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"...refusing to recognise anything resembling durable dispositions, Sartre makes each action a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world... If the world of action is nothing other than this universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness which creates it and hence totally devoid of objectivity, if it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved, revolting because he chooses to be revolted, then emotions, passions and actions are merely games of bad faith, sad farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience."
—Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), pp73-74.
. . . "Durable dispositions" might translate to received forms and modes which the existentialist experimental poet refuses to countenance, preferring her "interchangeable possibles," her "decrees of consciousness" . . . . but are the latter then "games of bad faith, sad farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience". . . ?
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Pierre Bourdieu: "School [the institutional education system] actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality."
([Po-Biz] actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality.)
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London Review of Books, 20 April 2006: Bruce Robbins writes that Bourdieu had "an extreme scepticism about the structures of formal democracy, which he believed functioned so as to disguise the hereditary transmission of privilege, allowing the success of some and the failure of the rest to appear as an innocent process of selection on merit."
From the same review (p. 18): "[For Bourdieu,] domains like art and science, which appear to be free from the political and economic constraints operating elsewhere, are in fact structured by an aggessive competition for 'symbolic capital' that is neither open nor equitable. In one way or another, things are arranged so that rewards end up in the hands of those who started at the top of the social hierarchy."
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Gee, if Bourdieu was right, might that help to explain the divergent career fates of William Matthews vs. William Knott. Matthews, coming from a background of inherited wealth, was during his lifetime one of the most successful and preeminent poets of his generation. His contemporary, Knott, who grew up penniless in an orphanage, never achieved that status, or anywhere near it.
Ah, if only I could console myself with Bourdieu, and believe that Matthews' success and my failure was indeed not "an innocent process of selection on merit."
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