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SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: intelligent, pigheaded, out

RE: SIGIA-L: intelligent, pigheaded, outrageous and intriguing

From: Benjamin Keith Belton (bkbelton_at_mailer.fsu.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 03 2002 - 14:03:22 EST

Lou Rosenfeld, in response to Derek Rogerson's not unreasonable IMO attempt
to appropriate Bourdieu's idea of habitus as a model for IA:

> I must admit, I do get a chuckle when someone explains his
> "ideal" for our
> field by appropriating an *84* word sentence fragment that,
> likely due to
> weak translation or weaker thinking, is so discombobulated as to be
> meaningless.
>

Perhaps weak _reading_ is more the culprit here. Before we give the
seemingly obligatory three cheers for anti-intellectualism, perhaps it would
be helpful to actually try to understand what one of the most influential
social analysts of the 20th century is actually trying to say, and why one
of our own might think it to be important for our field, rather than
dismissing the source as a weak thinker or dissing his translator.

If we cannot, or are not willing, to follow 84 words (repeated below) that
seem to me at a glance to have an obvious potential relationship to how one
could imagine IA might evolve, then this "discipline" doesn't stand much
chance of being more than a description of what its practitioners do. Not
that such description is a bad thing in itself, but such description alone
will not develop the scope, vision, theory and methods that an emerging
practice needs for development.

One might argue that the transposition of a concept such as Bourdieu's
habitus, developed to describe the matrix of social characteristics
unconsciously making up the structures of individual and group behavior, is
misapplied to to the conscious design of human systems, but even that could
be a creative misapplication with constructive results.

It seems to me that Derek's appropriation of Bourdieu has much in common
with ideas about pattern generation and self-organization that have been
much discussed in IA and probably have much to offer as another creative
synthesis of one disciplinary perspective to IA.

> "...systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
> predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as
> principles of
> the generation and structuring of practices and representations
> which can be
> objectively "regulated" and "regular" without in any way being the product
> of obedience rules, objectively adapted to their goals without
> presupposing
> a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the
> operations necessary
> to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated
> without being
> the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor."
____
B. K. Belton | School of Information Studies
bkbelton_at_mailer.fsu.edu | 850-645-5676

>
> cheers
>
>

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:55:01 EST

 

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