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April 25, 2005
La Sociologie Est un Sport Martial
This film, apparently a model for the (less interesting) Derrida film made a year or so later, is a loosely edited collection of videotaped interviews with Pierre Bourdieu -- radio, print, etc. -- together with footage at the office (including a voyeuristic mentoring scene where he and Loïc Wacquant map out the latter's future publishing schedule) and miscellaneous public appearances. Although it falls far short of any sort of summary of Bourdieu's sociology, it does show him introducing some of his famous concepts (cultural capital, social reproduction, symbolic violence, etc.). What the film really explores, more through identification and emotion than anything else, is what it might mean to be a public intellectual and, especially, what it might feel like. This is all bracketed between a public intellectual's wet dream of an on-the-street interaction with an admirer who hardly lets him speak she's gushing so much and a challenging, community-based meeting in a poor, immigrant, and apparently violence-ridden neighborhood of Paris where organic intellectuals resist the effects of his august presence without understanding the relevance of his scholarship for their predicaments. I have decided to show this film to my Harvard Sophomore Tutorial in an optional meeting at the end of semester to try to bring out latent ideas about activism and academia and, at the same time, to stress the importance of theoretical reflection and scientific research in this process.
Posted by johnn at April 25, 2005 09:13 PM
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Posted by: Anonymous at April 25, 2005 09:13 PM
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