Bourdieu The State Nobility Chapter 2

Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.

 

Part II: “The Ordination”

 

Part II is organized in three sections. I will give a summary of each section.

 

Section 1: The Production of a Nobility

Bourdieu argues that the French preparatory schools – the schools that prepare students to take the concours and enter the grande ecoles – systematically produce an elite, noble class through their specific pedagogical techniques and cultural mores. First, the students in the school are segregated and isolated from the rest of society. This restriction, Bourdieu argues creates a monopoly of power which, “when recognized, is converted into a nobility” (79). This group practices magical shareholding – they claim the symbolic capital of the collective group and of each individual member (79-80). Second, they have a common culture (slang, jokes, manners, and history transmitted through enculturation and hazing) that imparts a sense of social harmony and camaraderie that alumni continue to reference and use (83). Third, the teachers, who dedicate their lives to their students, teach specifically for the concours by primarily lecturing and piling work on their students (84-86; 93-94). Competition, survival, and efficiency are stressed; there is no expectation that the students will later remember or further research what they learn in lectures (86-88). This general knowledge of the things the elite believes are good for people in powerful positions to know is more important than specific technical knowledge, which is taught at the university (99-100; 111). The jobs university graduates will get will require them to have technical knowledge, while the jobs graduates of the grande ecoles will secure will require them to have an elite degree, a piece of symbolic capital.

 

Section 2: “A Rite of Institution”

Bourdieu claims that an academic degree and title has two important purposes: it tells the world that the person has been “consecrated” to have social power and an elite position and it enables the chosen person to recognize himself as a person of power and dignity (103-104). He calls this the dialectic of consecration and recognition and argues that “the elite school chooses those who have chosen it because it has chosen them” (104). It is no surprise, he states, who is admitted to these schools – they are the children who have succeeded from an early age: reading before they start attending school, skipping grades, etc (106). Bourdieu also discusses the case of the transplant, the student from the working class who vaults into the preparatory school (107). The transplant, when she receives her academic title, must reject her past, in essence becoming a convert (107-108). Bourdieu also claims that the elite schools gain their power to nominate and grant titles from the fact that people in power derive their power and status from their attachment to that institution (109).

 

“Assigning someone to a group of superior essence (noblemen as opposed to commoners, men as opposed to women, educated as opposed to uneducated, etc.) causes that person to undergo a subjective transformation that contributes to bringing about a real transformation likely to bring him closer to the assigned definition” (112).

 

Section 3: The Ambiguities of Competence

Here Bourdieu argues that it is the arbitrary breaks that occur in the elite schools (such as the decision between the last person who passes the concours and the first person who fails) that translates into perpetual social stratification. The “magic of the academic title” gives its holders a monopoly on social virtue and competence (118). He points out that the academic degree guarantees lifelong competence even when technical skills lapse (no one can take away your PhD, for example) (118-119). Also, people who hold academic titles are described differently than those who have other, more technical jobs: those whose jobs depend on technical skills are defined as what they do while the elite are described as who they are (119). Bourdieu adds that the person with an academic title is not bound by what skills he may or may not have; he is a “free worker” and not subject to economic and technological shifts in the same way as a lower-class worker is (120). Bourdieu ends by discussing how technical workers increase their social status by introducing semantic changes in their job descriptions (from janitor to custodian), which derives from the concept of academic titles – that the title is more important than the work done.

Brandt Literacy in American Lives

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Brandt develops the analytical lens of literacy sponsors to explain how larger economic and social forces impact the development of an individual’s literacy. Her study, conducted in the 1990s, consists of 80 interviews of people, ranging in age from 10 to 85, who live in the southern Wisconsin area. She shows how the rapid expansion of technology and the increased reliance on documents and texts (the contractarian society) has changed Americans’ literacy habits. Brandt shows this change in American society by looking at the literacy sponsors of four generations of an American family (the Mays) and by investigating how specific moments in history corresponded to an individual’s ability to acquire a new literacy (both in reference to the union and labor movement in the 1970s and the prison reform/rehabilitation at the same time.) Another one of Brandt’s chapters deals with the differences in attitudes towards reading and writing. Brandt asserts that writing plays an important role in the new 21st century economy, an economy that is centered around production. She argues that the public schools, who are supposed to be institutions of democracy and equal opportunity, need to be re-evaluated in terms of literacy sponsors to see what literacy learning they are offering their students and what, due to inadequate funds and poor technology resources, are they not giving their students.

Lanham Economics of Attention

Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2006. Summary of Chapter 2, “Economists of Attention”            Lanham argues in Chapter 1, “Stuff and Fluff,” that “the most obvious economists of attention have been the visual artists” (15). His next chapter describes two twentieth-century artists who he believes fit this moniker, Andy Warhol and Christo Javacheff. Both artists’ masterpieces (Warhol’s famous Campbell Soup paintings and Marilyn Monroe screen-prints and Javacheff’s Running Fence) emphasized the “paradox of stuff”: that when attention is shifted toward style, design, and packaging, the substance underneath all of that gets reconsidered and more thoroughly understood. One does not replace the other; the attentive mind notices the object and oscillates between the “stuff” and the “fluff.” In his discussion about Warhol, Lanham points out that he made particular choices when creating his art to maximize the attention they would garner. Besides relying on the paradox of stuff, Warhol also was able to pick rich objects for his art by paying attention to the interests of audience and by keeping in mind the power of the centripetal gaze (the human tendency to focus attention on a few things, like celebrities.)In his explanation of Javacheff’s project, Lanham describes how Running Fence is not just a rhetorical object but the creation of a series of rhetorical acts. To get permission to create the 24-mile-long fence, Lanham had to persuade hundreds of people to share in his grand vision; he had to create collective action from the bottom up. Javacheff increased the attention paid to his project by purposefully taking it down after two weeks.Lanham cites the cultural movement of Dadaism as influential to the development of his thought about the economics of attention. Dadaism, he explains, was a rejection of oppositions in favor of a practice to consider binaries together by being able to consciously shift between them. 

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Horner argues that Composition needs to start seeing itself and acting as part of the materialist culture it operates in. His book primarily concerns the nature of academic work, and to develop his cultural materialist perspective, he investigates the multiple meanings and interpretations of six terms used a lot in talking about Composition’s academic work: work, students, politics, academic, tradition, and writing. His critique covers many issues discussed in the field, including labor unionization, service learning pedagogies, use of student texts in composition research, the relation between academic and nonacademic literary practices, the professionalization of the field, abolition, and the institutional position of composition within the university. His book is a Marxist critique and throughout it, he relies on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of economic, socila, cultural, and symbolic capital and Giddens’ theory of the duality of structure.

Notable Notes

Really good analysis about service learning – does service learning encourage anti-academic sentiments by positioning work done outside the academy as “real” (and therefore things done inside the classroom as “fake”?)

Discussion about students in Chapter 2 was really eyeopening to me, especially his critique about composition’s commodification of students. We think of students as static entities in our research – their writing represents their identity, not their dynamic negotiation of it.

Chapter 1 = work. How CVs place more importance on publications that happen outside of labor as it is traditionally conceived. CVs don’t do justice to the work of teaching – just a list of how many courses you have taught; it’s more important to have innovative electives than to teach first-year comp year after year. We need to start acting and talking like our work is real labor so it becomes valuable. Publications act like they are owned by the individual instead of the result of the material circumstances around which they were created.

Chapter 2 = students. Students “are characterized by what they lack” (32). We see them as static others and their work is evidence for us. We need to consider them part of the intellectual journey and work that is our teaching – they have material constraints that need to be worked around. Critique of expressivism. We can’t imagine the classroom as utopian. Why does a classroom need to be a community? Student texts have little value because of little circulation.

Chapter 3 – Politics. Connection with power and authority in the classroom. Constructing the classroom to see the political as affecting all aspects of life. The open authority pedagogies might do a disservice to students (102).

Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 – academic and tradition. Why do we distrust these terms? Why do we trust progressive? Why do we undervalue student colleigiate life – why is it only something to view as nostaligic and not a site of real academic worK? The extracurriculum (117) Look for traditions hidden with in the dominant and outside of it.

Chapter 6 – writing. How do we teach students to have authority in writing? What is the effect of style? How can we teach stylistic ideas? We should use our comp classes to focus on writing, the culture of composition.

Quotable Quotes

“This subordination and sbsumption of the work of teaching to the prodcution of writing texts constitute the playing out at hte site of Composition of contradictions in more general conceptions of work.” (2)

“Actual student writign is not so much looked at as through. This blindness to the work of student writing speaks to the general denigration of students necessary to maintaining hierarchical relations between students as clients of academic professionals” (50).

“But recognizing tradition not as a fixed body of knowledge but an action and ongoing project of reworking knowledge” (204) – critical for theorizing about the SU Writing Program!

Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words

Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Commuities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Prologue

Heath, an anthropologist and linguist, wanted to understand how children’s language development is affected by the cultural communities they grow up in. This research was important because of the push for better educational methods to increase the success of minority and working-class students in schools. She conducted an ethnographic study from 1969 to 1978 of two communities in the Piedmont Carolinas only a few miles away from each other: Roadville (a white working-class community whose members work in the textile mills) and Trackton (a black working-class community who used to farm but now also work in the mills.) She recorded and intepreted the langauge learning habits of the children in these two communities, specifically looking at the effects of the preschool home and community environment on the children. She found that the language expectations of the schools and the mills were different from the values and expectations of the home communities. She argues that the “place of langauge in the cultural life of each social group is interdependent with the habits and values of behaving shared among members of that group,” values formed by family structures, religious groups, and concepts of childhood. (11). Heath also explains her ethnographic methodology.

Chapter 1: “The Piedmont: Textile Mills and Times of Change”

Heath explains the history of the Piedmont region of the Carolinas and describes the antagonistic relationship between the mill worker communities and the townspeople. She introduces the communities of Roadville and Trackton.

Chapter 2: “‘Gettin’ on’ in Two Communities”

Heath describes in detail the layout and members of the communities of Roadville and Trackton and explains each communities’ norms and beliefs about the roles of men and women, the place of schooling, and their expectations for their children.

Chapter 3: “Learning how to Talk in Trackton”

Heath describes the life of a Trackton child from birth, noting that boys are favored over girls and that the child is immediately a part of the community, not just one family. She illustrates with transcripts the three stages in which Trackton children learn to carry on conversations between the ages of 1 and 2: repetition, repetition with variation, and participation. Boys learn how to use language by being challenged by older members (usually men) of the community; girls learn through “fussing” and playsongs with the older girls. “Flexibility and adaptability are the most important characteristics of learning to be and to talk in Trackton” (111).

Chapter 4: Teaching How to Talk in Roadville

Heath explains how Roadville women prepare for the birth of their children and how they interact with their babies, toddlers and preschoolers. They use babytalk with infants but increasingly correct their children’s language as they grow older. Roadville mothers consider it their duty to train their young children so to prepare them for school, so there is a lot of focus on learning to talk “right.” Children are sex-segregated from two until junior high. Play is an important opportunity to emphasize language through educational toys. Memorization and repitition is key in church and home activities, during which children are expected to answer and perform for adults.

Chapter 5: Oral Traditions

In Roadville, story-telling emphasizes correctness, details and chronology, which are “reinforced in many of the community’s church-related practices and on other occasions when adults tell stories on themselves or each other.” The children’s own stories imitate what the adults do. The community’s expectation for true accounts is in contradiction with the fairytales and imaginative stories told in the preschools. In Trackton, fictionalization in stories (“talking junk”) is allowed and even encouraged, as good storytellers are valued in the community. Children are talked to in Trackton, not read to, and they are taught to be creative storytellers who can relate what they are saying to the ongoing conversation. Verbal play (“yo momma” and other insults, playsongs, one-liners, challenges) is a regular feature in Trackton language.

Chapter 6: Literate Traditions

Trackton and Roadville have different expectations for literacy: in Roadville, writing is seldom done but reading is actively encouraged and praised; in Trackton, writing also is not emphasized and reading is not done silently but only “read aloud.” Roadville children are surrounded by books and specific child-directed reading materials, while in Trackton, children aren’t given books but rather use reading as a competition, a game, and a way to figure out the bigger world around them. Roadville residents see the written word as an authority; Trackton residents see written language as something to be negotiated and manipulated. Women write and read more than the men in both communities.

Chapter 7: The Townspeople

Heath describes the townspeople, those people who are not Trackton or Roadville community members whose children attend school with Trackton and Roadville children. They are the managers of the Trackton and Roadville residents who work at the mills. The townspeople have a different attitude toward children: they treat them as potential conversationalists from birth and mothers are the primary caregivers. They use baby-talk and question-answer routines to talk with their babies. The townspeople’s uses for reading and writing more directly mirror the expectations of the schools, such as using written sources to find information to use in oral or written material of their own. Reading and writing are activities that all members of the community participate in for work and for leisure.

Chapter 8: Teachers as Learners

This chapter describes “how the ethnographies of communication in Roadville and Trackton became instrumental for teachers and students bringing language and culture differences and discovering how to recognize and use language as power” (266). Heath worked with townspeople in her graduate classes and teachers in the community. She helped teachers come up with new expectations and understandings of the relevance of teaching reading and writing to Trackton and Roadville students who would not be going to college, who were instead on the vocational track. The teachers didn’t need to lower their standards of correctness, but instead view the students as bringing a history and a background to the classroom that was to be built on and respected, not shunned and called dumb.

Chapter 9: Learners as Ethnographers

Heath discusses a classroom assignment where the students become ethnographers of their own communities.

Quotable Quotes

“These ethnographies of communication focus on each of the communities in which the children are socialized as talkers, readers, and writers to describe: the boundaries of the physical and social community in which communication to or by them is possible; the limits and features of the situations in which such communication occurs; the what, how, and why of patterns of choice children can exercise in their uses of language, whether in talking, reading, or writing; the values or significance these choices of language have for the children’s physical and social activities.” (6)

“For [Trackton residents], a ‘true story’ calls for ‘talkin’ junk'” (189)

“In short, for Roadville, Trackton’s stories would be lies; for Trackton, Roadville’s stories would not even count as stoires.” (189).

“For Roadville, the written word limits alternatives of expression; in Trackton, it opens alternatives. Neither community’s ways with the written word prepares it for the school’s ways” (235)

“As the children of the townspeople learn the distinctions between contextualized first-hand experiences and decontextualized representations of experience, they come to act like literates before they can read. They acquire the habits of talk associated with written materials, and they use appropriate behaviors for either cooperative negotiation of meaning in book-reading episodes or story-creation before they are themselves readers” (256).

“Thus it is the kind of talk, not the quantity of talk that sets townspeople children on their way in school. They come wiht the skills of labeling, naming features, and providing narratives on items out of their contexts.” (352) The importance of CONTEXT!

The townspeople “bring with them to school linguistic and cultural capital accumulated through hundreds of thousands of occasions for practicing the skills and  espousing the values the schools transmit.” (368)

Helen J. Schwartz and Lillian S. Bridwell-Bownes. “A Selected Bibliography on Computers in Composition: An Update.”

Helen J. Schwartz and Lillian S. Bridwell-Bownes. “A Selected Bibliography on Computers in Composition: An Update.” CCC. 38:4 (Dec 1987): 453-457.

This bibliography updates the 1984 CCC bibliography on computers in composition. All the material in the bibliography was published between 1984 and 1987.

Corbett, Edward P.J. “Teaching Composition: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going.”

Corbett, Edward P.J. “Teaching Composition: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going.” CCC 38:4 (Dec 1987): 444-452.

This is the second personal perspective essays published in CCC, and in it, Corbett surveys the direction the field has gone during his academic career.  He points at the enhanced professionalism of compositionists, the growth of the graduate programs, the increase in published books on the history, practice, and theory of composition, special conferences in specific sub-topics in the field, and the growth of new journals and new research practices to report in those journals. He also details the changes he’s seen in the teaching of composition, specifically more attention paid to technical and business writing, writing across the curriculum initiatives, English as a second language, the development of cognitive skills in students, and the writing process. He warns teachers, though, that they must constantly evaluate how they teach to make sure they are doing everything possible to help their students be better writers.

Brand, Alice G. “The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process.”

Brand, Alice G. “The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process.” CCC 38:4 (Dec 1987): 436-443.

Brand accuses the field of side-stepping the importance of the affect in the composing process and asserts that the affect plays a central role in writing, as writing is an act of decision making, choices, and motivation, all which derive from affect, not cognition. She contests the notion that the best writing is emotionally neutral, citing that as humans, we have moral orientations and beliefs that result in commitments that are not disposable. Pure cognitive research in writing has its limits, and in order to fully understand the writing process, researchers must look for the connection and collaboration between the emotion and cognition in writing.

McLeod, Susan. “Some Thoughts about Feelings: The Affective Domain and the Writing Process.”

McLeod, Susan. “Some Thoughts about Feelings: The Affective Domain and the Writing Process.” CCC 38:4 (Dec 1987): 426-435.

McLeod writes that composition studies would benefit from more research on the emotional or affective aspect of writing as it relates to writing anxiety, motivation, and cultural and personal beliefs about writing. She proposes a theory of affect based on George Mandler from which to study these three areas. She claims that it is impossible to write without triggering some emotions, and instructors should help their students channel their emotions so that they enable them during the writing process instead of impede them.

Witte, Stephen P.

Witte, Stephen P. “Pre-Text and Composing.” CCC 38:4 (Dec 1987): 397-425.

Witte argues that the writer’s pre-text, or mental construction of “text” prior to transcription, is such an important composing phenomenon that there must be more theoretical and empirical research in writing on it, specifically think-aloud protocols. From his own research on college freshmen’s pre-texts, he makes four observations about pre-text: pre-text directly affects the direction of the written text; pre-text can be stored in the writer’s memory and used in the text; revising pre-text uses the same strategies as revising written text; and pre-text is not a rigid step in the composing process but a necessary link between translating ideas to written text.