> On 12/11/06, Sean Andrews <cultstud76 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > To say that they are a class, to me, assumes that they
> > all have the same relationship to capital.
>
> I realize Marxists generally define class with respect to capital, and
> have only two classes. However, that's a pretty impoverished model;
> certainly now, and possibly even in Marx's day.
>
> Obviously, we don't need the hundreds of classes which a marketing
> professional needs, but two classes does not explain basic daily
> observations.
I didn't say that there were only two classes. Just that class is most easily considered when it has some concrete material referent (like relation to control over the bulk of material resources) And I wasn't really trying to argue that one way or the other, but to understand how you were speaking of intellectuals as a class, which is clearer now since you've basically said they are a class in so far as they can all be said to play the same role as the "professional managerial class." This is good because it was the only way your argument about them really made sense. It is basically this two class definition, adding the "coordinating class" between the two. Which explains how the rough term "intellectuals" gets, again, thrown into the mix as basically fitting only into this category.
The problem for me is that your analogy/explanation of how one knows what class one is in seems to be that it can be discerned depending on how much freedom you have to make independent decisions in your daily life.
The fast food worker has little therefore s/he's not in the intellectual class; the engineer, regardless of what kind of engineer or what that engineer works to do, has more control and has the freedom to ignore the working class therefore that engineer is a member of the professional managerial class, even if there is not a management component to their labor.
I think the ideological critique would separate the class based understanding of the orgin of ideas which have the most force in dictating people's daly lives. Using an institutional critique here is certainly important as it is through institutions that ideas, wherever they originate, have the kind of efficacy on people's lives you're discussing. In many ways, though, I'd say that whatever the actual relationship of intellectuals and other cultural workers (like the people who work in the media and arts) it is less that, as a class, they have a different relationship with capital than the fast food worker (in fact, for the less successful artist or intellctual, that may very well be something they do in their daily life) than that the people who have the ideas that work best in unison with the structure of capital and power in the society tend to get rewarded as denizens of the upper class.
In terms of Bourdieu, then, the capital that they gain in the more autonomous cultural field of intellectual production has a unique exchangability in the more heteronomous field of economic capital that allows them to cash in on their ideas in that field in ways unavaible to them in the intellectual field itself. In this, it may be true that their ability to shed the specialized language and make arguments which legitimate the status quo for a wider audience (to go back to Carroll's claim that "plain language" may have a certain relationship to established norms) is not only the key to their being able to transform the symbolic capital gained in the intellectual field for a different kind of social capital within the wider social totality, but is also the primary marker of their "selling out" and becoming so popular that they are not able to claim the same kind of status within the intellectual field itself.
None of this, on the other hand, necessarily explains why an ideology operates or appears to be true--something which even Bourdieu's notion of habitus doesn't completely explain. It gets at the forces which make the available positions and the dispositions they authorize explicable in terms of practices and statements made in order to gain or challenge capital within the field, but it still doesn't explain that tiny movement from the outside to the inside, from the material circumstances to consciousness, which despite a number of controlling mechanisms, is never quite total or direct, but still manages to produce close to the desired results. On the other hand, Bourdieu leaves most of this process to the level of culture and language, with only a faint sense that there is a physical, coercive level on which ideology operates. For this, the mix of Althusser/Marx/Lacan/Gramsci/Foucault etc. which is still imperfectly being worked through, often with overly complex language that could, in some cases be simplified but is still not necessarily some sort of moral defect or example of the enforcement of a class boundary per se, seems a fairly reasonable set of tools. Though there is a lot longer discussion to have about this, and this one is basically just an ad hoc example of what this discussion could be based on, I think it at least indicates the possibility that there is a there there.
In short, there is still a lot of room for questions of where ideology come from, how it operates, what it means in a particular case, which, though related directly to actual material relations, aren't exactly attributable to them except in the crudest fashion. The argument, as I understand it here, was two fold: whether or not Chomsky's basic institutional, material analysis could be said to be adequate to explain all the social effects normally considered with the concept of ideology; and whether the use of complex language in discussing this concept was ever necessary or if it was, as I understand Chomsky's argument, basically just an attempt (or a flaw) of the intellectual class to obscure their arguments from the piercing eyes of the general public. The latter population, which is a major object of the study in considerations of ideology, should, after all, be able to decipher these arguments of intellectuals easily lest these arguments be uselessly confined to the academy; or, alternatively, their articualtion in what appears to be complex, disciplinary language is evidence of their class biased power and therefore is itself as important an object of criticism and dismissal as all other forms of knowledge produced in the simple mental/material labor divide.
While I agree with fundamental points of this argument and I do beleive that there should be much more attention to the role of academics (though presumably the class of intellectuals includes a far wider group of people) as public intellectuals if they are to be able to claim to serve society in any way. The charge made by Dewey long ago that scientists of all types should be charged with making their enterprises explicable and their findings comprehensible to the public, even if sometimes difficult to accomplish and presumptive of a common dominant culture and level of education in which that could be stated, remains a key component of democracy and is far preferable to the system of expert advisors recommended by Lippmann. But Lippmann's vision won the day in the USA and this vision included a sense of how democracy should be controlled by ideology. However, to simply say that people are controlled by this is inadequate because in many ways we still choose it and find pleasure and fulfillment in it, even as it is something we are compelled to do. I'm sure there is a simple way of talking about this, but I am also not ready to say that any attempt to consider it in more complex language is itself a product of the same kinds of class oppression it is meant to analyze. After all, most of the things we assume to be able to be simply stated are usually based on a complex series of shared understandings, many of which are also under investigation. I believe that, though some of these investigation are possibly jargon heavy navel gazing exercises amounting to nothing, some will produce significant insights (and often, as Zizek and others are trying to do with Lacan, this may happen within the same set or writings.)
> (Actually, I am told that scientists caution against overly precise
> arguments, when it leads to thin chains of logic.)
*Sigh* Fine. But on the other hand this means that you can't use a "intellectuals" as a uniform category of social actors (much less a coherent class with an identical class interest in protecting their obscure speech from comprehension by the rest of society regardless of whether it is necessary for explaining the ideas they are trying to consider), all of which perform the exact same function for the ruling class regardless of what their work actually consists of, as if they actually exist. It doesn't make sense to caution against overly precise arguments and then act like we have them. In may ways my problem with this whole argument is that it seems to have a very thin chain of logic: anyone who uses complex language is doing it to uphold class boundaries because they are part of the intellectual class which is the same thing as the professional managerial class.
> > All of this, in other words, takes us completely away from a
> > conversation about ideas or methods --which I agree we should still be
> > debating about--and into a crude kind of default delegitimation of
> > anything so-called intellectuals say in their own defense or in
> > defense of their ideas or methods simply because they have now been
> > dubbed the same thing as anyone else who provides any intellectual
> > assistance to the status quo or has a similar relationship to capital
> > as the professional managerial class. Doesn't matter what you think
> > or what you say: you're workin for the man, man.
>
> More like strawman, man.
yes. that's exactly my point. there seems to be a far greater kind of vulgar marxist determinism to your understanding of intellectuals as a class than you let on. And I think that's what the original argument was over Chomsky, his tendency of relying only on political and economic power to explain dominance in society, and the argument, attributed to him, that using complex language to consider ideology or its processes is not necessary but is basically just another form of class domination, in this case of the "intellectual class" over everyone else.