Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Pierre Bourdieu: Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste:
The contradictions or paradoxes to which ordinary language classifications lead do not derive, as all forms of positivism suppose, from some essential inadequacy of ordinary language, but from the fact that these socio-logical acts are not directed towards the pursuit of logical coherence and that, unlike philological, logical or linguistic use of language - which ought really to be called scholastic, since they all presuppose schole, i.e, leisure, distance from urgency and necessity, the absence of vital stakes, and the scholastic institution which in most social universes is the only institution capable of providing all these - they obey the logic of the parti pris...... (page 476)

A scholar is a person with leisure? Then I am a Lady of Leisure - I can live with that.

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