This essay centers on a storyteller's performance of ritual in stories to draw associations between the life of the Biblical Mary with her son Jesus and the subjectivities and dispositions of people living in impoverished conditions. The storyteller explores these subjectivities and dispositions, characterizing the exploration as a journey. She also defines an ethical position where the self meets otherness—both sacred and cultural—to engender positive human relations. The essay combines the storyteller's performance with the author's to reproduce the effects, advance (...) the ethics, mitigate the politics of representation, and provide an understanding of the journey's end—a place called home. (shrink)

This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of the (...) symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory ; the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: transparency, determinism, and absolutism. (shrink)

With the publication of The Social Frameworks of Knowledge? the English speaking world has at last been given a serious opportunity to approach the complex sociological thought of Georges Gurvitch. However, as the author himself admits in the Preface, this book appears ?abstract and schematic particularly to the uninitiated?.1 The aim of this paper will be to try to relate this translated work to the main body of Gurvitch's writing and particularly to his stance in the sociology of knowledge. First (...) I will examine the intellectual origins of his sociology of knowledge and his attitude to his predecessors in the field. Secondly I will compare his approach to the sociology of knowledge to that of P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann. (shrink)

This paper explores the association of children and animals as an element in Western culture's symbolic universe. Three historical discourses found in the West associate animality with immaturity and growing up with the transcendence of this condition. The discourses differ in how they describe and evaluate the original animal-like condition of the child versus the socialized end product. All, however, tend to distinguish sharply between the human and the nonhuman. This paper explores expressions of this tendency in developmental theories that (...) set as the criterion of maturity the actualization of some capacity that is believed to set humans apart from animals. Seeing relationships with animals as marginally important in human development and life is a consequence of these assumptions. Simultaneously, these assumptions also marginalize the body. This constitutes a dual renunciation of body and animal, criticized for its effects both on inquiry and on our realization of the roles and values of nonhuman animals in development. Such research can help reveal the self-organizing nature of the human animal body. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

This article attempts to gain purchase on the information society via the notion of `technological forms of life'. It first addresses the idea of `forms of life'. Forms of life are a mode of conceiving of culture that arose at the turn of the 20th century in conjunction with phenomenology. Previously, in early modernity, culture was conceived very much on a representational model. The rest of the essay explores the possibility that a new paradigm of culture, i.e. technological forms of (...) life is emerging at the turn of the 21st century. Technological forms of life are understood as `culture-at-a-distance'. They are the flattening, stretch-out, speed-up and lift-out of forms of life. They are forms of life become non-linear. They involve the exteriorization of inferiority and reflexivity. (shrink)

For Kant, experience is epistemological, whereas ontological experience is in the first instance poetic and Romantic. In contradistinction to Kantian Erfahrung, it is most often called Erlebniß. We note further that Erfahrung is cognitive experience while Erlebnis is also aesthetic experience. Dilthey and Husserl understand experience pertaining to knowledge through Erlebnis. In epistemological or classificatory knowledge the parts add up to the whole. Ontological knowledge instead is holistic in which the whole is present in each of the parts. In ontological (...) knowledge we can know things themselves. Ontological experience is particularly important for global knowledge. This is because knowing another culture is not reducible to a culture's qualities or predicates. Culture as a way or form of life is a thingitself. A third type of experience is informational experience. This collapses the epistemological into the ontological and is also increasingly present today. This sort of experience of non-linear information theory can account for the experience of societies, of individual humans, of digital media, of neuronal networks, of phenotypes, urban forms, of cellular organisms, or of inorganic matter. (shrink)

While feminist sociology has succeeded in being recognized as a legitimate field of sociological research (yet mainly as a limited field within the broader discipline), its core objective - namely, to reconfigure the discipline, instating gender as a central analytic category - has not yet been achieved. This article argues that Bourdieu's sociology of practice offers a theoretical framework for fundamentally reconstructing sociology to integrate gender as a central category. After a brief outline of Bourdieu's reasoning in Masculine Domination and (...) of the controversy surrounding this essay, I discuss the concept of habitus, which forms the theoretical core of Masculine Domination, in the broader context of Bourdieu's work. Habitus is an analytical tool that overcomes the discipline's theoretical barriers to the integration of the category of gender on a central point: the concept of the social agent. I will demonstrate this by opposing the concept of habitus to the construct of the social role that, up to this day, is most influential in shaping the sociological understanding of the social agent. (shrink)

The intellectualist position held by structuralists does not explain the extremes of emotional reaction to the disruption of social categories. An approach from neuroscience based on the functions of the limbic system in the creation of long‐term memory through the role of the hippocampus and REM sleep is proposed to account for the emotive loading of cognitive categories.

Two questions frame this response to Amin’s article ‘The Remainders of Race’. It first introduces an epistemological question that recognizes the impossibility of separating ontology and epistemology in modern thought and asks why contemporary studies of racial subjugation so infrequently consider the concept of race’s onto-epistemological function. The second, methodological, question necessarily follows. Acknowledging that ‘the what of race’ cannot be separated from the ‘how of race’ makes it crucial to ask why the former is no longer considered in most (...) analyses of the latter. There follows a mapping of the context of emergence of political-symbolic strategies that carve out racial difference and cultural difference as human attributes. The article shows that, rather than an extraneous notion or a referent of a natural human attribute, the concept of race is the modern ethico-political device that refigures the workings of scientific universality in political and ethical texts. What this does is to enable the argument that, instead of manifestations of human ‘sorting’ instincts, the operatives of raciality proliferating in the global present consist of biopolitical architectures, mechanisms and procedures designed and assembled with the main tools of racial power/knowledge, namely racial and cultural difference. (shrink)

First thoughts about classification inevitably turn to the simultaneously mundane and extraordinary ambition to capture the universe of all that there is and has been. This dream of the universal has two basic modes (and so the process begins!). First, I will follow the spirit of theos and logos as represented by the Platonic embrace of totality enshrined in Socrates’ scrupulous rejection of rhetorical dishonesty. Second, I will address the later part of the march to subjectivity as expressed by the (...) mechanics of atomism and Cartesian reduction. Following this move from theology to ontology, from in other words the post-synthetic to the post-analytic, I will connect with the sociological destruction of such pretensions to absolute classificatory veracity – a necessary pre-requisite for the engagement of reflexivity and classification to be found in the work of Georges Perec. (shrink)

How are social and institutional circumstances linked to the knowledge that scientists produce? To answer this question it is necessary to take risks: speculative but testable theories must be proposed. It will be my aim to explain and then apply one such theory. This will enable me to propose an hypothesis about the connexion between social processes and the style and content of mathematical knowledge.

Stephen Turner complains about weaknesses of Robert K. Merton's teachings without noticing that these are common. He puts down Merton's ideas despite his innovations, on the ground that they are not successful and not sufficiently revolutionary. The criteria by which he condemns Merton are too vague and too high. Merton's merit is in his having put the sociology of science on the map and drawn attention to the egalitarianism that was prominent in classical science and that is now diminished. Key (...) Words: American sociology • intellectual frameworks • Merton • middle axioms • time lag. (shrink)