Some Notes on Bauman's Globalization

Introduction:

Globalization as a vogue word – pretends to make things transparent but is actually more opaque

Time/space compression – unifying and dividing effects – “What appears as globalization for some means localization for others; signaling a new freedom for some, upon many other is descends as an uninvited and cruel fate” (p. 2)

ON THE MOVE – even if we physically stay put

“globals” set the rules of the life game – consider in relation to Bourdieu’s field

“Being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation” (p. 2) – not sure I agree – consider anthropological studies. He says they are losing their “meaning-generating and meaning-negotiating capacity” – yet, isn’t that a construct anyway? Could the shifts be agentic?

Globalization from the bottom up – globalization is also LOCAL – glocal

“An integral part of the globalizing process is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion” (p. 3) – with that I agree

Is there really a “receiving end” of globalization?

Bourdieu might critique this – where are the micro level practices that support Bauman’s macro level analysis? How do individuals actually ADAPT to globalization in surprising ways?

Chapter 1: Time and Class

Last quarter century as the Great War of Independence from Space – freeing decision-makers and decision-making from the constraints of territory (p. 8) – consider our current economic crisis – there was no money where we pretended there was

Companies belong to share-holders – who are free from spatial determination

“Whoever is free to run away from the locality, is free to run away from the consequences” (p. 9)

MOBILITY – powerful and coveted – “freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community” (p. 9) – who bears the consequences?

Mobility is also freedom from otherness – “the moment ‘otherness’ tried to flex its muscles and make its strength felt, capital would have little difficulty with packing its tents and find an environment that was more hospitable – that is, unresistant, malleable, soft” (p. 11). “No need to engage if avoidance will do.” – consider habitus and field here – social reproduction is easier than change; crisis is avoided

Freedom of movement and the self-constitution of societes

Distance and geography as social products – national boundaries and identities are blurred – hybridized (p. 12)

Bill Clinton – no difference between domestic and foreign policy (Sarah Palin, anyone?)

Near and far binary – dissolved? “distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything” (p. 18) – but Bauman also points out the consequences of separation as it exists have ever more profound consequences

Fragility and short life-span of communities (p. 15)

“Cheap communication means quick overflowing, stifling or elbowing away the information acquired as much as it means the speedy arrival of news” (p. 16) – forgetting is easy when new information is readily available

Wetware– what's that?

New speed, new polarization

“rather than homogenizing the human condition, the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distances tends to polarize it” (p. 18) – freedom for one means a marginalization of another

“the mobile elite, the elite of mobility” (p. 19)

Cyberspace as freedom from the human body and “security of isolation” – p. 20

“Deterritorialization of power therefore goes hand in hand with the ever stricter structuration of the territory” (p. 20) – Bauman goes on to talk about Flutsy “interdictory spaces” – I think he is getting at the loss of public space, but I’m not sure

“The elites have chosen isolation and pay for it lavishly and willingly. The rest of the population finds itself cut off and forced to pay the heavy cultural, psychological and political price of their new isolation” (p. 21)

“Urban territory becomes the battlefield of continuous space war…” (p. 22) -- bricoleurs -- “rituals, dressing strangely, striking bizarre attitudes, breaking rules, breaking bottles, windows, heads, issuing rhetorically challenges to the law” are attempts to make territorial claims audible – playing the game – consider Bourdieu here

Exterritoriality of the elite is forced territoriality of the rest (p. 23) – which feels evermore like prison

“…local populations are more liked loose bunches of untied ends” (p. 24)

Meeting places served as spaces where norms were created – “Hence a territory stripped of public space provides little chance for norms being debated, for values to be confronted, to clash and to be negotiated” (p. 25).

Chapter 2: Space Wars: A Career Report

Measuring the world with the body

The battle of the maps

“The elusive goal of the modern space war was the subordination of social space to one and only one, officially approved and state-sponsored map” (p. 31)

"The manipulation of uncertainty is the essence and the primary stake in the struggle for power and influence inside every structured totality" (p. 34)



Space Wars: Uniformity, regularity, perfection, order against chaos, randomness, the haphazard, accidental, and ambivalent

"In the space of the city, just as in human life, one needs to distinguish and keep apart the functions of work, home life, shopping, entertainment, cult, administration; each function needs a place of its own, while every place should serve one and only one function" (p. 42). This seems to contradict the notion of technological globalization to me. Isn't space compressed? Maybe he's speaking of a different time here.

How do the Space Wars relate to schools and education (as I think they do).

The death of the street.

"The suspicion against others, the intolerance of difference, the resentment of strangers, and the demands to separate and banish them, as well as the hysterical, paranoiac concern with 'law and order', all tend to climb to their highest pitch in the most uniform, the most racially, ethnically and class-wise segregated, homogeneous local communities" (p. 47). Think about education here as well.

"Keeping our neighbors at arm's length would take care of the dilemma and make the choice unnecessary; it staves off the occasions when the choice between love and hate needs to be made" (p. 48)

He seems to suggest that even though there is no more public space there is also no private space -- storage of data about everything we do online especially (p. 50) -- "the surveilled, supplying the data for storage, are prime -- and willing -- factors in the surveillance."

Being included in that database means one has "credibility" -- literally. The database as an instrument of selection, separation, and exclusion.

Synopticon: "from a situation where the many watch the few to a situation where the few watch the many" (p. 51). Illusion of mobility.Locals watch the globals.

Chapter 3: After the Nation-state -- What?
The nation-state is withering away due to transnational forces.

Loss of control -- "new world disorder" (p. 57)

Globalization refers to "the global effects, notoriously unintended and unanticipated, rather than to global initiatives and undertakings" (p. 60). Notion of a lack of control here -- can't help but think about the global markets getting away from us

What is a "state's" identity then? He refers to a lack of cultural resources (p. 62) to maintain distinctiveness, but what does that mean?

States serve to protect the interests of corporations -- makes me think of the Republican party and rampant deregulation

"The dominant pattern may be described as "releasing the brakes": deregulation, liberalization, flexibility, increasing fluidity, and facilitating the transactions on the financial real estate and labour markets, easing the tax burden." Here, btw, is what that looks like:

The global hierarchy of mobility

'glocalization' -- unbreakable unity between 'globalizing' and 'localizing' pressures -- (p. 70). This is where Bauman may contradict himself. He referred earlier to the "receiving end" of globalization, and I get where he's coming from there, but 'glocalization' is a two-way flow of influence. Hybridity, if you will.

Chapter 4: Tourists and Vagabonds

Chapter 5: Global Law, Local Orders

No time for more notes, but I'm really interested in the "prisonization" of inmates and how this connects with Bourdieu -- is this a shift in habitus?

Bourdieu, Education, and Me

I care about this class because I’ve seen what it can do to you. I’ve seen it change you. You have to decide if you want to be here. You won’t have experiences like this again. Not in this school. This class matters to me. Something cool and magical is gonna happen if you stay. Be grateful. I expect something of you. Rise up.

(Field notes: September 6, 2007)

Introduction

Ms. Gage, the teacher in the excerpt from my field notes above, spoke these words to her students during the third day of school. She was upset with the juniors and seniors in her documentary film production and analysis course because the discussion the day before had not gone as she had hoped. Frustrated with the group’s interactions with one another and the material, she sought to redirect them with what she referred to as a “talking to.” On multiple occasions, Ms. Gage explained to the class, as well as to the researchers, that she believed students were not learning how to think “deeply” in school and she felt a personal responsibility to challenge them to do so. Indeed, when Ms. Gage tells her students that they will not have an experience like this again, not at this school, she does not exaggerate. Interviews with administrators and students confirm that this documentary film class is a unique offering, one that the teacher has fought for, developed, and raised funds for through grants for nearly a decade. Ms. Gage has been able to keep the class again this year, and through the support of other teachers and university staff, she has developed it into a larger digital media program despite dropping enrollments and the threat of school closure last spring.

I begin with the words of Ms. Gage and a description of this particular situation because my goal in this paper is to use the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to better understand the context of this classroom and the social identities constructed therein. As a research assistant on this project which analyzes critical engagement in this high-poverty, urban high school English classroom, I could not help but think of Ms. Gage and her students as I read Swartz’s text on Bourdieu, and several questions frame my thinking as I begin making connections between my observations and his work. How are students’ identities shaped by their social conditions and in what ways do they resist or give in to those conditions? What strategies do they use in the practice of identity making and how does literacy learning inform those strategies? How does Ms. Gage define and redefine engagement for her students knowing they come from high-poverty social class backgrounds? Finally, how does all of this shape students’ visions for their futures and agency in their design of them?

These questions are big, I realize, and this paper will serve as only a starting point for thinking through them. Following Bourdieu’s advice, I will attempt to think about these questions on both the macro and micro levels without necessarily delving into transcripts of data or language analysis – although this will come later. What follows, then, is a view of the research context through the lens of a number of Bourdieu’s constructs: field, habitus, social reproduction, and change.

Field and Legitimacy

Bourdieu writes that power resides in the “belief in the legitimacy of the words and of him who utters them” (cited in Swartz, 1997, p. 88). On many levels, the school where we conduct this classroom ethnography is in what Bourdieu might call a crisis of legitimacy. School enrollments in this large metropolitan district have been dropping consistently over the past decade, and this particular school is no exception from the trend. According to a local newspaper, the drop in enrollment is due in part to a “school choice” program. This program allows parents the flexibility to choose the schools their children will attend regardless of proximity to home neighborhoods, but increasingly, it also means that middle-class families are choosing to send their children outside their home districts.

Many students who attend the high school do not live near it, and those who do, are often part of a lineage of relatives who have attended the school and seek to maintain tradition. The school is also a site for Somali and Latino English Language Learners (ELL) in the district, and 78% of the school’s students qualify for free and reduced lunch. As such, students tend to bus from various locations and the school struggles to maintain active after school programs – athletic, academic, and otherwise.

Bourdieu’s concept of field is an important one here because it offers a way to understand the ways in which economic and political interests are in play, despite the ways in which they are misrecognized by society. Instead of recognizing how schools are subject to dominant ideologies of open choice and freedom of the market, parents and the media might see “failing” schools instead as the result of offering the wrong “choices” for students – or a matter of what Bourdieu refers to as “taste.” The concept of field denotes social spaces of “production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors” (Swartz, p. 117). As such, public education might be viewed as a field in struggle with other fields such as business as it fights to define itself outside the social constraints of market thinking, while, according to Bourdieu, it defines itself through that very struggle. When a school such as our research site fails to meet standards as determined by a dominant group, it also serves to legitimate that standard. Bourdieu points out that while standards are absolutely arbitrary, the consequences of failing to meet them are not (Swartz, 1997). For this school, failing to meet the arbitrary standard of a “sellable” school could mean failing to exist at all.

Field offers a way of thinking through resistance to domination as well. Perhaps most significant within Bourdieu’s notion of resistance is that struggle takes place “within the logic of reproduction” (Swartz, p. 121). In other words, because the struggle is a fight over legitimacy within the field, there is little social transformation. Thus, even as this school attempts to make itself legitimate, it can do so only in the eyes of a larger field of power which determines its legitimacy. Thus, the field never changes, only the potential position of actors within it. Fields impose on actors the rules of the game. In this case, the game to be played is that of being perceived as better than another school despite the social constraints of funding, bussing, attendance, and their link to poverty.

Habitus

Beyond the institutional context, influenced as it is by a struggle for legitimacy, I am interested as well in how that struggle informs identities at a group and individual level within the classroom – in both productive and restrictive ways. The excerpt that starts this paper offers one example. Due to a struggle for enrollments at district level, Ms. Gage must sell her class as a “magical” one that will “change” her students. At the same time, she expects “deep” thinking and prolonged effort from her students despite the movement out of her class that she witnesses weekly. An important aspect of this research, then, is whether her students take up or reject her challenge for them and the particular strategies they utilize to do so.

Applying Bourdieu’s notion of habitus offers an understanding of the impact of the institutional context as embodied in individuals. Bourdieu argues that cultural capital exists in three forms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. The first of these is the dispositions internalized by individuals while the second refers to objects that require particular abilities to use and the third to the educational credentialing system. Each of these influence individuals’ habitus, or the “deep structuring cultural matrix” (Swartz, p. 104) that mediates action. In other words, the struggles within fields of power at the school level inform the dispositions, beliefs, and perceived opportunities of its students. When other students see their classmates leaving the school and hear about how their school compares with others in the district (something many of them spoke about), they internalize structural disadvantages and come to believe that certain opportunities, such as a rigorous education and college, are “not for the likes of us” (Swartz, p. 106). They begin, as well, to view their hopes and chances in light of others’ expectations of them. Indeed, the individual who is socialized into such thinking is not in opposition to society, according to Bourdieu, but is “one of its forms of existence” (Swartz, p. 98). Society is reproduced with little energy exerted through the class habitus of individuals.

Change

Swartz makes clear that Bourdieu’s theories of capital, habitus, and field are better suited to understanding social reproduction than they are to understanding change, but that does not exclude the possibility for locating agency in the everyday practices of individuals. Agency, too, may be misrecognized. Bourdieu refers to actors as “strategic improvisers” who act upon opportunities within constraints. Habitus, according to Swartz, privileges action that is governed by a “practical sense” of how to move in a social world (p. 115). What is practical to do, say, or believe depends, then, on the best method for getting along in the world.

In a way, Ms. Gage attempts to bring students into what Bourdieu refers to as a situation of crisis which “disrupt[s] the immediate adjustment of habitus to field” (Swartz, p. 113). Only in such moments is a redistribution of capital possible. At the same time, he points out that not all moments are taken up because resignation to habitus is far easier than revolt – although certainly there are consequences for both. My interest, then, lies in identifying the moments where Ms. Gage attempts to open up a space for revolt for her students while realizing that structures continually constraint their possibilities. Given the nature of our conversations with Ms. Gage and her students, it is evident that they see fairly clearly the power relations that structure their lives and struggle to locate the resources to change them. How, then, do they begin to chip away at a habitus shaped by disadvantage?

One way in which Ms. Gage attempts to open up space for resistance and change is through production. As a documentary film making course, she engages her students in constant analysis of representations and definitions of their identities and social worlds, what Bourdieu refers to as the struggle over classification. Critical readings of the world around them encourage students to see their own lives differently and more importantly, to produce alternate visions of social worlds in their work. This engagement in the fight over symbolic representation is one way in which students begin to locate agency within structures – by recognizing and talking back to those structures. The strategies which they employ, even at a micro level, become what de Certeau (1984) calls the “everyday creativity” with which individuals subtly “rent” capital where they might otherwise not own it.

Conclusion

I have merely skimmed the surface of possibilities here for using Bourdieu to grapple with the data we have collected from our study. On a broad level, applying this theoretical framework seems to make obvious sense, but on a more micro level, writing through a few of my ideas also points to the nuances of Bourdieu’s work which may be valuable at the level of language and body as well. Perhaps most valuable for my future research is how readily Bourdieu applies to the orchestration of identities as socially constructed responses to surrounding structures. Despite the constraints, I view this still as what Holland and colleagues (1998) describe as an authoring of the self. In addition, as educators and researchers, we need to be less afraid of crisis in our work if it is truly where the potential for change resides. Bourdieu reminds us to return as well to the ways in which the struggle over identity is always tied to learning and status within educational systems. Thus, any production of self always bears political, social, and economic consequences.

References

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life.

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Grasping Bourdieu

I'm trying to process some ideas for my Bourdieu paper and am not finding it easy in the least. I'm interested in writing about agency in his work in order to think through a connection that I find with Bauman's notion of production in a digital age. At the same time, I think I need to spend my five pages on Bourdieu alone in order to know his ideas better. I can bring Bauman back later.

So, I'm feeling a little behind on this paper process (as far as the actual writing goes -- the thinking has been ongoing). Some notes here may help.

Production -- There's cultural production and reproduction, but also an individual agency within those constructs. Structure and agency. And redistribution. Obviously I don't know what to say about this yet.

Legitimation, Recognition, Misrecognition -- I'm really interested in this idea. Habitus is formed, partly, by what others legitimate. As is Symbolic Capital. This process of socialization works only through the process of recognition. Of being recognized as a certain kind of person and not of another. Bourdieu also makes clear that Fields are defined by the struggles between them -- that inclusion in a particular field means exclusion from another.

Whiteness -- Bourdieu also has me thinking back to Thandeka's book Learning to Be White (which I cannot locate in my collection right now). She argues that white people experience a loss as their white communities teach them racial separation. This loss, she believes, is abusive and painful. Is it possible, then, that as white people develop habitus around a racially separated selves that they experience a loss as well when faced with their privilege? In other words, learning privilege is painful because it means separation from a white community embodied in habitus. This maybe doesn't make any sense, but again, I'm processing.

Determinism -- Bourdieu tries really hard not to be deterministic (or that's Swartz's take). This relates again to agency, but I want to locate the places for the agency. Bourdieu seems to only hint at it at times.

Taste -- A student in the classroom I observed once said that people don't separate based on race any longer, but on style. She is a white student, but several students of all races seemed to agree with her. How does this relate to what Bourdieu says about taste and what Bauman says about style?

Mobility -- Having social, cultural, and symbolic capital offers the individual mobility -- moving between Fields, perhaps, and social worlds. This, as we talked about last week, is what we want to teach our students. Yet, I'm a bit uneasy about mobility. In all of the movement, who gets left behind? I rejected a while ago any notion of the authentic self, but that doesn't mean that our society has rejected that notion. So in the process of moving from here to there, where do individuals experience loss of a perceived idea of self, community, being?