Submitted by:   Mitchell Ash <mitchash@zedat.fu-berlin.de>

In response to Orville Lee et al. on Ken Barkin:

This particular tempest in a teapot saddens me, because I have admired
Ken Barkin's work in the past and regret the silliness, name-calling and
general lack of seriousness into which this debate has descended.  The
dimension of generational struggle is hard to miss, though the age
differences among the "sides" are not always so great.  Perhaps, rather
than yet another descent (this time into amateur psychoanalysis) it
might be more helpful to employ Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic
capital."  Those who are now attacking or counter-attacking what they
charicature as "post-modern" or "post-structural" approaches clearly have
a rather heavy investment in what were once the "standard" ways of doing
historical research and interpretation.  One might want to keep the
terminology still simpler and refer to intellectual commitments, but the
point of Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic capital" is precisely to go beyond
the strictly theoretical and to acknowledge that the "investments"
concerned have been made in the acquisition not only of theories,
conceptual tools, etc., but also of the practices that embody those
intellectual commitments.  Hence the power, at times the
near-irrationality of some of the reactions.  If BOTH scholarly ideals or
pre-supoositions, e.g. about the "reality" of "history," AND the tools of
the trade are under challenge, "wo soll das alles enden?"

As readers of Bourdieu know, these issues are by no means limited to the
verbal disciplines like history or sociology.  The natural sciences can
be studied from this point of view as well.  Indeed, it might well be
interesting to go take another look at some of the great controversies in
German intellectual history and ask whether these, rather like the
current "kleiner Historikerstreit" over who should write the history of
the GDR, were not barely disguised academic Verteilungskaempfe of the
kind Bourdieu has brilliantly dissected in his book, Homo Academicus.
Which I heartily recommend to all participants in the current "post-mod"
debates--if only to inject a touch of reflexivity into them and get the
participants to take themselves just a little less seriously.



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