ok,
I will try to express why I don`t agree with the accusation of idealism that you wielded to Foucault and to Bourdieu. It should be a good exercise for me. This has to do a lot with the way you utilized such an accusation to make your point, what ever this point was anyway.
For instance, regarding to Foucault`s work, you did not consider that, by the time he was proposing his nietzschean views concerned to The order of things, he was one of the first thinkers to say that the man was a recent invent in history and that as such he will not pervive for too long, or that he will just do as long as the historic block or epoch pervive -as you might know, am referring to the episteme that sediments the knowledge that gives sense to the idea of man-. I guess this is a good argument to say that he was not an idealist. Then, you did not consider how influenced Foucault was in respect to his nietzschean views, mostly, in respect to all what he could say, think and work, regarding to the dissolution of the subject. You did not consider that Foucault was very concerned not to be asked who he was (he famous “don`t ask me who i am”) and, within this concerning, his effort to propose his genealogy as the method to erase the prominence of man, and to think history without such prominence. You did not consider that all this effort leaded him to think and to grasp, as a very novel abstraction by that time, all what he proposed & developed about discoursive practices: for instance, his theory of enunciation, which is kind of difficult to follow -without mentioning the subjectiveness that enunciation meant for him as a sediment of knowledge, mostly speaking about what he referred to discoursive sockets, or to truth as a functor of knowledge that has nothing to do with what any man can say but to the conditions of its possibility, its historical apriori, and all that stuff-. But all this needs to be contextualized properly so to not let us reduce his views through the retrospective effect, and so to happily avoid easy accusations. So, if we consider that all his early efforts were mostly moved by his nietzscheanism (this is to say that his genealogical point of view was also meant to be put on as a practice above the prominence of humanity and its representations, in order to question them through analytical exercise, through an analytical toolbox, a toolbox that lead him also to think power, for instance) and mostly with the idea of the dissolution of the subject and the event in the nietzschean sense (that was by the way against sartrian consciousness and even against levistraussian structure -if so-) if we consider all this, its very easy to find how unfair is to say, at the end of the day, that he was an idealist.
But my rant was not meant to refutate your accusation, even though it is refutable concerning to all this things that i am saying now. My rant was referred to your argumentative and pragmatic manners (and if u dont want to publish this comment because I`m touching this matter, its ok, i understand, -spotting myself here is not quite my goal-, but anyway, I have to say that I will post it in the blog that i have in wordpress, which is a special blog where I collect all my commented stuff on the blogosphere, so it is nothing personal). Regarding to this question , for example: you did not bother to give sense to the effort that Foucault did back then at his time to grasp what we all now know it is his thought, as many times he stated: a thought-in-progress, a thought that never pretended to do objectivist theories, but a thought to put in practice thought itself throughout a variety of analytical departures to think concrete problems. With your accusation you cutted all this sensible foucaultian context, and the reason that u did that is because you are very used to take the work of an author, his thought, and his efforts, as nothing more than a text. You are not very worry to embody what you take of an author, you just use it, which is more like to say, that you don`t know it, but you manage it in a very bureaucratic way. The infamous “what can i do with this phrases, with this assertions, so to feed my textual proposes and demonstrations, so to wield them or not against this or that consideration, so to use it fruitfully to construct or destroy” is something that is for you the order of the day. You are so used to this manners that you don`t even notice this scholastic vice, which by the way, it is perfectly exposed precisely by Bourdieu. Bourdieu criticizes the way scholars reproduce their scholar views as the view that they give sense to their own endogenous & common practices, without doing any healthy objectification of such views an practices.
But why to accuse? what is the point to stigmatize as “fat” to who is “fat”? what for? Is not this a terrible manner to make a point, somehow ad hominen claim to separate tendencies and to take parties just to suit an pompous investiture, just to feed a personal trend negatively by the defect of others? (and I`m not saying that your are accusing as idealist who is actually an idealist, in the case speaking of Foucault or Bourdieu they are not, so to my mind, you are so mistaken for double: 1. using the accusation as a way to demonstrate whatever you need, and 2. accusing who does not deserve such accusations). So, as you abuse of your textual tendencies, as you are doing this in a way of a sort of mercenary textual practice, you are not willing to consider that Foucault and Bourdieu walked rather different paths than the ontological ones: they had social commitments that nowadays are still very up to be respected at any rate. Here your pragmatic response or your axiological blindness would sound like “but i dont care, as i am only interested in ontology”. But this interest of yours is not enough argument to sustain an ethical standpoint to accuse them, it just does not justify the “civility” such accusations. “Oh well, what do you expect, if i can only see thing right through my navel”: this neither justifies your pragmatic manners, nor your ways to state your points: with a little bit of intellectual humbleness you may want to objectify your practice, your textual manners, your intellectual procedures, so to take account of them doing the proper margins, and in other to take the positions that you are willing to take in the philosophical fields, as something that shall be very useful to your ontological concerns. (At this point, you may now say that i am trespassing the line between civility and uncivility: but i am not, am just wielding back to you what is meant to be taken beyond the text, as a foucaultian and bourdieuan point of view: so, as u can see, am putting that in practice here or at least am trying to do so, so to ask you what do you expected of a foucaultian or bourdieuan, if being foucaultian or bourdieuan lead to this way to put things and denounce the blindness that they imply and mean by themself, so to take them better through their own discoursivity and sense of practice?).
In respect to Bourdieu, it is sort of the same considerations that should be applied on his defense, regarding to your manners. But for instance, i can say that he denies to take things that easily. Bourdieu`s work is a constructivism-structuralism, but its also meant to be taken as a strategic relationism: he denies the prominence of the man, as he does not consider any actors or actants in the way that Latour does -thought, am not very familiar with Latour`s standpoints-. Bourdieu proposes socioanalysis using a conceptual machinary that lead us to think and to value the logic of practices, this is, from a very macrosocial point of view. His conceptual frame of work is related to the notion of habitus, in one hand, and to the notion of social field of production, in the other. Now you might say: “gotcha! correlationism!”, yeah it might be, but the dynamics that he proposes between these two conceptualizations are not meant to be taken as something centered in an human ontology. The bourdieuan habitus is a notion meant to rupture with realism naivety, with psychologisms, and with the objectivist positions that cannot reach the logic of the social because they overflow “ontologically” their relations, and when doing so, they also fall into a rampant subjectivity: an endogenous social insight. Certainly, the habitus is a system of relations that is embodied within its practice, a system of skills and schemes, ways of views that are meant to reproduce the know-how of practices in respect to their consequent fields, the fields that are accordant to those skills, schemes, know-hows and social points of view. This is to say, that the habitus breaks with the notion of awareness and intentionality of the actor, the subject and the individual, while it introduces the idea of agent (agency) that can be either singular, collective, or institutional. The habitus has a reproductive component that assemblages with social space in many ways and with its categories (that are also reproduced, and embodied). But the habitus can be shared through different individuals, so to say, that you share the same or similar habitus with any else that has the same or similar trajectory that you have, that has the same or similar conductive patterns of action, that has the same or similar tastes, the same or similar education, that has the same or similar position in the social space -family and parents as its departure- , that went to the same or similar school -and coursed the same or similar lessons-, that frequent the same or similar bars, that presume the same or similar way to think. To this point it is hard to think that could be another guy very similar to Levi Bryant doing the same or similar things that you doing (oh god no please!), but the habitus allows us to comprehend such “coincidences” and to understand, for example, the non spoken criteria to select who is a good candidate to be spoused, or to explain the conditioned reasons of a divorce. As u can see, this is the heart of bourdieuan socioanalysis, and socioanalysis is the main work of Bourdieu: his theories of symbolic power or symbolic violence are just a tasty complement to the whole of his work, as they explain the doxa and its ideologies, etc etc. At this end, the last thing that it is important is if he is an idealist or not, and I am sure that if you would know all this, and take it in consideration, you would not use him as an example to wheel your accusation. The same with Foucault.
So, even if you still manage to demonstrate that they are idealists, which would be something very stubborn to my mind, very forced if so, and even if you manage to demonstrate, of course, with all the proper respect that they deserve about their work, and with all what you might know about such work -giving tribute to your effort, energy and time invested to do so-, and even, with all that you surely know that is left to know or you don`t actually know by now about such work as well -as an exercise of intellectual frankness and humility- even if all that, you will find, at the end of the day, that they were never the good and clear example that you needed to hold your disparaged points. So, as you might see, this is were honesty and unwillingness should be admitted or not as part of the scene.
So this is my take on the question. I hope this writing is enough to stand some points, and forgive my broken english.
cheers
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