change happens, but how? david meyerson

I'm preoccupied with change in this world.  Change in the past.  Change in the present.  Changing the future.  If we get beyond the basic academic fight for the "best" definition, I think it's a semantic battle over how to characterize change.  People are afraid of change and academics try to capitalize in order to make important points that will gain notoriety.  This does not mean the definitions should be ignored.  They are quite useful if they are given a context.  I don't pretend to know all the contextual information about Pierre Bourdieu (thanks for including the Swartz article- another professor and I agreed that Pierre is almost unreadable!). However, Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, two giants in the philosophy/cultural theory game, seem to be a bit trapped by their own definitions.  (Maybe they are only trapped if I try to fit them into my own particular context.)  The study of power by Foucault at first reads quite cynical.  I think he's brilliant (in fact, I have a small Foucault hand puppet on my fridge at home) but he posits such a dark existence and agency seems nowhere to be found.  To understand and speak truth to power is invaluable, especially in today's "post-racial" society. (I quote the word with sarcasm in my fingers). Large institutions have kidnapped the discourse of what help is to a society.  We have banks that are too big to fail despite being the perpetrators. We have media conglomerates that give us a multitude of choices.  Their choices.  Who gets left out of this equation? When the large institutions reach out across many class boundaries, the marginalized are so hidden as to be non-existent. Okay. So, we know bigger isn't always better and we have to tease out the complexities or we are entirely too controlled.  Big Brother meets the entertainment industry, if you will.  But, that doesn't mean we don't fight.  That doesn't mean that we can't choose our own interpretations. Is the goal for every person to be wealthy, monetarily or otherwise.  We tend to forget that wealth as a concept can mean many different things to different people.  I'm going to contradict myself here by saying that it is entirely useful to recognize polarizing arguments.  Just find a place for them in the general conversation as means to illuminating where the compromises can take place.  Although I am very opposed to them politically, there is merit to the Tea Party in my mind.  Without them, fat cats wouldn't necessarily challenge any assumptions.  The power wielded in Washington suffers from extreme confirmation bias.  Not just political ideologues, but those who believe in the sanctity of the system.  I am comfortable with the idea of the Arab Spring not only because I believe the citizens of these countries should have a say in how they're governed, but also because they illuminate the building process and the choices that can be made.  Burkitt speaks of spaces that can transform.  Now, he talks more about the role of "play" in spaces.  I think that there is "space" for "change".  Symbols are needed to highlight how change is taking place.  That square in Cairo is a symbolic space for change.  We see the flip-side with the Syrian government destroying whole towns because they act as symbolic spaces of resistance.  Without spaces such as these, the dichotomies that inevitably appear cannot be interpreted by the second wave of revolutionaries- ones that will build institutions based on the information they glean.  The square in Cairo (forgive me for not looking up the name) revealed a people deeply convicted that they had been paternalized to death by President Mubarak.  It also revealed a society divided in its quest for future, divided in how it treats its women, divided in how it views the "West".  I believe the goal in response to Bourdieu is to realize that habitusii (?) exist, but are not immovable.  Change happens.  Good, lasting change happens when we have the information we need and we embrace reflexivity.  In an instant, everything can change, but it's easy to revert to form.  Look at the Egyptian street where the military is trying to strong-arm citizens.  Look at Wall Street, which hasn't learned a damn thing, although that was never their intention.  Change does happen if we're prepared for it.