tyresias | Others words to the forefront

These 2 quotes are about sociologist/ethnographer Pierre Bordieu, one of my academic crushes. The first one is about class and the second on society and hyerarchy. The man is challenging me to rethink of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, post-modernism and post-structuralism.

Bourdieu holds that the ultimate spring of conduct is the thirst for dignity, which society alone can quench. For only by being granted a name, a place, a function, within a group or institution can the individual hope to escape the contingency, finitude, and ultimate absurdity of existence. Human beings become such by submitting to the 'judgement of others, this major principle of uncertainty and insecurity but also, and without contradiction, of certainty, assurance, consecration'. Social existence thus means difference, and difference implies hierarchy, which in turn sets off the endless dialectic of distinction and pretention, recognition and misrecognition, arbitrariness and necessity.