Notes from Nonsite Meeting 9/27: "Rites of Institution" by Pierre Bourdieu

What follows here are Miranda Mellis's presentation notes from the September 09 Nonsite Collective meeting. For the Bourdieu text, click here and scroll to the attachment at the bootom of the page.

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9/27 Nonsite meeting--Notes/minutes from a conversation on "Rites of Institution", Pierre Bourdieu

When I saw an email announcing that I would be facilitating a discussion at a Nonsite meeting of Bourdieu’s “Rites of Institution”, a text I had proposed for potential group reading but not imagined myself “facilitating”, I felt “assigned a competence”, I felt a “right imposed upon me” which was also an “obligation” signifying as to how I should “conduct myself as a consequence”. Within hours of feeling so interpellated, I was relieved of the surprise sensation of an unasked for duty, by a note from Rob, and all was well. But the experience provided an occasion and material for examining in miniature the dynamics Bourdieu describes in “Rites of Institution”. I was cued, but could neither fully accept nor resist the cue. Bourdieu doesn’t talk about it explicitly in the text, but between consecration (successful rite of institution) and desecration (for example, ‘class-traitor’) is a space of un-valiant, non-heroic doubt. I felt the Nonsite meeting was a space in which I could express ambivalence regarding the assigned facilitation.

But what of the promises of the text? How might we take it up reflexively? What of prophecies and exorcisms; making and destroying representations; heretical discourse; “arming with knowledge” in order to try and “neutralize” “well-founded delusions”; and using the text to prompt group reflection on these categories around which Nonsite ‘collates’ and collects: “the collective”, “the facilitator”, and “self-organized pedagogy”?  Could these terms be substituted/ re-articulated usefully (towards, among other operations, making their doxa visible)? What of linking this (or these) mode(s) of re-articulation, gathering and learning to others towards prophesying, or conjuring its/their ‘historical spirit’?

…and from here a lively discussion ensued which, according to my scanty notes touched upon calling community into being in contradistinction to documenting the already-extant; the motivations behind archiving and the notions of near (present-tense/bodily) and far (future-anterior/technological) archives; Nonsite as a dissipative structure and tempo-rary/emergent form of organization; sites framed and mobilized by actions rather than actions framed by sites; etc.etc…

Recursions in the conversation/key words:

Magic
Amulet
Use
Production
Facilitate [cf potential Emily Miller event “Facilitate This” in February]
Collective
Pedagogy