Abstract society

"Modern society has become abstract in the experience and consciousness of man"; this has happened because of a discrepancy between the objective autonomy of institutions and the subjective autonomy of the individual. The individual is subject to the social control of many institutions, but none of them control him totally.

"Because of segmentation, the social structure leaves voids...which the individual fills with private meanings, his dreams, phantasies, explanations and justifications. Since they lie between the institutional segments of pluralistic society, these private meanings escape control and rationality of the rest of social structure and are experienced as the subjective and unalienable [sic] foundation of human existence. The individual calls this his private autonomy or even "freedom", but is unaware that this freedom is merely residual: it is, so to speak, put together from the leftovers of a segmented social structure." 

-from Mennell's 1973 review of Abstract Society

 

Palestine 1893

source

"habitus, history turned into nature"

"... in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday's man; it is yesterday's man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result. Yet we do not sense this man of the past, because he is inveterate in us; he makes up the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we are led to take no account of him, any more than we take account of his legitimate demands. Converely, we are very much aware of the most recent attainments of civilization, because, being recent, they have not yet had time to settle into our unconscious"

- Pierre Bourdieu (citing Durkheim) 1977: 79

Alain Badiou - Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute

Lesebühne extra: Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute - Vortrag von Alain Badiou from Volksbühne Berlin on Vimeo.