The first season received positive reviews in both France and other countries, and won several awards. The second season has been universally acclaimed, and has even been seen by some as the best television ever produced in France.
- All the Colors of the Rainbow (The Adventures of Kyra, Cody and Ruby).
- Versteckspiel (German Edition)!
- Memento (German Edition).
- Günter Grass und Pierre Bourdieu im Gespräch (TV Movie ) - IMDb.
The Bureau is based upon real accounts by former spies and inspired by contemporary events, and centres on the daily life and missions of agents within France's Directorate-General for External Security , its principal external security service. It focuses on the "Bureau of Legends", responsible for training and handling deep-cover agents operating 'under legend' on long-term missions in areas with French interests, especially in North Africa and the Middle East.
Living under false identities for years, these agents' missions are to identify and recruit good intelligence sources. The series features intelligence officer Guillaume Debailly, codenamed "Malotru", who returns to Paris after six years undercover in Damascus. He has to face the challenge of reconnecting with his daughter, ex-wife, colleagues, and even his old self. But his return to 'normal life' proves difficult, especially when he discovers that Nadia, who was his love in Damascus, is now also in Paris.
The first season follows his attempts to navigate the rules of life as a spy, and his increasingly tenuous position with Nadia. The second season continues with the same themes, four months later, but also focuses on another character from the first season, Marina Loiseau. She is leaving for Tehran to work undercover as a specialist in seismology , in order to gather intelligence about Iran's nuclear weapons programme.
HyperBourdieu-English
Guillaume has been promoted to deputy director but also become a double agent on behalf of the CIA. He becomes increasingly desperate to resolve the situation with Nadia, which culminates in serious consequences for them both. The discourse of the bad object did not start instantly. There was a more positive perspective on television in its early years. Television just like radio before, but also cinema to a certain extent inherited pedagogical ambitions for a tool which was supposed to reach a mass audience adding to radio the seduction of the image.
Briefly, television was also considered as giving birth to a new art form, somewhere between cinema and theatre. Some cinema scholars moved to television, and so did some cinema critics. Live drama, especially, was much discussed 5 , in relation to a specific aesthetics of television. However, at slightly different paces, both ambitions receded quickly.
Zu - Pierre Bourdieu, UEber Das Fernsehen (German, Paperback)
Skepticism or hostility from educational quarters came first, despite the efforts to set up networks of educational television. This tradition of cinema critics attacking television has barely relented since, especially in France. In the s, Serge Daney, 6 a renowned cinema critic turned television reviewer for a short period, published a selection of his reviews as a book, which read as a scathing attack on the medium, on all fronts: Western television critics, after attempts to construct it as a good object mostly artistic, sometimes journalistic , switched their axiological orientations around the end of the sixties.
Some intellectuals, such as Maurice Clavel in France, used television to comment about society. Some journalists turned television critics seemed to have taken a peculiar enjoyment in thrashing the medium, echoing cinema critics. Finally, television journalism became service journalism, informing on what was about to be broadcast and helping viewers make a choice. It is impossible to even mention all prestigious intellectuals, philosophers, and sociologists who took part in this vilification.
Although I will generalize about cultural elites across Western nations, it is worth bearing in mind that precise cross-national comparisons remain to be made.
It would be interesting to dig out similar attacks beyond the Western world. As examples of national contexts: In the UK, the association of television with theatre and its specific British history, may have reduced the intensity of the aggressiveness against television. In Italy, much as in France, there were additional political reasons for the resentment of left-wing intellectuals: In Italy, Pasolini, not only a film-maker but a leading public intellectual, was the most popular television prosecutor.
On December 9, , he published his challenge to television managers , in the popular daily Corriere della Sera , with much success. Pasolini came back to the topic of television numerous times. He early wrote about the television-politics nexus as if foreboding the rise of TV-Prime Minister Berlusconi. Still in Italy, more academic and less famous authors also took television to task 8.
Major publishing houses also translated books attacking television Bourdieu, Postman, or the Enzensberger, all referred below. There were a few successful international anti-television pamphlets.
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In , Jerry Mander, former advertiser turned advocate of the public interest published his Four arguments for the elimination of television , translated into Italian, Spanish and German and probably other languages. What a way to go, life at the end of the empire , where television joins climate change as one of the major ailments of humankind. In France, philosophers, while not writing specifically about television, occasionally produced damning statements, often remarkable for their triviality regardless of the rest of their work.
The book adapted from the program was most successful. Among scholars, the American academic Neil Postmanprobably made the biggest splash besides Bourdieu: Amusing ourselves to death was translated into French, German and Italian the year of its publication, among other languages. Those attacks on television share common characteristics. First, and importantly for us, they take to task the medium in itself, not or rarely a specific genre, or a specific regulation let us say, private versus public television.
A decade after his death, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu stands tall
No other medium was criticized at such a high level of generality. From this starting point, television is accused of causing deterioration in several fields: Politics was central to their argumentation: The medium is supposed to concentrate huge power.
With or without references to sociological work, television is also condemned for encouraging passivity among its viewers but also, somewhat paradoxically, violence. Whether the harmful effects of television result from the technology itself viewing a flow of images in the home , of the poverty of programs, of a deliberate political manipulation, is not always clear. Furthermore, writing at the time of the quick growth of commercial TV in France, he also criticizes, in passing, the purportedly paternalistic public service television of the past.
A personal note, here: An exception should be made for a specific bunch of authors, coming mostly from the television industry, who have kept writing books in praise or defense of television, across the years. They often adopted, as a kind of provocation, a resoundingly positive title for their books. How can we explain this remarkable negative libidinal investment in television?
One could of course simply claim that the attackers are right, in several ways: TV programs do have little cultural value; their accumulation in the brain of people does provoke bad effects. Although one of his last books was called Pascalian Meditations, it seems plausible that the key thinker for Bourdieu was not so much Pascal as Spinoza, who has since become a global icon for the radical intellectual left. What impressed the sociologist was the apparently contradictory notion that liberty does not mean casting off our deterministic chains, but rather understanding them.
But according to Passeron the neutral stance specific to scholars was totally foreign to Bourdieu, even if he did on occasion lay claim to that prerogative: The unresolved contradiction between commitment and scientific detachment still weighs on anyone reading or interpreting his work. Could another Bourdieu appear now? Certainly not, says Noiriel: Sociological research has gone global, whereas it was only just taking shape in France when Bourdieu established his position.
But does the same apply to the position of a critical intellectual which he embodied, we ask? From social deprivation to industrial action, his commitment was linked to "a profound understanding of these issues". So, he believes, "another Bourdieu would be possible now, but he would take a different form, that's all. Bourdieu himself defined sociology as orchestration without a conductor.
That orchestra is still playing. This article originally appeared in Le Monde.