Introduction
In his obituary published on The Guardian website in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu was described as ‘for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France’ (Guardian Online 2002). In a postscript to that obituary, Stuart Jefferies wrote:
Last year a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu—Sociology is a Combat Sport—became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do. Bourdieu became ‘the intellectual reference’ for movements opposed to neoliberalism and globalisation that developed in France and elsewhere during the 90s. ‘Ours is a Darwinian world of insecurity and stress,’ he wrote, ‘where the permanent threat of unemployment creates a permanent state of precariousness’…Among those he actively supported was José Bové, the French small-farmers’ leader, who, in 1999, gained fame overnight by leading an attack on a McDonald’s outlet, regarded as a symbol of globalisation. ‘For him,’ Bové said about Bourdieu, ‘life itself was a commitment.’ Bourdieu’s death deprives France of one of its great post-war intellectuals, a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan. (Guardian Online 2002)
The focus in this and other accounts of Bourdieu’s life and career is predominantly on his role as an intellectual who, much like Foucault, used his position and status within the French academy to intervene on a range of topics and issues, but most particularly with regard to the rights of, and the injustices suffered by, groups who remained outside mainstream networks of power (the colonized, provincial peasants, urban workers, migrants and students). What is less visible in these public testimonies is an appreciation of the scope, breadth, influence and significance of Bourdieu’s scholarly and intellectual work: an argument could be made that, in terms of the extent to which his ideas have been taken up by and influenced academic and intellectual fields (education, anthropology, sociology, communication, critical and cultural theory, literature and art, to name the most obvious examples), again the only comparable contemporary figure is Foucault. As Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman (2000) write in their Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture, the aim of Bourdieu’s academic work was not limited to ‘the reinvigoration of the discipline of sociology in France’: his main objective was, in his own words, nothing less than a reappropriation of ‘the social unconscious’ (Bourdieu 2000: 10). To achieve this, he attempted
to produce a theory of social life drawn neither from the mental laboratories of philosophy, nor from the strict empiricism of much of what passes for sociological research, but from a highly theoretical mode of analysis that nevertheless pays careful attention to the complex dynamics of social life itself (Brown & Szeman 2000: 1).
As Bourdieu himself (2007), along with others (Grenfell 2012; Robbins 2000) notes, his familial and social background was unusual for a highly successful French academic of the mid-twentieth century. Born in 1930, he came from a relatively poor, rural background in the southwest of France. However, academic success in the French school system led him to one of the most prestigious institutions in France, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 1951 to study in one of the most academically prestigious fields: philosophy. He was an oblat miraculé, glossed by his translator Richard Nice as ‘Bourdieu’s term for a pupil who commits himself entirely to the scholastic success which gives him a “miraculous” social mobility’ (Bourdieu 2007: 5). This produced
a very strong discrepancy between high academic consecration and low social origin, in other words a cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions. This kind of ‘coincidence of contraries’ no doubt helped to institute, in a lasting way, an ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the academic institution, combining rebellion and submission, rupture and expectation, which is perhaps at the root of a relation to myself that is also ambivalent and contradictory—as if the self-certainty linked to the feeling of being consecrated were undermined in its very principle by the most radical uncertainty towards the consecrating institution, a kind of bad mother, vain and deceiving. (Bourdieu 2007: 100)
After successfully completing his university studies in 1955, he taught briefly in a provincial lycée before being conscripted into the French army in Algeria. As he describes in Sketch for a Self-Analysis, he stepped off the ‘very privileged route reserved for students of the École Normale’ (2007: 38) and instead of completing his military service in Versailles, he was sent to Algeria as a soldier (2007: 38). Towards the end of his military service there, he took up a clerical role in the military section of the French administrative system based in Algiers. During this time, he wrote Sociologie de l’Algérie, which was published in 1958. After completing his military service, he taught at the University of Algiers from 1958 to 1960 (Bourdieu 2007: 38).
On his return to Paris in 1960, Bourdieu attended lectures given by Claude Lévi-Strauss and worked as an assistant to Raymond Aron (Grenfell 2012: 13), who had founded the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (CSE). Bourdieu was appointed as Secretary (Robbins 2000: 33) and eventually became the Director of the Centre in 1968 (2000: 16). Jean-Claude Passeron was also assisting Aron, and together they ‘developed a research programme for the Centre which would explore the phenomenon of social mobility and analyse also the emergence of mass culture’ (2000: 34). After taking a position as lecturer at the University of Lille in 1961, Bourdieu returned to Paris in 1964 to take up the positions of Director of Studies at the École Practique des Hautes Études, and lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, which he held until 2001 and 1984 respectively (Grenfell 2012: 229).
Bourdieu’s work with Passeron, which began under Aron’s aegis in the 1960s, highlights an aspect of academic research that Bourdieu regarded as vital: ‘his vision of research as a quintessentially collective activity whose true subject is not the individual scholar but the scientific field in toto’ (Wacquant 2013: 20). Bourdieu collaborated with a wide range of scholars, and he explains the importance of the group to his work and development in a passage in Sketch for a Self Analysis:
The group that I set up, based on elective affinity as much as intellectual convergence, played a decisive role in this enormous investment, with my own belief producing in others the belief capable of reinforcing and confirming my belief. Everything thus combined to favour an individual and collective self-certainty that induced a profound detachment from the external world, its judgments and its sanctions. (Bourdieu 2007: 69–70)
The CSE enabled Bourdieu to assemble a group of fellow researchers and ‘to participate in universes of thought, past or present, very distant from my own’ (2007: 66). As Robbins (2000: 112) points out, some of the ideas and fields in which Bourdieu was interested were in fact researched by colleagues such as Patrick Champagne and Monique de Saint Martin. Bourdieu took up the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France in 1982 (Bourdieu 2007), and in 1993 he accepted the ‘Gold Medal of the National Center for Scientific Research’ (CNRS), France’s highest prize for scientific achievement (Wacquant 2013).
Bourdieu’s role as a ‘public intellectual’ in France was accentuated when, with the 1981 election of the Socialist President Mitterand accompanied by a Socialist majority in parliament, he was asked to contribute to government policy-making. He sat on a Collège de France committee on educational reform in 1981, and later that decade chaired a government commission on education (Grenfell 2012: 230). In 1993, La misère du monde was published to widespread acclaim. From here, Bourdieu played an even more visible role in French public life (see Wacquant 2013), founding what was to become the association Raisons d’agir (Reasons to Act) in 1995, and the book series Liber-Raisons d’agir, launched in 1996 with the publication of On Television and Journalism (Bourdieu 1998b).
Bourdieu (2007: 100) referred to his ‘ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the academic institution, combining rebellion and submission, rupture and expectation’. Wacquant (2013: 18) notes that this attitude led him to consider turning down both the chair at the Collège de France and the Gold Medal. His abhorrence of ‘academic pomp’ and sense of the contradictions consequent upon his ‘cleft habitus’ made the necessary inaugural lecture and acceptance speech a matter of extreme stress and concern to him (Bourdieu 2007: 108–10; Wacquant 2013: 18–19). In both cases he resolved the tension caused by ‘the very fact of a social consecration which assaulted my self-image’ (Bourdieu 2007: 109) by delivering an address that treated the occasion as an event for sociological analysis and, in the case of the Gold Medal, breaking with protocol to make political points (Wacquant 2013: 22). Gisele Sapiro (2010: xx) writes that while Bourdieu ‘claimed the right to…speak freely on political issues…the autonomy of the expert is limited…Counterexpertise was a means of making a political use of scientific knowledge in an autonomous manner.’
In the preface to Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, a text written in the style and featuring a mode of address characteristic of his overtly interventionist later work, Bourdieu (2003: 11–12) states:
I have come to believe that those who have the good fortune to be able to devote their lives to the study of the social world cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake. These struggles are, for an essential part, theoretical struggles in which the dominant can count on innumerable complicities…Against such power, based on the concentration and mobilization of cultural capital, the only efficacious response is a critical force of contestation backed by a similar mobilization but directed towards entirely other ends.
Two points are worth noting here. The first is Bourdieu’s commitment (he ‘cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake’) to the imperative, derived from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, that philosophers should not just interpret the world, but should ‘change it’ (Marx 1969: 15). However, both a sociological refinement and an enhancement of Marx’s dictum exist and, typically for Bourdieu, these are presented—at least implicitly—as both the result of a process of reflection and duration (‘I have come to believe’) and as a form of work—a problem that has to be dealt with and solved in a practical manner (‘the only efficacious response’). The second point relates to the claim that the future of the social world ‘is at stake’, and the work of salvaging the social shall be decided by ‘theoretical struggles’: this is a significant claim primarily because it is made by someone who is influenced by and discursively committed to Wittgenstein’s (1983) meticulous care and reflexivity with regard to the use of language.
Bourdieu is not alone in claiming that the survival of the sociocultural field is threatened by the discursive regimes, logics, values, dispositions and technologies of contemporary capitalism. The visual theorist Jonathan Crary (2013), referring to the attempts of global capitalism to make inroads into, and eventually abolish, ‘the time of sleep’ as non-productive and incompatible with regard to the ‘allegedly irresistible forces of modernization’, writes (2013: 128), ‘Now there is actually only one dream, superseding all others: it is of a shared world whose fate is not terminal, a world without billionaires, which has a future other than barbarism or the post-human, and in which history can take on other forms than reified nightmares of catastrophe.’
The colonization of the social field by market economics, the catastrophic socio-cultural consequences that accompany it and the curious ideological and ethical distance that seems to separate or obfuscate the relation between its causes, actors and practices and their effects—as Maurice Blanchot (1986: 3) writes, ‘The disaster is related to forgetfulness’—is a motif that Bourdieu inherited from the social economist Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation (1957) Polanyi provides an historically situated account of the coming of fascism, interpreted as a consequence of the ideological rise, hegemony and fall—the ‘great transformation’ of the book’s title—of free market capitalism. Polanyi argues that market capitalism works to abolish the ‘between us’ out of which the social is constituted, facilitated and maintained; one result of this evacuation of social values and considerations in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was that the social effected a kind of return of the repressed, in the form of a negative communal identity predicated upon disaffection, alienation and a disposition towards socio-cultural and political fascism. Capitalist economics, Polyani (1957: 258) writes,
gave a false direction…No society is possible in…a market-view of society which equated economics with contractual relationships, and contractual relations with freedom…Vision was limited by the market which ‘fragmented’ life into the producers’ sector that ended when his product reached the market, and the sector of consumers for whom all goods sprang from the market…Society as a whole remained invisible…Neither voters, nor owners, neither producers, nor consumers could be held responsible for such brutal restrictions of freedom as were involved in the occurrence of unemployment and destitution…Any decent individual…was unentangled in the evil of power and economic value. His lack of responsibility for them seemed so evident that he denied their reality in the name of his freedom.
In the Algerian phase of Bourdieu’s work, capitalism is located, evaluated and treated as part of the French colonialist regime: the imposition of capitalist logics on Algeria is characterized as having a devastating effect on the integrity, coherence and stability of the local culture, predominantly because it replaces a way of life predicated on specific socio-cultural relations, forms of capital, identities, conventions, values and economies, and inscribed with and contextualized by local narratives, epistemological categories and meanings, with a form of market economics. While not nearly as directly interventionist as some of his later works, the anthropological writing and scholarship produced during or derived from Bourdieu’s time in Algeria is characterized by an analysis and critique of the abstraction (and, by extension, the destruction) of Algerian society, culture, relationships and forms of identity by the forces and logics of colonialism and capitalism. There is a concomitant awareness that the French intellectual field of the 1950s and 1960s, and the academic disciplines and bodies of theory that dominated it—Marxism, existentialism, literary theory, phenomenology, philosophy—were complicit in this process of abstraction (Bourdieu 2007). For Bourdieu, the euphemized and depoliticized Orientalism that served as an extension of right-wing political thought during the period of the Algerian War, and that was particularly influential in the fields of ethnography and anthropology, was accompanied by leftist thought that could only conceive of Algeria and the Algerians within Marxist-oriented revolutionary narratives. Goodman and Silverstein (2009b: 10) state:
Bourdieu sharply demarcated himself from other leading proponents of ‘Algerian Algeria’—most notably, Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. In Bourdieu’s view, Sartre, Fanon, and others aligned with the Communist left were blind to the socioeconomic realities of the Algerian population…the leftists sought to locate in the Algerian peasantry a nascent revolutionary consciousness…Bourdieu…found the left’s utopianism ‘misleading and dangerous’…The left’s views were motivated, Bourdieu contended, by ‘Parisian ideas’…that…paid little heed to the ‘objective situation’ of colonial Algeria.
According to Tassadit Yacine (2013: 7), Bourdieu’s experiences in Algeria produced ‘a profound biographical and intellectual conversion of the Paris philosopher into an anthropologist, ethnologist and sociologist’ who, for the ‘rest of his life’, would conceive of and use the social sciences and their methodologies as ‘a political weapon in the service of a social critique of forms of repression and domination’. The political and interventionist focus of Bourdieu’s work was conducted and discursively situated at the level of (predominantly) scientific procedures and methodologies—in other words, it involved ‘for an essential part, theoretical struggles’ (2013: 12).
References to, and an analysis of, capitalism are curiously absent from Bourdieu’s educational and early cultural texts that deal with more modern (and predominantly French) societies and contexts. The focus is on the role played by cultural sites, institutions, discourses and genres in the reproduction and naturalization of power differentials and class domination. In this early work, Bourdieu gradually develops and utilizes a theory of a general economy predicated upon field-specific regimes of value and the exchangeability of different forms of capital (including economic capital). What is missing from this theoretical development, according to Calhoun (1993), is an understanding and account of the role of capitalism in terms of its relations with and transformation of regimes of capital: in other words, he argues that ‘what Bourdieu’s approach to capital lacks…is an idea of capitalism’ (1993: 68)—or, more specifically, a theory of what John Guillory (2000: 23) refers to as ‘the union of social and economic systems’.
In his body of worked devoted to the field of cultural production, Bourdieu’s theory of a general economy of capital is reformulated to take into account the ways in which the state and capitalism utilize regimes of symbolic and cultural capital to naturalize and maintain their domination. Although the forms of capital that symbolic power takes under market capitalism are not precisely the same as those utilized by the state, there are methodological continuities. Bourdieu makes the point that the specific processes that have brought about the widespread economic abstraction of the socio-cultural world have affinities with the more general regime associated with the field of power and the state, whose purpose is to deny and disguise social, cultural, political and economic domination and transform it into a form of apolitical, natural and undeniable superiority:
The ethical revolution that enabled the economy eventually to be constituted as such, in the objectivity of a separate universe, governed by its own laws (the laws of self-interested calculation and unfettered competition for profit)…Paradoxically…is itself inseparable from a new form of repression and denial of the economy and the economic that establishes itself with the emergence of all the fields of cultural production based on the repression of their economic and social conditions of possibility…The emergence of these universes which, like the scholastic worlds, offer positions from which one can feel justified in apprehending the world from a lofty distance as spectacle, and in organizing it as an entity solely intended for knowledge, goes hand in hand with the invention of a scholastic worldview that finds one of its most perfect expressions in the myth of homo economicus and in ‘rational action theory’. (Bourdieu 2005c: 7)
Bourdieu’s insights into the relation between symbolic capital and the facility to influence or intervene in cultural politics informed his own approach to the academic field: he understood, for instance, that work produced within or recognized as being part of the field of science enjoyed a status not usually accorded to the arts and humanities. Bourdieu’s scholarly trajectory was characterized by a commitment to the procedures, imperatives and values of science, and a rigorous reflexive relation to his position and work within the field. In other parts of this book, we will deal with the claims that Bourdieu makes about, and his explanations of, the value and roles of the social sciences. It is sufficient to say here that science in its various forms has established what Bourdieu refers to as a high level of autonomy with regard to other cultural fields—most particularly the field of power—and that this relative autonomy (along with a high degree of socio-cultural prestige and its almost universal status as a positive form of cultural capital) is tied to the claims that it makes, and the evidence it provides in support of its contention that it is ‘a discourse on the social’ (Lefort 1986).
Claude Lefort’s account of the relationship between ideology, communication and the field of science is particularly relevant by way of providing an explanation of Bourdieu’s academic and intellectual strategies and orientations. Lefort argues that the notion of ‘discourse on the social’ is a salient aspect of the operations of what he terms ‘bourgeois ideology’, which claims to provide an objective, neutral and reliable account of things (the material world, social relations, human consciousness) derived from an almost ontotheological level of epistemology. The methodological rigour and neutrality of science constitute the basis of the argument that it is both distinct from and not reducible to a ‘discourse of the social’. Lefort contends that the acquisition of this status also means that the value and status of science have been recognized by the field of power (constituted, at various times, by the state, capitalism and the bureaucratic field), and consequently integrated into disciplinary and normative apparatuses that operate at an ordinary and everyday level. The effect of this regime of power, according to Lefort (1986: 230),
presupposes the representation of the scientificity of discourse…There was a discourse on science as well as an exploitation of science in order to produce a discourse on the social. In the context of industrial production itself, a knowledge of the rationality of work was elaborated, a knowledge which was displayed but which was also circumscribed within the limits of a ruling apparatus. Taylorism…eventually gave it full expression…This representation is that of the organization, of an organization which is not a product, a mere application of science, but one which embodies it and whose formula is not the property of the manager, but is inscribed in reality.
Within Lefort’s neo-Marxist narrative, science has been appropriated, as a discourse and an apparatus, by the field of power. There are two main aspects to this process. At one level, there is a pseudo-performance of science and scientificity in the media and more generally across state institutions and bureaucracies, tied to the production of an almost limitless supply of information verified by ‘the magic of objectivity’ (1986: 233). At another level, the human sciences (psychology and economics are singled out here, but sociology is also referenced), by taking on the formal qualities (the models, structures and discourses) of organizational institutions, lend their ‘social magic’ and authority to power, allowing it to euphemize or disguise its operations within and relations to the social field. Members of the increasingly heteronomous sectors of the social sciences field can (and in fact must) commit to the notion that the employment of a technical, statistical, discursive, methodological or theoretical frame of analysis (laboratory equipment, algebraic equations, algorithms, models, maps, focus groups, content analysis, grounded theory, structuralism) delivers up the verifiable truth of a particular situation or phenomenon. However, this process—which facilitates the acquisition of cultural capital and other forms of recognition (titles, promotion, appointments) within the field—is articulated and produced as an extension of the field, by way of making a contribution to what Lefort (1986) calls the capitalized ideas of Progress, Modernity, Civilization and Knowledge. Here the social sciences function simultaneously as instruments of power and ‘of and for themselves’: because they provide the science that extends and euphemizes power, they justify themselves to, and are recognized and privileged by, power.
While Bourdieu would not share Lefort’s general characterization of the relation between the sciences and the field of power, he accepts that the autonomy of the field of cultural production, within which he includes the sciences, has been infiltrated by the logics, values and discourses of capitalism, and that some areas of science function as forms of instrumental positivism. As he states (1993b: 13):
A good number of those who describe themselves as sociologists or economists are social engineers whose function is to supply recipes to the leaders of private companies and government departments. They offer a rationalization of the practical or semi-theoretical understanding that the members of the dominant class have of the social world. The governing elite…needs a science capable of (in both senses) rationalizing its domination, capable both of reinforcing the mechanisms that sustain it and of legitimizing it. It goes without saying that the limits of this science are set by its practical functions: neither for social engineers nor for the managers of the economy can it perform a radical questioning.
In the foreword to Science of Science and Reflexivity, Bourdieu (2004: vii) specifically warns that, ‘The autonomy that science has gradually won against the religious, political or economic powers, and, partially at least…the state bureaucracies which ensured the minimum conditions for its independence, has been greatly weakened’. The most serious threat is to the ‘social mechanisms that were set in place’ to validate and protect scientific objectivity and autonomy, such as ‘the logic of peer competition’. These are now ‘in danger of being subordinated to ends imposed from outside; submission to economic interests and to the seductions of the media…undermine confidence in science and especially social science’ (2004: vii). Autonomy is necessary, Bourdieu (1993b: 9) argues, if science is to continue to analyse and critique power-as-symbolic domination, and to reveal ‘things that are hidden and sometimes repressed’. The sciences can carry out this function of critique because they possess an epistemological facility and value, predicated on a ‘coherent system of hypotheses, concepts and methods of verification’ (1993b: 9) that allows them to continue to speak as a discourse on, rather than of, the social. This is the point at stake in Bourdieu’s response, in an interview collected in Sociology in Question, to a question about why sociological discourse needs to be scientific (1993b: 9):
Why not say it’s a science, if it is one? And then, something very important is at stake: one of the ways of disposing of awkward truths is to say that they are not scientific, which amounts to saying that they are ‘political’, that is, springing from ‘interest’, ‘passion’, and are therefore relative and relativizable.
An integral part of Bourdieu’s commitment to science and scientific rigour, and one of the ways in which he distinguished his work from critical and theoretical work in the arts and humanities, is his insistence on the necessity of combining theoretical and empirical methodologies and approaches. He argues (Bourdieu 1996: 2) that the use of statistics in The State Nobility identifies ‘processes such as those that lead to the differential elimination of students from different backgrounds, processes that exhibit such regularity in their complexity that one might be tempted to use mechanistic metaphors to describe them’. He further maintains that his major theoretical concepts, such as the habitus and cultural field, arose out of, and were only identifiable and recognizable in terms commensurate with, the regularities and objectivities derived from empirical studies. With regard to the question of how a cultural field could be identified, described and delimited, Bourdieu’s position is that those matters had to be arrived at empirically, rather than theoretically:
The question of the limits of the field is a very difficult one, if only because it is always at stake in the field itself…Participants in a field…constantly work to differentiate themselves from their closest rivals in order to reduce competition and to establish a monopoly over a particular subsector of the field…Thus the boundaries of the field can only be determined by an empirical investigation. (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 100)
Bourdieu’s commitment to scientific research is augmented by a strong disposition, influenced by the examples of Durkheim, Weber, Bachelard and Canguilhem, and partly a consequence of his experience in Algeria, to turn the methods by which science objectifies the world onto the contexts, presuppositions, choices, world-views and methods from and by which that objectification is derived and produced. The value of scientific work is not simply the consequence of an imitation of the ‘external signs of the rigor of the most established scientific disciplines’ (Bourdieu 1999: 607); nor is it necessarily guaranteed by institutional affiliations, forms of academic capital or even the process of peer review. It resides in the incorporation, at the level of the scholarly habitus, of a systematic attitude of awareness and interrogation of the researcher’s relation to the regime (that is, the rules, dispositions, mechanisms and processes) of knowledge production within which the subject is located, and from which all methodological, theoretical and technical frames, ways of seeing and practices are derived. The value of the social sciences is predicated upon their reflexive relation to the everyday work of the field and the position that the researcher occupies in the field. This relation takes the most minute forms, from a Wittgenstein-like return to taken-for-granted linguistic terms that effectively make or shape (or even disappear) what they purport to deliver up or describe—as Bourdieu (2005a: 187) points out, a term such as ‘underclass’ does a great deal of political work by first reifying and then excluding a group of people from the social—to a questioning of what makes certain kinds of research questions possible and others unthinkable (Bourdieu 1999). Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 72) characterize this process as a ‘discovery of the generic’ and the ‘shared, banal, commonplace’, and argue that research into socio-cultural phenomena is always predisposed by the position and trajectory of the subject and the field from which the research emanates. In several of his earlier research projects, such as his study of families in his home area of Béarn, and of ‘his own tribe’ in Homo Academicus (1988), Bourdieu focuses on the ways in which, and the extent to which, his own habitus disposed and informed his approach to production of objects of study, and in The Weight of the World (1999) he develops and employs a methodological apparatus that is oriented towards trying to facilitate, on the part of the subjects of the study, relatively unmediated accounts of their experiences.
Despite this emphasis on reflexivity, Bourdieu’s work has been critiqued by both scholars within the field of sociology and by academics in disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, education, art theory and literary studies, for its determinist approach to and theorizing of socio-cultural practices. These critiques tend to fall into four main categories. First, there is the contention that his theoretical apparatus, the empirical data that it generates and the evaluations, conclusions and narratives derived from them are ‘culturally specific’, and therefore cannot be extrapolated to other situations and contexts (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). Second, and by extension, it has been argued that his major theoretical concepts (for instance, the habitus), which were developed out of specific research projects and contexts (for instance, Algeria and Béarn), are treated and deployed as if they were universal and ahistorical (Goodman & Silverstein 2009a). Third, his work has been subject to criticism from disciplinary specialists who take issue with his sociological ‘colonizing’ of areas outside his field of expertise (Goodman 2009). Finally, there is the charge that concepts such as the habitus and the logic of practice are mechanistic or deterministic, and under-estimate or completely deny the possibility of human agency (Jenkins 1992). We will deal with these issues in more detail in later chapters, but it is useful to provide an overview of these criticisms and the arguments that have been made in response to them.
In terms of the cultural specificity of Bourdieu’s theory, methodology, data and evaluations, it is his educational texts that have attracted the most criticism. A number of scholars have argued (see the contributions to Harker et al. 1990) that the highly bureaucratized and stratified French education system is neither analogous nor comparable to education systems in countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, and therefore the arguments that Bourdieu makes cannot be transferred or extrapolated outside the French context. There is also the charge that Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts effectively abstracts the everyday experiences of students and teachers, much as Marxist theories of class struggle abstracted Algerian experiences of their war of independence.
In terms of the specificity (and by extension, non-transferability) of the French education system, the response that has come from Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1993b) and scholars such as Harker (1990: 98) is that while that system is idiosyncratic—‘possibly the most highly bureaucratised and centralised system in the world’—it does not follow that Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts and arguments cannot be used, perhaps in modified forms, to generate data, evaluations and conclusions in other educational systems. Harker (1990: 99) suggests that
there are two tasks in front of educationalists who would seek to use Bourdieu in relation to non-French school systems. First, it is necessary to catch up with Bourdieu theoretically, by seeing his work as a method of enquiry rather than a completed theoretical edifice; and second, to work out the method in relation to their own social space and the particular ‘field’ of education within it.
He argues that Bourdieu’s ideas, and his general theoretical approach, are valid to the analysis of education fields and their relation to the field of power across different national contexts, but that they require specific orientations, depending on the historical and cultural dynamics of the field of analysis. This is in keeping with Bourdieu’s own insistence that concepts such as field and habitus are both predicated upon and developed with regard to the scholarly task at hand, and shaped by and receptive to specific empirical data (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992).
The second critique of Bourdieu’s theorizing and analysis of the field and socio-cultural functions of education, particularly in The Inheritors (Bourdieu 1979b) and Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990), is that he substitutes a kind of sociological grand theory and set of narratives for what are in fact micro-level relationships between the education system, forms of pedagogy and learning-as-practice. From this perspective, a text such as Reproduction imposes a theoretical homogeneity upon a collection of experiences that are both heterogeneous and theoretically beyond scientific or scholarly retrieval. Consider, for example, the discursive distance that separates Jacques Rancière’s (2004: 175) characterization of ‘the experience of the schoolchild to whom classes and bells, lessons and homework, rewards and punishments do not precisely call to mind free and disinterested exercise’ from Bourdieu’s (1993b: 120) explanation of school culture in Sociology in Question:
The school, the site of schole, leisure, is the place where practices endowed with social functions and integrated into the collective calendar are converted into physical exercises…where one acquires a distant, neutralizing disposition towards language and the social world, the very same one which is implied in the bourgeois relation to art, language and the body…What is acquired in and through experience of school, a sort of retreat from the world and from real practice.
Bourdieu argues that when the cultural field, practices and processes of education are analysed, it is possible to identify objectivities of difference regarding students’ educational trajectory, profile and attainments that are predicated on factors such as class position, father’s profession, parents’ educational capital and gender. This set of objectivities is then located within a wider socio-cultural space, where regimes of symbolic power and domination are manifested in and normalized, naturalized and maintained through the habitus-as-dispositions that is acquired, to a significant extent, within the education system. For Rancière (2004), on the other hand, the school—at least for working-class children—is an alien space, much more likely to produce indifference, boredom and resentment than ideological compliance; it is also a place where students, while understanding that the game is already heavily loaded in favour of an altogether different set of cultural literacies from those that they possess, nevertheless have the capacity to learn how to play along, simultaneously inside and outside the rules of the game. Both positions provide perfectly valid accounts of the regime of education, pedagogy and learning; however, their irreconcilability is not to be found in what happens to students, but rather in terms of what their experiences mean and, more importantly, how those experiences translate at the level of cultural politics. For Bourdieu, the argument that students resent or reject the values and world-views supposedly inculcated at school is to miss the point, which is that the production of a rejection, on their part, is precisely what school is set up to do in the first place. This rejection is part of the embodiment of a set of dispositions that ensures they remain out of, and thus help to perpetuate and naturalize, the wider socio-cultural game of symbolic power. Rancière’s position is that school engenders an antagonism to the game that is carried into the socio-cultural field, and that authorized culture (and, by extension, the field of power) never accomplishes what it seems to accomplish, which is acquiescence.
With regard to the criticism that Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus is invalid or flawed because it applies supposedly synchronic and universalist concepts to situations, contexts and practices that unfold over and change in time, Bourdieu stressed that his theoretical approach, derived from sources such as Weber, Bachelard and Canguilhem, is designed to adjust to synchronic and diachronic levels of analysis.
Perhaps the best example of this tendency on Bourdieu’s part to adjust and refine his theoretical apparatus to take empirical evidence, critical feedback and the specificities of the work-at-hand into account can be found in his rethinking of the relation between the field of cultural production, class and symbolic power. Whereas in his educational sociology, cultural literacy, production and consumption are effectively assigned the role of facilitating the reinscription of class differentiation and domination, during the 1980s and 1990s Bourdieu developed and provided a more nuanced account of both the dynamics of the field of cultural production and its ambivalent relation to the field of power; there are also reformulations, in the same period, of his theorizing of the mechanics of class formation, the notion of reflexivity, the strategic capabilities of the habitus, and the durability and stability of cultural fields. This refinement of his theoretical apparatus is often discussed, contextualized, worked through and explained in strongly reflexive texts such as Sociology in Question (1993b) and An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), in the material collected in In Other Words (1990b) and Language and Symbolic Power (2005b) and in his more ‘philosophical’ books, most particularly Pascalian Meditations (2000).
Despite the incorporation of a rigorous reflexivity into his methodological and theoretical apparatus, Bourdieu’s work has attracted considerable and sustained academic criticism—and, for that matter, journalistic criticism, for instance, On Television and Journalism (1998b)—that his theories impose a mechanistic explanation onto socio-cultural practices, and by extension deny the possibilities of human agency. As Richard Jenkins (1992: 118) summarizes it, ‘The central thread which unites…empirical and theoretical critiques is the argument that Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction and social reproduction is deterministic.’ The essays collected in the book Bourdieu in Algeria (Goodman & Silverstein 2009a) tend to follow this lead. Abdellah Hammoudi (2009: 200) suggests that by conflating tradition and the habitus, Bourdieu leaves ‘little room for the study of the use of reason in social practices anterior to colonization’, and that this ‘not only marginalize(s) internal contradictions, but also the relative freedom that men and women in their actions exercise with regard to normative systems’.
Bourdieu has consistently denied that a notion such as the habitus is in any way mechanistic: he argues that habitus and the logic of practice were developed partly as a response to and a means of overcoming the schema of ‘structures without subjects’, prevalent in Levi-Strauss’ anthropology, Russian Formalist literary theory and post-Saussurian linguistics, among others. The notion of habitus constitutes ‘a rejection of a whole series of alternatives into which [the] social sciences…has locked itself, that of consciousness (or of subject) and of the unconscious, that of finalism and mechanism’ (Bourdieu 1985: 12). At the same time, it provides an explanation of the objective regularities of the socio-cultural world, and by extension of the way in which power, as the source of the categories of apprehension and evaluation that subjects bring to the world, is able to reproduce and maintain itself without recourse to overt forms of domination or violence. Bourdieu understands power as operating predominantly at a symbolic level: while a subject’s practices and world-views are not explicable at a mechanistic level, being in the world means being inhabited by the world—or, more specifically, by certain naturalized and normalized values and categories of perception that reproduce themselves via the habitus. The habitus functions, for Bourdieu, at a level of misrecognition: the set of dispositions through which it is facilitated and manifested is acquired unconsciously, which is why ‘what I am’ and the ‘ways I see the world’ are often taken for granted, accepted as something that is innate or common sense.
Bourdieu has utilized this mode of thinking across his scholarly work on education, cultural production and the state, which he refers to as ‘three stages in a single enterprise’ (Bourdieu 2000: 10). To this we could add a fourth aspect: that of his later and more openly interventionist work, which utilizes techniques, discourses and forms of address taken from both traditional scholarship—Science of Science and Reflexivity (Bourdieu 2004), The Social Structures of the Economy (Bourdieu 2005c)—and the polemicist essays—Acts of Resistance (Bourdieu 1998a), Firing Back(Bourdieu 2003)—and is directed against the symbolic violence exercised by market capitalism. In this final stage of Bourdieu’s career, the focus moves from an analysis and interrogation of the naturalized regime of symbolic violence associated with the ‘dominant’ to the imposition of a capitalist hegemony that attempts to force states ‘to open up all services to the laws of free exchange and hence to make it possible to turn all service activities into commodities and sources of profit, including those responding to such fundamental rights as education and culture’ (Bourdieu 2003: 77).
Antecedents
It has been noted, not least by Bourdieu himself (Bourdieu 2007), that his research was often conducted from the position of an academic outsider. This characterization can be extended to Bourdieu’s status within the wider academic field:
I…understood retrospectively that I had entered into sociology and ethnology in part through a deep refusal of the scholastic point of view which is the principle of loftiness, a social distance, in which I could never feel at home, and to which the relationship to the social world associated with certain social origins no doubt predisposes. That posture displeased me…and the refusal of the vision of the world associated with the academic philosophy of philosophy has no doubt contributed greatly to leading me to the social sciences, and especially to certain ways of practising them. (Bourdieu 2007: 41)
Bourdieu (2007) suggests that, as an outsider, what is denied at the level of an ease and intimate familiarity with regard to the way things are is sometimes compensated for by the absence of a disposition to see what should be or is meant to be seen—or to not take for granted what is presumed and treated as the departure point for and basis of observation, categorization and evaluation. His primary example of this tendency is the scholarly habitus: he argues that its disposition to abstract issues, situations and practices, and to remove them from the immediate context and logic of their production, is germane to academic scholarship. It is important, however, not to overplay Bourdieu’s distance from the academic and intellectual fields. As he writes in Sketch for a Self-Analysis (2007: 102), ‘How can I fail to recognize myself in Nietzsche when he says…that he has only ever attacked things that he knew well, that he had himself experienced, and up to a point, he had himself been?’
In Sketch (2007: 1), Bourdieu provides an account of his uneasy relationship with(in) the French academy, and of the intellectual influences and antecedents he deemed ‘pertinent from the point of view of sociology, in other words necessary for sociological explanation and understanding’. Any discussion of Bourdieu’s intellectual influences and antecedents must give due weight, as Bourdieu (1988, 1993b, 2007) himself insists, to ‘negative influences’—that is, those bodies of theory, methodologies or intellectual approaches from which he has differentiated himself, or that he has attempted to extend, counter or overcome. These can be divided into three main groups: philosophy, Marxism and, more broadly, the sets of theoretical approaches commonly found in but not exclusive to the social sciences, characterized by the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism. There are, of course, various other groups and sub-groups that Bourdieu critiques, such as the theories and methodologies associated with the quite antithetical approaches of cultural studies and positivism; however, the three areas above exerted a strong and continuous influence over Bourdieu’s scholarly trajectory, and were the theoretical departure points for the development of concepts such as habitus, cultural field, cultural capital and reflexivity.
Bourdieu’s relation to philosophy is sometimes ambivalent, but more often than not it is critical:
If I have resolved to ask some questions that I would rather have left to philosophy, it is because it seemed to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not ask them; and because, especially with respect to the social sciences, it never ceased to raise questions that did not seem to me to be essential while avoiding asking itself about the reasons and above all the (often not very philosophical) causes of its questioning. (Bourdieu 2000: 1)
To accentuate this point, he adds in the next paragraph that, ‘In order to justify an inquiry that hopes to open the way to truths that philosophy helps to make it hard to reach I could have invoked thinkers who are close to being seen by philosophers as enemies of philosophy’, such as Wittgenstein (1983), who makes his ‘prime task the dispelling of illusions, especially those that the philosophical tradition produces and reproduces’ (2000: 1).
At a more contextual level, Bourdieu’s critique of philosophy can be related to the academic environment that characterized his early career (Bourdieu 2007). He describes how the intellectual hegemony of the field of philosophy, to which he refers as ‘a universally recognized scholastic aristocracy’ (2007: 6), devalued and rendered marginal most disciplines within the social sciences, with the notable exception of anthropology. Bourdieu’s intellectual sympathies and ‘choices’, which characteristically ‘manifested themselves above all else in refusals and in intellectual antipathies that were most often barely articulated’ (2007: 2), were oriented towards marginal academic figures such as Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, whose historical and historicizing approaches contrasted markedly with that of philosophy and provided ‘an antidote to the “facile” aspects of existentialism’ (2007: 11). This problematical relation to philosophy, and the development of an interest in the social sciences, were accentuated by the position that various academic disciplines were to take regarding the Algerian War of Independence: Bourdieu (2007: 58) refers to the ‘transformation of my vision of the world that accompanied my transition from philosophy to sociology, in which my Algerian experience is no doubt the pivotal moment’. Philosophy (both in its more traditional and Marxist versions) and anthropology tended to ‘bracket off ’ the socio-cultural experiences of Algerians by incorporating them, for instance, into Marxist narratives that simultaneously abstracted them, or subjecting them to a euphemistic, right-wing Orientalism (2007). This contrasted sharply with Bourdieu’s experiences as both a conscript and a researcher in Algeria: ‘It is not easy,’ he writes, ‘to describe simply…situations and events…that have profoundly shaken me…and not only the most extreme of them’ (2007: 48). This involved, among other things, informants giving him details of torture inflicted upon them by the French army, and of Bourdieu himself being the target of threats and other forms of violence (2007: 48). Bourdieu’s Algerian experiences engendered ‘a deep refusal of…the vision of the world associated with the academic philosophy of philosophy’ and led him ‘to the social sciences and especially to certain ways of practising them’ (2007: 41).
Although sociology was regarded in the French intellectual field of the time as ‘a plebeian and vulgarly materialist science of ordinary things’ (2007: 17), it offered an alternative to the distanced and distancing approach of the scholarly disposition, which Bourdieu associated most particularly with philosophy. Whereas for Bourdieu philosophy treated everyday issues and problems as intellectual abstractions, sociology offered the possibility of socio-cultural intervention:
The sociologist has the peculiarity, in no way a privilege, of being the person whose task is to tell about the things of the social world, and, as far as possible, to tell them the way they are. In itself, that is normal, even trivial. What makes his (or her) situation paradoxical, sometimes impossible, is that he is surrounded by people who either actively ignore the social world and do not talk about it—and I would be the last to criticize artists, writers or scientists for being totally absorbed in their work—or worry about it and talk about it, sometimes a lot, but without knowing much about it (there are some of these even among recognized sociologists). It is indeed not uncommon that, when associated with ignorance, indifference or contempt, the obligation to speak that derives from suddenly acquired notoriety or the modes and models of the intellectual game inclines people to talk everywhere about the social world, but as if they were not talking about it, or as if one were talking of it to help to forget it and have it forgotten—in a word, while denying it. (Bourdieu 2000: 5)
Bourdieu’s most critical account of the dispositions and attitudes he associates with philosophy is articulated in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991a), but it has its antecedent in what Bourdieu refers to as his refusal of what Merleau-Ponty referred to ‘in a very different sense of the common usage as “intellectualism”’, which ‘had long oriented my intellectual choices’ (Bourdieu 2007: 77). The book on Heidegger (Bourdieu 1991a) provides a detailed account and analysis of how ‘symptomatic intellectualism’ functions as a form of cultural politics, while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of its association with the political—or in fact with anything but the most distanced and non-tendentious relation to the world. This separation from the world is practised through and legitimated by the use of technical and theoretical discourses, which are irreducible to appropriation or translation—that is, they cannot be carried off to contexts or subjected to readings that don’t take them on their own terms, and deal with them in their own form of discourse. Vulgar—that is, non-philosophical—readings and uses are disqualified in advance, on the grounds that they ground what cannot or should not be grounded—in other words, as both a corruption of an effectively pure discourse and an intrusion into and violation of the autonomy of the space and language of philosophy. In the Heidegger book, Bourdieu (1991a) provides an extensive analysis of the conditions, characteristics and trajectories of the philosophical cultural field and its habitus, along with a contextualizing account of precisely what is at stake (and what is to be gained) when a field separates itself from the world in order to be able to identify, discuss and pronounce upon the (abstract) truth of the world, without appearing to speak from a position mired by and within the world. Heidegger’s work is shown to be available to political readings by way of its strategic and self-interested refusal to countenance any such thing. Its ‘dual meaning and covert undertones’ reveal
some of the most unexpected political implications of Heidegger’s philosophy, at a time when they were not recognized by historians: its condemnation of the Welfare State, hidden deep inside a theory of temporality; its anti-semitism, sublimated as a condemnation of rootlessness…its refusal to disavow the commitment to Nazism…its ultra-revolutionary conservatism, which inspired not only philosophical strategies of radical overcoming but also…the disappointed philosopher’s break with the Hitler regime, when it failed to reward his revolutionary aspirations to the vocation of philosophical Fuhrer (1991a: viii).
Bourdieu’s issues with Marxism are, to a large extent, of a different order to those identified in his critique of philosophy, and to render his relation to Marxism in the negative would be both simplistic and inaccurate. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s early academic career was characterized by a turning away from what was, in sections of the French social sciences and the area of critical theory, the domination of Marxist thought. As Bourdieu writes, ‘I have always found myself on the opposite side from the models and modes dominant in the field, whether in my research or in my political position-taking’ (2007: 106), a disposition that manifested itself in being ‘conspicuously Weberian or Durkheimian for example when it was imperative to be Marxist’ (2007: 106–7). Bourdieu’s criticism of Marxist philosophy is predominantly threefold. First, he argues that with Marxism there is a tendency—implicit in its Hegelian roots—to abstraction, and to systematizing and universalizing itself. Bourdieu (1990b: 17) writes that ‘Marx himself never made much use of historical criticism against Marxism itself ’, and he refers to his ambivalent relationship with the Frankfurt School and Althusser and their ‘totalizing critique’ (1990b: 19). Second, Bourdieu rejects the Marxist base-superstructure distinction, and the notion that socio-cultural reality can be reduced to, or is necessarily explicable in terms of, economic relations. Third and by extension, he is critical of the way in which Marxist theories either overlook or underplay everyday social experiences and influences: contrary to the position taken by ‘mechanistic materialism’ (Bourdieu 2000: 136), Bourdieu insists that the apparatuses of symbolic domination, and the ways in which they euphemize violence, are more widespread, economical and effective in disposing and naturalizing the acquiescence and acceptance of the dominated to the condition of their domination. For Bourdieu, the concepts of the habitus, cultural field and cultural capital (and relatedly, misrecognition and illusio) are used to identify, analyse and explain how power naturalizes and sustains itself, most particularly at a bodily and micro-level. What these concepts provide is an account and explanation of socio-cultural practices that are grounded in and derived from, but never entirely aware of, the power relations and flows that constitute the world in which practice occurs. Bourdieu (in Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 166–7) writes that ‘under definite conditions and at a definite cost’, symbolic power and violence ‘can do what political and police violence can do, but more efficiently…It is one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist tradition to have failed to make room for these “soft” forms of violence, which operate even in the economic realm.’
Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus—particularly the concepts of habitus, cultural field and cultural capital—is also designed to identify and analyse the relations between cultural practices and their sociocultural contexts, and by extension the logic underpinning the ways in which social groups, including classes and class fractions, are formed. This perhaps constituted Bourdieu’s most significant departure from Marxist theory, although it is not fully developed and integrated into his theoretical apparatus until the post-Distinction period of his work. In texts such as In Other Words (1990b), Language and Symbolic Power (2005b), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) and Practical Reason (1998c), Bourdieu argues that instead of classes having a more or less ontological reality based on, among other things, ownership of the means of production, they are instead a form of socio-cultural and political work that has to be done. Different groups of subjects within the socio-cultural field have objective affinities (the statistical likelihood of access to higher education, for instance), but also a set of values and perspectives (the habitus) that dispose them to identify with each other. In other words, because of their proximity in social space, they are potentially available to be interpellated and produced—briefly or otherwise—as a group (that is to say, class) identity. Bourdieu (2005b: 231) argues that:
On the basis of knowledge of the space of positions, one can carve out classes in the logical sense of the word…sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who, being placed in similar conditions…have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests…This ‘class on paper’ has the theoretical existence which belongs to all theories: as the product of an explanatory classification…it allows one to explain and predict the practices and properties of the thing classified—including their propensity to constitute groups.
Because so much continuous and complex work is required to make and maintain classes, Bourdieu replaces the Marxist notion of ideology (and, by extension, false consciousness) with that of symbolic power. Much like Foucault’s concepts of discipline, regulation and normativity, symbolic power functions to naturalize, normalize and maintain a particular regime of power (‘the dominant’) without seeming to exercise power. In Masculine Domination (2001), for instance, Bourdieu demonstrates how the extraordinarily weighty task of imposing masculine domination is carried out partly by ensuring that women are compliant with, and accept, the world-view that prescribes that certain substances (the masculine body) possess attributes (strength, forms of intelligence, an ability to behave and think in a rational manner), which in turn justifies the power differential and the socio-cultural allocation of roles and functions—for instance, across social spaces and fields such as the domestic sphere, and the cultural fields of science and the state. Whereas:
The classical Marxist tradition emphasises the political functions of symbolic systems, and explains the connections between these systems in the interests of the dominant class, and the problem of false consciousness in the dominated classes. From Bourdieu’s perspective this approach tends to reduce power relations to relations of communication. The real political function which he sees symbolic systems as fulfilling is their attempt to legitimate domination by the imposition of the ‘correct’ and ‘legitimate’ definition of the social world. The struggles between symbolic systems to impose a view of the social world defines the social space within which people construct their lives, and carry on what Bourdieu sees as the symbolic conflicts of everyday life in the use of symbolic violence of the dominant over the dominated. (Mahar, Harker & Wilkes 1990: 5)
Much like Marxist theory, subjectivism (which could be said to include existentialism and phenomenology) and objectivism (predominantly in the form of structuralism) exercised considerable influence over the French intellectual field during the 1950s and 1960s. They represented two antithetical approaches to an analysis and understanding of sociocultural practices. Subjectivism, which was associated with existentialism and, to a lesser extent and in quite different ways, phenomenology, provides an explanation of human activity that privileged agency, free will, individual cognitive processes and what Bourdieu (2007: 11) refers to disparagingly as the exaltation of ‘lived experience’. Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 132–3) compares Sartre’s ‘founding myth of the uncreated creator’ to the notion of the habitus, and analogizes that the former relates to the latter much as ‘the myth of genesis is to the theory evolution’. He argues (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) that even the more rigorous forms of phenomenology posit a subject who remains relatively independent, at the level of socio-cultural identity and as a being-in-the world, from objective rules and categories.
Loïc Wacquant (in Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) provides a useful discussion of this issue. He quotes from Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the relation between a footballer and the objective contexts (the rules of the game, the dimensions of the field, the role of the referee) as they are played out on the football field, specifically his contention that:
It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes a new line of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. (Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 21)
Wacquant goes on to identify two points that differentiate Merleau-Ponty’s approach from that of Bourdieu’s work. First, he argues that while Merleau-Ponty accepts that the subject has to negotiate, and is to some extent bound by, the rules of the game, the game as a set of logics, dispositions and normalized perspectives is constitutive neither of the subject nor of the subject’s apprehension of the game. In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s subject, as Wacquant reads it, is both necessarily inhabited by the game (at the level both of a bodily hexis, which determines forms of physical movement, and in terms of a strategic understanding of what decisions to make and when) and somehow outside the game, to the extent that ‘the soccer “field” remains a purely phenomenal form, grasped strictly from the viewpoint of the acting agent’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 22). His second point—an extension of the first—is that there is nothing in Merleau-Ponty’s account that provides an explanation of the process of consciousness as a dialectic of ‘world and action’ and that is capable of establishing ‘a solid analytical link between internal and external structures’ (1992: 22).
Structuralism was associated with a diverse group of disciplines and names across the social sciences and humanities, including Levi-Strauss (anthropology), Parsons (ethnomethodology) and Barthes (literature). It dominated French anthropology during Bourdieu’s time in Algeria and has been cited as an influence on his work up to and including Outline of a Theory of Practice (1978). Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology was particularly influential, to the extent that Bourdieu could state in Sketch (2007: 44) that ‘I placed myself in the tradition he had created (or recreated).’
There were two aspects of Levi-Strauss’ work, however, against which Bourdieu reacted: a tendency to overlook the relation between social reality and history, and a tendency to privilege the objectivities of the social at the expense of social practice (Bourdieu 2007: 45). For Bourdieu, structuralism was objectivist in the sense that it understood practice as being explicable in terms of culture frames and structures: members of a community are always inhabited by, and process the world in terms of, a set of ‘meaning machines’ that mirror either a specific cultural regime or the structural categories of the human mind, depending on the body of theory in question. A literary example of this idea can be found in Walter Abish’s (1974) novel Alphabetical Africa, which is divided into chapters based on the English alphabet: the first chapter is ‘A’, and contains only words that begin with that letter, while ‘B’ contains words that begin with ‘A’ and ‘B’, and so on down to chapter ‘Z’, where the full complement of the alphabet is available. In the ‘A’ chapter, for example, notions of violence are limited to terms such as annihilation, apprehension, arson and attack; by chapter ‘K’, people can be killed, but they can only be murdered from chapter ‘M’ onwards. In Abish’s novel, what is visible, and by extension what becomes meaningful, is commensurate with the cultural resources and categories at hand. Two points are being suggested here. First, subjects are always played by, and restricted in their thinking, to the world in which they live; and they cannot interrogate or step outside (that is, they cannot reflexively engage with) their cultural universe. Second, the task of the social or literary analyst is to identify the structures that produce and process practices, rather than to deal with the practices themselves. One influential example of this tendency is Saussure’s division of the study of linguistics into the categories of langue (system) and parole (practices), and then exclusion of the latter from consideration because of its unruliness. Bourdieu writes that:
Language, according to Saussure…is treated as an instrument of intellection and an object of analysis, a dead language…a self-contained system completely severed from its real uses and denuded from its practical and political functions…The illusion of autonomy of the purely ‘linguistic’ order which is asserted by the privilege granted to the internal logic of language, at the expense of the social conditions and correlates of its social usage, opens the way to all subsequent theories which proceed as if the theoretical mastery of the code sufficed to confer practical mastery of socially appropriate usages (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 141–2).
The theoretical sources and techniques that both disposed and enabled Bourdieu to attempt to overcome the limitations of philosophical and Marxist approaches, and to bridge the gap between subjectivism and objectivism, came from a variety of areas, but perhaps the most influential and abiding of these were what we might call foundational sociological theory (represented by Durkheim and Weber), the history and philosophy of science (Bachelard and Canguilhem), and the philosophy of Pascal, Wittgenstein, and somewhat problematically and ambivalently, Nietzsche.
The influences on Bourdieu’s work exercised by sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber need to be contextualized and read in two ways. The first is in terms of their transformation of sociology into a discipline and field of activity strongly informed by the rigorous approaches, methodologies and techniques associated with the sciences. The second is with regard to the challenge posed to sociology (and we might add, to its scientific status and prestige) by both popular culture and journalism (‘Everyone is a sociologist’); and we could add to this the various intellectual and scholarly forces, including philosophy on the one hand (represented by the figure and work of Heidegger) and what Bourdieu terms the ‘reductions and impoverishments’ (Bourdieu 2007: 72) brought by positivism on the other.
Durkheim’s work influenced Bourdieu’s commitment to the value of a scientific approach in both underpinning scholarly work, and enabling sociology to operate as a discourse on the social. Responding to a question about the contradiction inherent in sociology’s status as both an academic and a political activity, Bourdieu explains that:
Sociology as we know it was born, in France at least, from a contradiction or misunderstanding. Durkheim was the one who did all that needed to be done to make sociology exist as a universally recognized science. When an activity is constituted as a university discipline, the question of its function and the function of those who practice it no longer arises…Sociology is not so lucky…the question of its raison d’être is asked increasingly the more it moves away from the definition of scientific practice that the founders had to accept and impose…You know how much work Durkheim had to do to give sociology this ‘pure’, purely scientific, ‘neutral’ image…ostentatious borrowings from the natural sciences, countless signs of a break with external functions and politics, such as preliminary definitions (Bourdieu 1993b: 27).
Durkheim provided Bourdieu with a disposition towards and an appreciation of ‘theoretically grounded empirical research’ (Bourdieu 2007: 73), and the methodological apparatus with which sociology could demonstrate that ‘social facts “have a constant mode of being, a nature that does not depend on individual arbitrariness and from which there derive necessary relationships”’ (Durkheim, quoted in Bourdieu, Chamboredon & Passeron 1991: 15).
Weber’s status in this discussion is less easy to characterize, particularly given that references to his work and ideas in Bourdieu’s texts are much less frequent than Durkheim citations. However, he remains influential on a number of levels: his approach is associated with scientific principles such as neutrality and objectivity, and with an identification and analysis of the minutiae of everyday socio-cultural practices inhabited by factors—such as forms of implicit or undisclosed calculation—that remain invisible to the analysis of objectivities; we can say, for instance, that ‘misrecognition’ and ‘illusio’ are very much ‘Weberian’ concepts. What is also present in Weber’s work, which Bourdieu identifies as comparatively lacking in his own (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 93), is a sensitivity to history and historical continuities. At the same time, there are areas of ambivalence. This is apparent in Bourdieu’s response to a question regarding his relation to cultural and social history in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992: 91–2). In his reply, Bourdieu focuses not on Weber, but on the Weberian sociologist Norbert Elias, whose work on ‘the civilizing influence’ is ‘one which I have a great deal of intellectual sympathy, because it is…based on the historical psychosociology of an actual grand historical process, the continuation of a state which progressively monopolizes…symbolic violence’ (1992: 92). Bourdieu suggests, however, that ‘just like Weber before him, Elias always fails to ask who benefits and who suffers from the monopoly of the state over legitimate violence, and to raise the question…of the domination wielded through the state’ (1992: 93). What is missing from the Weberian approach, for Bourdieu, is that it can be caught up in treating historical activities and developments as abstractions without regard to their (micro)political contexts or functions.
The influence of Bachelard and Canguilhem on Bourdieu’s work was contextual as well as theoretical and methodological. On one level, they represented an alternative to the intellectual domination imposed, in the French context, by Sartre and existentialist philosophy. Bourdieu identifies himself with those ‘who sought to resist “existentialism” in its fashionable or academic forms’ (Bourdieu 2007: 9), and who could draw upon
an epistemology and a history of the sciences represented by authors such as Gaston Bachelard [and] Georges Canguilhem…Often of lower-class or provincial origin…and attached to peripheral university institutions…these marginal and temporally dominated authors, hidden from common perception by the celebrity of the dominant figures, offered a recourse to those who, for various reasons sought to react against the fascinating but rejected image of the total intellectual…Canguilhem…could be invoked by the occupants of opposite positions in the university field…as the advocate of a tradition of the history of science and epistemology, which, at the height of the triumph of existentialism, represented the heretical refuge of seriousness and rigour, he would be consecrated, with Bachelard, as the maitre a penser of philosophers more remote from the heart of the academic tradition. (Bourdieu 2007: 10–11)
Consistent with their role of offering the possibility of a way out from the confinement of existentialism, Bachelard and Canguilhem insist upon subjecting the knowledge-theory and methodology nexus, even in its most scientific and established manifestations, to an historicizing gaze and interrogation: ‘Bachelard teaches us that epistemology is always conjunctural: its propositions and thrusts are determined by the principal threat of the moment’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 174). What fellows from the proposition that epistemology (and by extension, knowledge) is always produced with regard to the concerns emanating from a specific episteme is the notion that theoretical and methodological approaches and techniques are necessarily oriented towards some general or specific form of work, rather than being universal and trans-historical. For a variety of reasons, mostly tied to the dynamics of specific academic fields and sub-fields, theories and methodologies are often treated and deployed as if they were universally applicable, and even in the most advanced state of ossification they can continue to exert scholarly and intellectual influence—witness the hegemony still exercised over the American discipline of communication by positivist concepts, approaches and methodologies that were a product of the 1950s. However, as Bourdieu insisted throughout his career, theoretical notions such as the habitus and cultural field function as particularized or specific universals—that is, they take on inflections and orientations that are specific to the time and place both of their use and of the work at hand. We will address these issues in detail elsewhere, but one quick and relatively straightforward example to consider is that of the notion of reflexivity. If we were to trace Bourdieu’s use of reflexivity, we would find that while the basic principles remained continuous, the points of focus changed over time; the concept is often deployed strategically, sometimes against a target or to defend a position, and this tendency is further accentuated by the different forms of address being used (say, an explanation of statistical analysis as opposed to an interview with a journalist). As an extension of the second point, the extent and criteria of the definitions of reflexivity often vary depending on the field or the content of its deployment so, in certain contexts, reflexivity is explicitly confined to the field of the sciences in a manner commensurate with Kuhn’s (1970) formulation of paradigm shifts, while it is usually opened up where the discussion pertains to the cultural field.
Bourdieu’s relation to the field and approaches of philosophy is strongly inflected by his disposition, to some extent derived from influences such as Marx and the history and philosophy of science, to see his own scholarly activity as a form of rigorous, reflexive and critical science oriented towards socio-cultural and political intervention as opposed to the ‘flabby humanism’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 4) of existentialism or the ‘pure philosophy’ (Bourdieu 1991a: 1) of Heidegger. In Pascalian Meditations, for instance, he identifies his position with Wittgenstein’s rhetorical question: ‘What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic…and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?’ (2000: 42).
In an interview in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), however, Bourdieu is both more expansive and ambivalent about these relationships—for instance, his break with ‘the pretensions to theoretical hauteur’ (1992: 204) that came with his academic trajectory as a student of philosophy was facilitated and enabled by his ‘theoretical and philosophical training’ (1992: 204). When, in the same interview, he describes the work and value of sociology, he does so in terms that place both himself and the field of sociology within the Socratic philosophical tradition, while claiming the work associated with that tradition in the name of sociology:
the sociologist is the one who goes out in the street to interview Mr. and Mrs. Anybody, listens to [them], and tries to learn from [them]. This is what Socrates used to do, but the same who celebrate Socrates today are the last to understand and to accept this sort of renunciation of the role of the philosopher-king in the face of the ‘vulgar’ that sociology demands. (1992: 204)
In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (2000) repeats the claim that sociology is charged with answering the important questions, not only because philosophy fails to ask these questions, but because the scholarly attitudes and discourses of philosophy function to foreclose the possibility (and, at a level of disciplinary ethos, they stress the undesirability) of engaging with the world. There are exceptions to this characterization, and for Bourdieu the two most significant are to be found in the works of Pascal and Wittgenstein. In his Introduction to Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (2000: 1–2) justifies his title in the following way:
In order to justify an inquiry that hopes to open the way to truths that philosophy helps to make it hard to reach, I could have invoked thinkers who are close to being seen by philosophers as enemies of philosophy, because, like Wittgenstein, they make its prime task the dispelling of illusions, especially those that the philosophical tradition produces and reproduces. But…I had various reasons for placing these reflections under the aegis of Pascal. For a long time I had adopted the habit, when asked the…question of my relations with Marx, of replying that…if I really had to affiliate myself, I would say I was more of a Pascalian. I was thinking in particular of everything that concerns symbolic power…But, above all, I had always been grateful to Pascal…for his concern, devoid of all populist naivety, for ‘ordinary people’…and also for his determination, inseparable from that concern, always to seek the ‘reason of effects’, the raison d’être of the seemingly most illogical or derisory human behaviours.
Pascal and Wittgenstein are the two ‘enemies of philosophy’ that Bourdieu acknowledges most openly as influences on his work. Bourdieu (2000) claims that Pascal’s work and approaches underpin his theorizing of symbolic power, particularly as it is manifested and facilitated at the level of bodily incorporation and hexis. Wittgenstein’s (1983) work is seminal to his theorizing and elaboration of a theory of cultural practice in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1978), The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990c) and, although he is only cited once in the text, Practical Reason (Bourdieu 1998c). We will consider elsewhere, and in more detail, Wittgenstein’s value to Bourdieu’s thinking—particularly in terms of his understanding of how cultural practices are never equivalent to or explicable in terms of objectivities such as rules, formal accounts of rites and ritual, and kinship structures, but rather have their own logic of practice, which cannot be accounted for on either side of the ‘antagonism between the two modes of knowledge’ (Bourdieu 1990c: 25) of subjectivism and objectivism. Wittgenstein’s research into the relationship between language and communication, and the forms of socio-cultural work that are done without being visible to the conventional perspectives, approaches, theories and methodologies employed by the social sciences, is germane to Bourdieu’s sociology. The identification and analysis of what is necessarily repressed within socio-cultural fields—the processes of symbolic domination, the doubling of socio-cultural objectivities at the level of practices derived and embodied, at an unconscious level, via the habitus—require ‘new ways of thinking’ about sociological questions that are not amenable to objectivism or subjectivism:
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed, they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment. (Wittgenstein, quoted in Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 1)
It could be argued that Nietzsche should be grouped with these ‘enemies of philosophy’: however, for a variety of reasons, his relationship with Bourdieu’s work is far more difficult to evaluate. This situation owes a great deal, in the first instance, to Bourdieu’s (negative) association of Nietzsche with Heidegger, and what he refers to as an ‘aesthetics of transgression’ that was fashionable in French intellectual culture in the 1950s and 1960s (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 154), and in the second instance to Bourdieu’s very obvious lack of ease with regard to Nietzsche’s ‘fulgurations and fulminations’—at least concerning the extent to which they manifested his entrapment within the limitations of his position ‘in social space and, more specifically, within academic space’ (1992: 85).
Bourdieu’s relationship with Nietzsche’s work and ideas, and the extent to which that work contributed to or informed his, need to be read qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and with a due sense of care and suspicion. Going through the indexes of Bourdieu’s books, and the bibliographies accompanying his chapters and articles, one is struck by the absence or infrequency of citations of Nietzsche’s work: there are a handful of references in Algeria 1960 (1979a), The Logic of Practice (1990c), The Craft of Sociology (Bourdieu, Chamboredon & Passeron 1991), Homo Academicus (1988), The Field of Cultural Production (1993a), Distinction (1989) and Pascalian Meditations (2000), and no mention at all in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1978), Sociology in Question (1993b), The Rules of Art (1995), In Other Words (1990b) and Practical Reason (1998c). The only extended discussions of Nietzsche or his work and ideas (and the term ‘extended’ is used here in a very loose sense) occur, unsurprisingly, in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991a) and Language and Symbolic Power (2005b), and predominantly in response to specific interview questions in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). This lack of recognition is contradicted by Snook’s account of Bourdieu’s ‘antecedents’, where it is claimed first that Nietzsche is frequently acknowledged by Bourdieu (Snook 1990: 161) and second, and more reasonably, that Bourdieu’s ideas regarding language and symbolic power owe a great deal to Nietzsche’s theorizing of the connection between power, language and symbolic violence (Snook 1990: 161). There are a number of other examples of this claim being made: Mitchell Aboulafia (1999: 157) refers, for instance, to ‘Bourdieu’s Nietzschean sensibilities with regard to interest and power’, and in a decidedly unsympathetic account of Bourdieu’s work, Richard Jenkins (1992: 123) charges that, in terms of his failure to appreciate the forms of popular resistance to power, ‘it is the shade…of…Nietzsche which lurks at Bourdieu’s elbow’. However, it is difficult not to recognize the validity of Snook’s (1990: 161) argument about Nietzsche’s work being ‘strongly influential on the development’, at a technical level, of Bourdieu’s understanding and theorizing of power.
In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), Wacquant refers to Bourdieu ‘systematically developing…a sociological method consisting essentially in a manner of posing problems, in a…set of conceptual tools and procedures for constructing objects and for transferring knowledge gleaned in one area of inquiry into another’ (1992: 5). Wacquant is describing an ongoing relation, extending from the period of Bourdieu’s research in Algeria to his death in 2002, between the insights derived from dealing with work at hand and the development of a scholarly apparatus (knowledge, frameworks, concepts, categories, approaches, methodologies) that could be applied, with points of variation and specific emphasis, to the histories, contexts, regimes and specificities of socio-cultural politics. Bourdieu has claimed consistently that his identification of sets of empirically determined objectivities has served as the departure point for his schemes of categorization and differentiation, as well as his theorizing of the concepts of and the relation between habitus, field and practice. If the habitus exists as an entity for comprehending and explaining social phenomena, for instance, it is because for Bourdieu there are social regularities that cannot be encompassed within objectivist or subjectivist explanations of social behaviour. As he writes, ‘The social game is regulated, it is the locus of certain regularities…I can say that all my thinking started from this point: how can behavior be regulated without being the product of an obedience to set rules?’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 64–5). Concepts such as the habitus and cultural field are not just theoretical accounts of empirical data; rather, they are derivatives of an identifiable objective continuity. Bourdieu argues that the material world and its structures produce categories of thinking, apprehension and evaluation that are embodied by subjects, and that in turn remake or contribute to the maintenance of the material world, and its practices and regularities.
This book provides an account of Bourdieu’s theoretical and methodological orientations, dispositions and antecedents, his scholarly trajectory and his main theoretical concepts. It discusses the ways in which Bourdieu incorporated the influence of figures such as Wittgenstein into his scholarly practices, and how those practices were to some extent informed by an attempt to move beyond established theoretical and methodological positions (structuralism, Marxism, sociological positivism). This chapter will be followed by an account of the major developments in Bourdieu’s scholarly trajectory, with reference to both the content at hand (statistics about educational opportunities, the relation between Flaubert’s representation of and position within the literary field) and wider strategic considerations (for instance, the claims Bourdieu was making about the range, responsibilities and methodological imperatives of the discipline of sociology).
The next chapter provides a detailed account of how this process played out across Bourdieu’s scholarly trajectory, with particular regard to the development of his major theoretical concepts and methodologies, and their deployment in studies of the education system and the field of cultural production, as well as more generally with regard to the analysis of the logics underpinning cultural practices and the process of symbolic domination and violence.