The past is not fugitive, it stays put. […] After hundreds and thousands of years, the scholar who has been studying the place-names and the customs of the inhabitants of some remote region may still extract from them some legend long anterior to Christianity, already unintelligible, if not actually forgotten, at the time of Herodotus, which in the name given to a rock, in a religious rite, still dwells in the midst of the present, like a denser emanation, immemorial and stable.
Marcel Proust, In search of lost time. II. The Guermantes Way, London, Vintage, 2000, p. 482
1. Our current behaviour is determined by a past, often very long, which manifests itself in the form of self-evident facts (institutions, buildings, machines, tools, texts, categories of perception, of representation, of judgement), in other words in an established order of things more often misunderstood and opaque than acknowledged and transparent.
Scholium 1. When Nietzsche rails against the way history imposes itself on the present, he is thinking about history used as an example or held up as a model, of figures from the past who are evoked as ideals to be imitated (‘a half-understood monument to some great era of the past is erected as an idol and zealously danced around’1), about the history that is taught to young people and which prevents them from living their lives. In contrast to this use of history through which ‘life crumbles and degenerates’, Nietzsche proposes another use in which it ‘stands in the service of life’.2 Yet the difficulty inherent in this way of approaching the issue of the relationship between the present and the past lies in the fact that the weight of the past is essentially seen as the weight of memories imposed on people in the present. As a result, we completely fail to see that this ‘weight of the past’ lies in facts (in institutions, objects, machines, texts, customs, mental structures) and that, for this very reason, this past is for the most part not consciously present in the minds of those in the present even though they are very much products of it. The men and women of the present can forget or be ignorant of history, they may well not fantasize idealistically about the past, yet, as Nietzsche says, they nevertheless continue to be ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘great and ever greater pressure of what is past’.3 But by ‘past’ or ‘history’ we need to understand all that has crystallized and accumulated over time and which we inherit, more often unconsciously than consciously.
It is this same past that Marx refers to in a famous passage of Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte4: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ He criticized Ludwig Feuerbach for his failure to see that ‘the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs.’5 Nothing that appears to our immediate sensual experience to be natural or present since the beginning of time is completely detached from history. The same applies to the elements of a landscape we contemplate which themselves depend on the industrial, agricultural and commercial past of the country. ‘The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach’.6
If Marx generally draws his examples uniquely from the economic order (thinking about the state of productive forces, economic exchanges, etc.), the analysis he sets out is just as much about language, law, the State, cultural customs, art, science or politics.7 Just as the cherry trees, which seem such an obvious element of nature to the eyes of a European at the end of the second millennium, with their impression of always having been there, necessitate a historical detour via the commercial exchanges between East Asia and the West, so the smallest cultural gesture dates back to a distant or recent history. Thus, eating with a knife and fork, as the majority of Westerners today learn to do at an early age, is an action which has its place in the long history of the self-control of manners in Western experience.8 In the same way, the simple act of reading a book or a newspaper in silence is the result of a number of key moments in the history of writing. These include the invention of the codex around the second to third century AD, the development of silent reading in monastic circles from the sixth century onwards, the widespread use of the practice of putting spaces between words from the seventh century onwards, the introduction of printing in the mid fifteenth century and its subsequent mechanization in the nineteenth century.9 Or, finally, in the context of polite rituals, raising one’s hat to greet someone means ‘unwittingly reactivating a conventional sign inherited from the Middle Ages when, as Panofsky reminds us, armed men used to take off their helmets to make clear their peaceful intentions’.10
Not only is the present determined by an accumulated and multi-layered past, but the product of past activities appears to us as realities over which we have no more control than when we find ourselves contemplating the spectacle of a mountain range or a wild sea. The realities of the past, completely arbitrary as they are, impose themselves as self-evident facts which we must simply accept and which we can in no circumstances ignore. Referring to the social division of labour, Marx and Engels wrote:
This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force, which arises through the cooperation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they cannot thus control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.11
Society, the State, the economy, take the form of external forces which are both mysterious and overwhelming (Marx and Engels use the term ‘alienation’) and which are beyond the control or the will of individuals.
That does not mean that the accumulated past rigidly fixes history, allowing only the eternal repetition or renewal of what already exists. The products of history are, on the contrary, continuously re-appropriated by the actors of the moment according to whatever new consideration they are focused on. But the present is never totally autonomous and the new, when it comes along, is never independent of all the past which forms the conditions of possibility.
At each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its condition of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, of capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given; is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of men’.12
Each moment in the history of societies is therefore a combination of inherited situations and of new orientations, but the inheritance is often much more onerous than we think. It may indeed be true that the French language is constantly evolving, yet we need to go back several centuries to find texts that we can no longer understand on the basis of our existing linguistic competencies, proof of its relative stability. In the same way, while we can stress the fact that international currencies are arbitrary and socially constructed, that they have a historic birth and death (like the French franc for example) and that they depend on faith and confidence, we must also remember that there are virtually no societies today which function without a currency and that currency has a history going back over thousands of years. We could even say that there are natural realities (such as the viruses which cause certain illnesses), which can now be more easily modified (we can be vaccinated against the flu or treated if we catch it) than the currency system or the capitalist mode of production.
Scholium 2. Michel Foucault speaks of the ‘historical a priori’ and of the ‘conditions of possibility’ of utterances, speeches or knowledge. He is conscious that ‘juxtaposed, these two words produce a rather startling effect’.13 But, in the context of the Kantian notion of a priori, the many layered history of past centuries does indeed represent a condition of experience, a reality anterior to any individual experience. By adding the qualifying ‘historical’, Foucault simply suggests that the conditions of possibility of any discourse, knowledge and experience can only be found in the crystallized, multi-layered and organized product of past human experiences. Nothing ‘transcendental’ here, unless this too can be described as historical. Foucault’s ambition is to historicize the Kantian transcendental, the a priori of practices and experiences studied. Historicized, the a priori is no longer necessary or universal. It appears to be so because the products of history have been naturalized and transformed into self-evident facts, into what is obvious, into tacit beliefs. As Fernand Braudel insists, ‘mental frameworks too can form prisons of the longue durée’.14
Often in disagreement with Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu nevertheless shares the same convictions as the philosopher concerning the structuring presence of the past in the present which defies the positivist logic of proof: ‘The system of cognitive schema which are an essential element of the construction of reality and which are common to the whole of a given society, at any one time, make up the cultural unconscious or, better still, the “historical transcendental”, which is the basis of the common sense (or the doxa), in other words, everything which is taken for granted, which is self-evident, which goes without saying. This “historical transcendental” is undoubtedly, out of all the aspects of historical reality, the one historians are most likely to remain ignorant of, not least because there is no trace of it in historical documents which, by definition, do not register it (much like Hegel’s description of “the original historian” who, because he lives in the very era that he is describing, records everything except the essential, that which is taken for granted).’15
2. The self-evident fact takes the form of something which is taken for granted and often ‘accepted’ by the actors as an inescapable and quasinatural state of affairs. The principal characteristic of these self-evident facts is that the existence and legitimacy of such facts is beyond question. They exist and that is how it is: you must simply accept their existence, adjust, and organize your life accordingly.
Scholium 1. The many self-evident facts which form the basis of any given social grouping are generally adopted by the members of this social grouping who rather than taking their desires for reality, gradually begin instead to take the reality of things for their desires and to love, embody, bring to life or adopt what is being imposed on them as a compelling necessity.
The stoics, and notably Epictetus, differentiated between what lies within our control and what lies outside our control and advised their followers to want only the former and to accept the latter without argument, or to endure it without protest. Such wise advice, however, fails to take into account that many of these self-evident facts which seem to us ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ are not so and are instead the product of human history. They are therefore subject to the control of man but very little subject to the will of the individual. Any newcomers generally come to adapt to the situation as they find it and ‘go along with’ what seems to be so overwhelmingly inevitable. They are born into a society which has its specific language, a State, an economic system, laws, arts, sciences, etc., with which they become more or less familiar, and which they are more or less obliged to accept as their own: ‘My life consists in my being content to accept many things.’16
Scholium 2. The self-evident fact imposes its legitimacy first and foremost by the crushing weight of its existence rather than by means of a process of ideological justification. The example of the motor-car, first invented at the end of the nineteenth century and soon ubiquitous in the vast majority of industrialized societies, is particularly significant from this point of view. Individuals are born today into societies which have invented, industrialized and commercialized the car on a massive scale. They have constructed road and motorway networks, developed oil refineries, allowed the development of competing networks of filling stations and of networks of professional garages, erected road signs and traffic lights, introduced a highway code, set up a national driving licence system guaranteed by the state, organized the growth of driving schools and the professional network of driving instructors, set up police forces to monitor and control drivers’ behaviour, built car parks both paying (with all the technology required to collect the money) and free, organized a complete urban way of life based around the use of the car, etc. This collective life organized around the car brings with it a plethora of consequences, values, beliefs and myths. It is based on an individual or family-based approach rather than on any notion of public transport and on a myth of freedom and individual ownership and relies on relatively sophisticated objectivized measures for controlling drivers and a willingness to apply self-control on the part of drivers ready to accept the rules and regulations as well as the imposition of certain types of behaviour with regard to alcohol, drugs, etc. And yet it is not clear that we can really speak of any real process of recognition of the legitimacy of the car and of all the various measures, organizations or legislation associated with it. We adapt to its presence: as an adolescent we dream of owning a car of our own and of proudly offering our boyfriend or girlfriend a lift, we take the driving test with the impression we have taken a step forwards towards independence, we buy a car, take out insurance, stop at the petrol station to fill up with fuel and at the garage for an MOT or in the event of a breakdown, we learn how to fill in forms when we are involved in an accident, we organize our journeys and our timetable depending on how long we think it will take us to get there by car (rather than on foot, by bike or by bus), we become accustomed to judging people’s social status by the type of car they drive, etc., but there is still no real acknowledgement of the legitimacy of this state of affairs. No ‘belief in the car’ or in the road network, no real recognition of the legitimacy of the car as a means of transport but only a prereflexive acceptance of its existence and a practical organization of daily life in consequence.
The only exception to this banality of the self-evident fact lies in the existence of an explicit political criticism such as that associated with militant groups who are against the car in general (as opposed to the bicycle or to walking) or against the petrol car in particular (as opposed to the electric car), against the individually owned car (as opposed to public transport), against any form of urban pollution and in favour of the development of less polluting modes of transport, against the motorway system which criss-crosses and ‘disfigures’ the landscape, etc. But not everyone has a militant tendency and not all self-evident facts or all crystallized situations have their critics. And even when critics exist, they are not necessarily equipped with the appropriate measures to replace the criticized self-evident facts by other more acceptable self-evident facts. We can criticize cars and motorway systems all we like, but as long as there are no practical solutions to replace or radically reorganize such lifestyles, nothing can really change. The same is true of the struggle against capitalism, industries with high pollution rates, the commercialization of society, etc. Getting rid of the car would involve us questioning every single link in the chain of necessities which links all the groups and institutions with direct or indirect interests in protecting the ongoing existence of the car.
The relationship between individual actors and different sections of the objectified and accumulated past exists, therefore, outside of any process of recognition of the legitimacy of the social world, of institutions and powers. Self-evident facts are simply imposed and are not in reality criticized or even questioned, nor is their obviousness challenged except by very limited social groups (militants for some cause or other, or researchers in the social sciences).
Scholium 3. A final element, which is rarely taken into account in the study of ‘social changes’, of ‘reforms’ or ‘revolutions’, is the biologically inevitable fact that social actors have a limited life span, which inevitably makes any revolutionary transformation of the existing nature of things extremely difficult. Our societies are based on extraordinarily complex, multi-layered histories and the time needed to assimilate or appropriate products of civilization is becoming longer and longer. In the biographical timescale imposed on all actors, the period of assimilation, which allows us to understand the world as it is and to learn how to behave in an appropriate manner (how to eat, drink, dress, speak, write, calculate, make things, move around, interact, etc.), is spread over a relatively long sequence of time during which it is often difficult to combine learning with criticizing the existing situation. If individual actors can gradually learn to deconstruct what exists, to challenge underlying assumptions, notably thanks to an accumulation of critical ideas of the world in which the social sciences play an active part, they still have very little time left to make sure these criticisms actually end up as part of any real process of transforming the world. The biographical window allowing any modifications of the existing situation to be made is a limited one and each new generation must start all over again, setting out from the point where preceding generations stopped.
3. Acknowledging the self-evident facts and the foundations of belief allows us to call into question the theories which give a central role to uncertainty (or doubt) and criticism (or subversion). Uncertainty, doubt, criticism or subversion, when they exist, are neither permanent nor systematic.
Scholium 1. ‘Sociology of critique’ as opposed to ‘critical sociology’, considers that ‘dispute and critique occupy a central position in the course of social life’.17 It somewhat unfairly generalizes critical moments by implying that all actors are equally capable of subversive and critical capacities: ‘The pragmatic sociology of critique […] fully acknowledges actors’ critical capacities and the creativity with which they engage in interpretation and action en situation’.18 That being so, it takes no account of all those things in the social world which are not debated, which are presupposed and which exist in the manner of self-evident facts. Actors may therefore sometimes criticize one or another aspects of the world but they continue to subscribe to its main orientations (what else could they do?), for objectivized history, the crystallized product of past struggles, and therefore what dominant figures in the past have passed down to humanity today, imposes itself with the same degree of self-evidence as the mountain imposes itself on the gaze of the person who sees it through his window every morning on waking.
Scholium 2. Rather than placing uncertainty (and even anxiety) and doubt at the heart of every action, it would be more realistic (and reasonable) to ask ourselves what it is possible to doubt or in which conditions a situation becomes uncertain. In all cases, it seems obvious that we cannot question everything, all the time.19
Imagine that two sides are in dispute over the ownership of an object. They seek recourse to the law and a trial takes place during which they confront each other. Each side sets out their case and justifies their position with a view to convincing the judge. Then, after a more or less lengthy series of exchanges, the judge is called upon to ‘pronounce’ and to decide what is to become of the object in question. In such a case, the law is called upon to solve the disagreement and to end the uncertainty of a situation arising from a conflict between the two parties concerned. Similar situations can be found in the context of scientific controversies where scientists struggle to determine the veracity of a proposition or the existence of a phenomenon and conclude by deciding in favour of one of the parties, thereby ending, temporarily and until further notice, the uncertain situation revealed by the argument between the scientists. Such cases involve relatively uncertain situations and objects which are sometimes indeterminate (What is the status of this object? How should it be defined?), actors who consciously argue and justify themselves according to their interests and their skills, and procedures or tests (whether legal or scientific) which are designed to end the uncertainty of the situation. Now this is exactly the kind of situation described by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in their theoretical model of ‘justification’, in which they want to make us believe that each situation in the social world resembles a trial or an ongoing dispute, like a scientific controversy in full spate. Boltanski himself claims that ‘the sociology of critique undertook to describe the social world as the scene of a trial, in the course of which actors in a situation of uncertainty proceed to investigations, record their interpretations of what happens in reports, establish qualifications and submit to tests’.20
An awareness of the special nature of this kind of situation of uncertainty is heightened when you work, as I have done, on controversies over the authenticity of paintings or on questions around the legitimate ownership of a painting and become familiar with the tests (scientific and legal in particular) to which works are submitted in order to determine their authenticity and their legitimate ownership.21 In this type of situation, and only in this type of situation, ‘the ordering of social life must face (…) an uncertainty about the whatness of what is.’22 So institutions decide this ‘whatness of what is’, and name, describe, classify, categorize objects, individuals, situations and, in order to do so, set up procedures or tests – academic exams, scientific expertise, legal proceedings, etc.
Boltanski claims that: ‘the main contribution of the pragmatic standpoint to sociology has been to underline the uncertainty that threatens social arrangements and hence the fragility of reality’.23 To adopt the view that action, in general, would take place ‘against a background of uncertainty, or at least with reference to a plurality of possible options’,24 would mean, however, excluding the essential properties of social life. Placing uncertainty at the heart of social life (of the ‘flow of life’), is tantamount to seeing the world as simply a series of ‘situations’ which give rise to problems and call for tests. Yet in reality, actors do not start each day by calling into question the economic situation, the language imposed on them at birth, the civil and criminal laws, the education system, etc. It is from an unchallenged block of certainties or self-evident facts that occasionally situations emerge leading to discussions, disagreements, criticisms, accusations or justifications. For Boltanski, actors are constantly having to ‘re-establish locally agreements which are always fragile’,25 whereas in fact certainty and shared assumptions fall outside any such agreements: the division of labour, the distribution of wealth, pay scales, educational hierarchies along with the statistical correlation between qualifications and employment are more often than not seen as part of those self-evident facts which are beyond discussion.26
Actors share beliefs which form the foundation on the base of which lie both doubts and certainties.27 Moreover, even if arguments and controversies open up zones of uncertainty, it must not be forgotten that they exist against a background of shared and undisputed beliefs. Debating the scientific validity of a fact implies having faith in science and being in agreement on a certain number of the procedures involved in the authentication of scientific facts. In the same way, in order for art historians to disagree over a painting with a view to establishing whether it is an original work, a replica, a copy or a forgery, they must of necessity believe in the importance of art, in the importance of being able to establish the authenticity of paintings, or in the ‘greatness’ of the painter to whom they mean to attribute the work. The ‘uncertain’ action involved in all this is typically that of the auctioneer who judges the authenticity of the items in question. And yet, by doing so, he (or she) is merely paying tribute to several centuries of attributionism, to the invention of art as a sacred domain, as distinct from profane activities, and to the art market. The practical act of perception and judgement involved is based on a series of underlying assumptions which are the product of a centuries old and multi-layered history.
The body of beliefs forms the foundation of ordinary certainties. While aware that actors cannot constantly question or debate the overall framework into which they fit because they sense that this reality is stronger than they are,28 Boltanski still overturns the ordinary order of things. He writes, for example, that it is a question of ‘abandoning the idea of an implicit agreement, which would somehow be immanent in the functioning of social life, to put dispute and, with it, the divergence of points of view, interpretations and usages at the heart of social bonds, so as to return from this position to the issue of agreement, to examine its problematic, fragile and possibly exceptional character’.29
But, in the end, it is impossible to doubt everything all the time. For example, in the context of economic transactions, the buyer can, of course, doubt the value of what is being bought (am I really buying a car that has only done 100,000 km or has the clock been tampered with? Am I buying a genuine old master or simply a copy or even a forgery which has been deliberately painted to deceive me?), just as the seller can doubt the solvency of the buyer or the authenticity of the banknotes used in the transaction,30 but everybody cannot be in a permanent state of doubt about everything. Each act of buying and selling confirms the existence of a market and of a monetary system and suggests a certain degree of implicit confidence and belief in the stability or the reliability of the system. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said: ‘If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.’31
It is, moreover, by no means certain that disagreements systematically provoke uncertainty, and even less anxiety, given that each side may be convinced they are in the right and are in no way shaken in their conviction by the position of their opponents. Indeed, actors are rarely on an equal footing in arguments or disputes, and some categories of actors occupy positions or have a social standing that make their point of view carry more weight and sometimes even allow them to have the last word on a particular situation. There are many examples where this superiority comes into play: judges over defendants, teachers over pupils, priests over their congregation, the police over offenders, officers over soldiers, renowned art historians over young art history graduates, or, in short, the dominant over the dominated.
4. Our everyday practices rest on self-evident facts, and in particular on foundations or bases of belief sometimes dating back over many centuries and which, as a result, escape our consciousness, which is far more preoccupied with secondary matters. Yet they nevertheless drive our immediate behaviour. The significance of our current gestures, words and actions can only be fully grasped if they are set against the context of the relatively long history of these largely unquestioned beliefs.
Scholium 1. The whole of society rests on unquestioned assumptions, or in other words, on beliefs which are not explicitly perceived as such. I am not referring here to the kinds of belief that lead us to say that we ‘believe’ or do not ‘believe’ … in Father Christmas or in the existence of a life after death. Instead, these are cultural assumptions which are more rarely evoked in ordinary conversations, such as the necessarily hierarchical character of all societies, the need for currencies or the importance of art and science. As Pierre Legendre writes: ‘one fact is denied: that all cultures, including those in the west, live by indemonstrable truths, by beliefs with an almost untouchable status, whose coherence and normative consequences depend on their authentication according to the correct social rules’.32 It is a matter, therefore, of beliefs which the holders themselves often do not know they possess (it is rather that the beliefs possess them than that they really possess the beliefs), and that only an external view can help identify and clarify. As the unquestioned background context to action, they are objectively presupposed by those who act.33
Scholium 2. The history of teaching and learning is full of examples of conflicts between the supporters of different pedagogical theories who, unknowingly, share the same common foundation of practices and beliefs. For example, if debate on the concept of ‘the thriving child’ has emerged within the pedagogy of the twentieth century, with the idea that the child should progress with their learning at his or her ‘own pace’, any changes to teaching methods must come up against the nature of the skills to be taught (writing, spelling, grammar, etc.) and the specific relationship with language which is inseparable from it. Thus the ‘new forms of assessment’ or ‘new methods’ never question the concept of ‘assessment’, the ‘lesson’ or the ‘curriculum’. A sociology which focused too closely on the various pedagogical debates would almost certainly fail to grasp the essence of the underlying reality. In order to be able to debate and argue, at times passionately, on the merits of one type of classroom exercise or another, there needs to be some tacit agreement on the obvious necessity of such exercises. As Jean Hébrard writes, ‘exercises carried out in the classroom is certainly a much favoured example of practice which largely remains outside the realm of pedagogical debates […] so much does it form part of the accepted landscape of school life’.34 For obvious reasons of proximity, educationalists are unable to see the ground beneath their feet. Sociohistoric analysis of educational developments, as an unvarying expression of the learning relationship, therefore enables us to step back in order to understand more clearly the current state of education.35 ‘When schools have had to meet specific goals for decades, a fortiori for centuries, these are handed down to teachers through a complex didactic and pedagogical tradition which is sophisticated and detailed. And it is not unusual to see cases where the accumulation of educational practices in a particular discipline ends up preventing many teachers from seeing the ultimate objectives they are working towards.’36
Scholium 3. The terrain on which the men and women of today carry out their activities is the crystallized and multi-layered product of history. It is a terrain made up of assumptions, of things taken for granted, of relationships with the world and with others which remain unquestioned, in other words, the objectivized beliefs in institutions, measures, objects, spaces, etc., which are then assimilated as inclinations to perceive, think, feel and act in a certain way. Thus, the notions of the sacred, of art, of the work of art, of contemplation or of admiration, of the sublime, of the institution of the museum, of authenticity, value, etc., all of which we inherit from what is sometimes a very distant past, instantly impose a whole series of underlying assumptions.
In the domain of art, each category of actors has a specific role when it comes to works of art. Art historians and experts bring their knowledge of the painters and their works and can pass judgement on their authenticity; laboratories specializing in analytical tests on works of art have a role to play in identifying the properties of art works and in the process of authentication and conservation; museum directors seek to build up the best possible collection, acquire the finest pieces and put on the most attractive exhibitions; those in the legal profession resolve disputes where the conditions of a sale are challenged and apply the laws governing the conditions in which works of art can be moved; gallery owners are on the lookout for bargains in the art market; auctioneers put works on sale in the economic interest of their owners and in their own interests; actors within the art market want to see the value of their artworks recognized and therefore rely on the activity around the attribution and disattribution of works by art historians, etc. The actions of one group affect the actions of others (no art market without art history, no art history without the cultural policies of the state or without the existence of museums, etc.), without anyone being necessarily conscious of the foundation of collective beliefs on which their own action is situated.
Everyone considers, for example, that art is important, that certain eras are more artistically rich than others, that certain painters are worth more than others. Everyone subscribes to the cult of authenticity and regards a copy, even if it is contemporary and very well executed, as inferior to an autograph work. Everyone finds it normal that the price of paintings is indexed on their aesthetic or historical value, etc. Controversies place historians or experts on opposing sides without this fundamentally altering the fact that they still share the same unquestioned convictions. The beliefs associated with each of the situations briefly mentioned here are not the kind that make a person say that they ‘believe in God’, that they ‘believe homeopathy works’ or that they ‘believe sport is good for you’. They rarely have the opportunity to come out with a phrase such as ‘I believe only a genuine work is of any interest and worth looking at’; ‘I believe that a simple copy has no aesthetic interest whatsoever’; ‘I believe in the greatness of Nicolas Poussin’; ‘I believe that certain objects deserve to be distinguished from the mass of ordinary objects and exhibited in museums’. Yet their behaviours clearly demonstrate that they believe all of this. They presuppose it through their attitudes and their behaviour.
We can observe the way people behave in relation to works of art as the magical behaviour of individuals who regard such works as sacred, set them apart from ordinary objects, condone emotional responses to works of art which have been authenticated and sanctified, but ridicule the same kind of responses in the face of a mere copy. And we can see the actors from the art world as faithful believers who organize their rituals (of authentication, sanctification, contemplation, etc.) and their magical acts (legal, scientific, economic, etc.).
5. The foundations of the beliefs-assumptions which underlie present activities can be characterized by the fact that they do indeed determine practices and attitudes and that they are not just pure representations without any practical consequences. Beliefs of this kind imply a disposition to act in a certain way in certain situations.
Scholium. These beliefs, which are more often than not unrecognized as such with the result that, for the holders, rather than simply possessing the beliefs, the beliefs possess them, are beliefs of the type defined by Charles Sanders Pierce: ‘Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way, when the occasion arises.’37 From this point of view, believing that the sea is infested with sharks results in us not wanting to go swimming there, just as believing in the importance of art and considering it as something precious and sacred leads the believer to treat it very carefully (like the ‘do not touch’ signs found in museums). This type of belief is therefore closely linked to an action.38 ‘The believing, in effect, is about “what makes something happen”. It is measured against the links, either loose or tight, which it maintains with what it causes to happen and/or expects to see happen.’39
6. Only an approach of a regressive nature, consisting in reconstructing the conditions of possibility of any given fact, permits a true understanding of the fact in question.
Scholium 1. We know the importance Durkheim placed on history in his sociological work. For him, historical research was a sort of psychoanalysis of the present time, allowing an understanding of what makes our contemporary world possible: ‘If we leave the present, it is in order to return to it. If we flee it, it is in order to understand it better.’40 He turned to history, for example, going right back to the twelfth century, in order to understand the state of the education system of his own time.41 For sociologists, this regressive approach is therefore clearly anchored in the study of the present time. Unlike the historian who can use what he knows of the present to study a past situation, the sociologist studies the present situation and goes back through history in order to grasp the conditions of possibility.42
Scholium 2. Given that this regressive approach does not simply go back to the premises of the fact being analysed, we need to consider the conditions of possibility of a situation and not just its origin or its development. It does not restrict itself to only studying the different forms that a phenomenon takes throughout history, from the moment it first appears to its present state, but questions what it is that has made a given object possible and which may not necessarily be of the same order or nature as the object itself (even if it relates to religious history and is of little interest to art historians, the history of relics in the West is undoubtedly, as we shall see, one of the historical conditions of possibility behind the emergence of art as a separate and sanctified domain).43
Scholium 3. A similar approach was applied by Bourdieu in the context of interactions between vendors of private houses and their buyers. He explains how, starting with a study of commercial transactions, he then worked back to the conditions of possibility of these transactions through a series of regressions which led him to the State: ‘The centre of research interest shifted to the institutional conditions of production, both of the supply of homes and of their demand. It became very quickly apparent that, in order to understand what happens in the transaction between a single seller and a single buyer – a meeting that ultimately is apparently random – you have to go back step by step, and at the end of this regression you find the state.’44 It is this kind of historical regression, this stepping back in history, that I deploy in the context of a painting by Nicolas Poussin. In order to understand why, after being involved in controversies around the different versions of the painting, it then ended up being bought for such a high price, I needed to go back to the putative artist (Nicolas Poussin) and to the conditions of his success over the centuries, to the history of attributionism, to the emergence of an art market, to the development of artistic values, to the status of pictorial art from the Middle Ages onwards, etc. From regression to regression, it emerges that art is incomprehensible unless it is seen in the context of relations of domination: the opposition between the sacred and the profane, the masterpiece and the ordinary painting, the painting which commands a high price and the accessible copy, etc. All of these lead back to relations of domination the nature of which it is the researcher’s task to attempt to determine.
7. A regressive method of this type, which reconstructs the conditions of possibility of what appears as self-evident in the present context, enables collective options, which were taken up in the past and then forgotten, to be identified. Without being linear or leading in any particular ‘direction’, the history of societies is also that of the closing down of possibilities and of the reduction in the range of possibilities as well as that of points of no-return.
Scholium 1. One of the reasons for reconstituting the past is to demonstrate that any given causal series could at any time be subject to any number of shifts or changes of direction, and that these would have had different consequences as far as forms of collective life and individual destinies are concerned. As it is presented to us, social reality often conceals the ‘choices’ which underlie it and prevents us seeing the multiple alternative realities, whether real or potential. However, ‘what we cannot imagine, we cannot desire’,45 as Joseph Gusfield pertinently observed. By studying the past, by pointing out that alternatives presented themselves and were ‘decided’ in one way rather than another, we reveal the choices that have often been forgotten as such.46
Even if evolutionism is mistaken in seeing the course of history as a linear sequence of moments, ranging from the simple to the complex, which can be practically predicted, it is always possible to think of history as a succession of orientations or of collective options (which are not necessarily guided by conscious choice). The product of the conflicts between the supporters of opposing orientations or options, these open the door to some possibilities but close off others, or render them highly improbable.47 ‘By going back to the beginning of history, if not obviously to its absolute beginning’, writes Gérard Lenclud, ‘epistemic configurations can be reconstituted which were once so many centres of organization. In these centres, such as those in Greece for example, choices were made and paths taken, closing off other choices and other paths and excluding other conceivable developments.’48 Even without a ‘sense of history’ inscribed from time immemorial in an illusory genetic code of human societies, historical developments show that certain transformations make any return to previous situations difficult and carry within them potential developments which are never infinite. Thus there are no examples of societies in which some form of State has been introduced, reverting to a collective mode of organization without the State, nor of highly differentiated societies returning to a situation where functions and domains of activity were less differentiated.49 It seems to me that the same is true when it comes to writing (there are no examples of societies where writing has been introduced subsequently reverting to a purely oral tradition), to money (the invention and then the gradual generalization of money as a ‘general equivalent’ make any return to a barter-based economy extremely improbable), to science and technology (the history of societies tends to be one of a gradual complexification of accumulated knowledge and techniques rather than one in which scientific and technological development is abandoned), and to many other things besides.
The examples given by Bourdieu in 1980 on the subject of nuclear energy and of access to home ownership, once again highly relevant today, are a good illustration of what we could call the ratchet effect, in other words the difficulty of turning back once a direction has been determined:
As the conclusion of a long series of social choices which show themselves in the form of a body of technical necessities, the technological heritage tends to become a real social destiny which excludes not only certain as yet unrealized possibilities, but also any real possibility of excluding many of those possibles already realized. We need only take the example of nuclear power stations which, once constructed tend to impose themselves not just in terms of their technical function but also by virtue of all the complicities that exist between them and all those who have vested interests in them or even in their products. We can also take the example of the choice which emerged in the 1960s to facilitate access to home ownership, for the greater profit of banks and in particular of the creators of ‘personalized credit’, instead of pursuing a policy of social housing, one effect of which, amongst others, was to attach a segment of the members of the dominant class and of the middle class to the political system which seemed to best guarantee their capital. In this way, every day that a given power remains in place, increases that element of the irreversible with which those later seeking to reverse it must contend.50
Scholium 2. A systematic reflection on the opening and closing of possibilities which constitutes each new moment of the life of societies is essentially what could fuel the approach of what is referred to as ‘“what if?” history?’ The question as to what might have happened if things had taken a different course in the past necessitates an awareness of the significance that each moment, each new collective orientation, imposes on the destiny of societies. Unfortunately, those asking such questions have often supported an event-based conception of history which notably promotes a classic political history of ‘great men’ and focuses exclusively on the most frequently taught, and sometimes most mythicized, events.51 What if Jesus had not been crucified? What if the Arabs had been victorious at Poitiers? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo or had been defeated at Austerlitz? And what if the First World War had not happened or had taken a completely different course? And yet, the ‘options’ which determine the destiny of societies are more collective than individual and have more to do with a structural order than one based on events. Imagining that the destiny of societies could have been different by focusing only on the surface of events bears witness to a considerable scientific regression.
8. The plurality of different universes of art, science, law, the State, culture, the market, etc., explains the fact that the relatively independent products of history (self-evident facts), link together, interact and intersect in present practice. Present practice is therefore the product of the combination of these partially independent self-evident facts.
Scholium 1. The history of a painting, like the history of its changing status, its value and its various successive owners and therefore like the history of its relationships with a whole range of individuals, groups or very diverse institutions (gallery owners, auctioneers, art historians, experts, lawyers, museum directors, museum curators, researchers in analytical laboratories, political actors whether municipal, regional or state, economic actors, journalists, etc.) implies a plurality of spheres of activity: political, economic, legal, aesthetic, museum-based, academic/scientific, media-based, etc. By taking such an apparently simple object of study, the researcher is obliged to abandon the usual frameworks of observation of the social world which generally focus attention on a specific domain or sphere. Framing the matter in this way allows the researcher to analyse, for example, controversies between art historians or rivalries between museums. Analysis in terms of specific fields, tends notably to push the researcher in one particular direction, with the result that, if sufficient care is not taken, instead of answering the questions being posed about the object in question, researchers end up asking only the questions to which theory is able to offer answers. This is exactly the type of question that led Norbert Elias to say ‘the tail wags the dog’.
Callon and Latour’s actor-network theory is typically the kind of theory which breaks away from the notion of domains, spheres or fields and it is no coincidence that it is in studying technological objects that these authors were led to make this kind of link between heterogeneous realities. Indeed, focusing on the object inevitably ends up grouping in the same field of observation actors, groups or institutions generally considered separately by the theories which study these specific sub-universes (theories of systems, fields, worlds, spheres of activity, etc.). In this way, a painting is linked to actors who have emerged from the sub-universes of museums, art, science, law, economics, politics, journalism, etc., and even to those from within the sub-universes. These different actors, who individually belong to different fields or worlds, are not only linked with actors from the same fields or the same worlds, but are also linked amongst themselves through the intermediary of the painting.
Nevertheless, encountering a real problem does not necessarily mean that the solution found is always the right one. From this point of view, the sociotechnological world of Callon and Latour represents a bad solution to a good problem or a bad answer to a good question. Not only do Callon and Latour consider as wide-ranging a group of actors as possible by using the principle of non-distinction between humans and non-humans, and by making the latter actors in their own right,52 but they also refuse to impose any hierarchical structure on the actors, and notably to take into account the relations of domination between them (in the case of humans). Yet it is these relations which explain why they do not all carry the same weight or have the same chances of having the last word in situations of controversy or conflict. Painting a portrait of a world without history, they reduce any relationship between humans, or between humans and non-humans, to a vague and very weak ‘association’ which does not really enhance our understanding of social situations.
It seems to me, in fact, that by trying too hard to link everything with everything, and by refusing to differentiate between the ‘actors’ who have been linked together, we end up no longer explaining anything at all. It seems highly risky to place on the same level and to bring together realities that are as different as macrostructures, technological mechanisms, administrative or scientific procedures, human beings, animals, plants, gods and concepts. The process of maximum heterogenization of connected elements certainly produces some surprises but unfortunately affords few insights.
Scholium 2. In his Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances (An essay on the foundation of our knowledge) (1851), Antoine Augustin Cournot starts with the hypothesis that in the world of natural phenomena, various independent causal chains would exist, and that it is precisely from the intersection of these that what we call chance would be born. Thus, he argues that there is independence between the causal chains and that there is no solidarity between the chains. Such claims seem to me to be debateable if one ventured to transpose them exactly in order to understand the social world. We can certainly say that the social ‘microcosms’ making up society are like separate universes relatively independent from each other, each with their own logic, which cannot be reduced to other parallel logics. But two points need to be considered:
These comments should act as a warning to us not to consider microcosms as universes which are closed in on themselves.53 They have their own internal logic but tend to develop their specific action by drawing on other microcosms and are also in a position to intervene, make their presence felt or be used in any area of practice whatsoever. From this point of view, the terms ‘world’, ‘universe’ or ‘sphere’ can give a false impression of something closed in on itself and imply that each microcosm has its own separate life.
Certain objects of research oblige the researcher not to limit their study to a particular ‘field’ or ‘world’, but to embrace the interconnections, links, the shared and coordinated mobilization of actors operating within different microcosms.
9. The relatively independent self-evident facts which interlink, merge or join together in present practice can be associated with variable temporalities, ranging from the shortest to the longest period of time.
Scholium 1. The regressive approach involves the reconstruction of histories of extremely varied duration, from the history of events to the almost immobile history which extends over several centuries: biographies of objects, of individuals or of institutions, the development of the categories to which these objects, individuals or institutions belong. The meaning of present human behaviour can be found at the very heart of this overlapping of temporalities. Progressively more dynamic layers superimpose themselves onto slower layers, the most recent being that on which the actors hurry about their business, with all their various intentions and their illusions, their words, gestures and actions.54 The present is thus the time where multiple temporalities condense, ranging from the most civilizational to the most recent.
What is usually referred to as ‘social structure’ in sociology or anthropology corresponds exactly to what Braudel defines as being part of those realities which are quasi-immobile, crystallized, sedimented:
For us historians, a structure is of course a construct, an architecture, but over and above that it is a reality which time uses and abuses over long periods. Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations: they get in the way of history, hinder its flow and, in hindering it, shape it. Others wear themselves out more quickly. But all of them provide both support and hindrance. As hindrances they stand as limits (‘envelopes’, in the mathematical sense) beyond which man and his experiences cannot go.55
Braudel correctly saw in the increasing tendency within the social sciences to focus on events – in the form of both sociological monographs and micro-sociological studies of interactions – a way out of historical explanation which was just as problematic as that which consisted in reducing the present to a timeless structure via attempts at modelling:
it must be admitted that the social sciences, by taste, by deep-seated instinct, perhaps by training, have a constant tendency to evade historical explanation. They evade it in two almost contradictory ways: by concentrating over much on the ‘current event’ in social studies, thanks to a brand of empirical sociology which, disdainful of all history, confines itself to the facts of the short term and investigations into ‘real life’; by transcending time altogether and conjuring up a mathematical formulation of more or less timeless structures under the name of ‘communication science.’56
Not that Braudel was seeking to deny events and the short term any legitimacy, but he wanted ‘individual adventures’ to be seen in the context of more complex realities, and notably, ‘all the major forms of collective life, economies, institutions, social structures […], civilizations’.57 By going directly to what particular individuals say and do, we run the risk of forgetting the background or the foundations on the base of which these ‘words’ and these ‘actions’ from the present draw their meaning.58
Scholium 2. A very good example of the way temporalities and the plurality of actors or groups of actors can overlap is a study carried out by the art historian Michael Baxandall, in the context of the construction of the Forth Bridge on the east coast of Scotland.59 He uses this case, drawn from somewhat outside his area of interest as an art historian, in order to compare it to the processes involved in the creation of a painting. With this in mind, he explores crucial questions of ‘causality’: what ‘causes’ or ‘conditions of possibility’ can or should be mobilized in order to understand the construction of a bridge and, even more so, of a particular type of bridge where specific constraints needed to be taken into account? Baxandall’s analysis makes us reflect, first of all on the importance of listing a series of ‘causes’, of ‘conditions of possibility’ or of ‘central elements’ in order to understand how a history unfolds, and, secondly, the equally great importance of hierarchizing these elements by a process of questioning.
The bridge over the river Forth on the east coast of Scotland, was constructed in the nineteenth century, in an economic climate which favoured rapid communication between Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh. Before the bridge was constructed, the only way of crossing the estuary was by ferry but this means of transport meant any journeys were very slow. In 1873, at a time when the techniques of bridge building were able to meet the growing economic demand for railways, four companies got together to attempt to construct a bridge, a risky enterprise given the depth of the water and the amount of silt. They approached two engineers, John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, the latter having particular responsibility for the design of the construction. Baxandall notes that Baker ‘had a strong background in metal technology’ and brought with him ‘a historical view of his profession’, in the form of sound knowledge of the history of bridge construction. Armed with this knowledge, Baker proposed a bridge built on a ‘cantilever principle’, a technique originating from the East and which exactly responded to the particular constraints of the local environment. The construction of such a bridge could now be envisaged due to a ‘new medium of mild steel manufactured in the Siemens open hearth furnace’.
Baxandall proposes reducing the history of this construction to a series of ‘causally pregnant items of information’.60 He begins by listing twenty-four of these which include existing geographic factors that were totally outside the awareness and preoccupation of the actors of the time (‘the buckling of the Lower Old Red Sandstone across central Scotland during the mid-Devonian period’,61 for example), economic factors, events which preceded the construction of the bridge (the collapse of the recently constructed bridge over the river Tay in high winds), references to the history of bridge building, to the steel industry and to knowledge of metallurgy and, last but not least, to the skills and preferences of Baker or of ‘the public’. What Baxandall demonstrates is that the causes and elements would vary according to the question to be answered. If we simply want to know why there is a bridge rather than nothing (or a ferry), we would not be interested in the same aspects of history as if we wanted, for example, to know why the bridge took its specific form. But, in all cases, we notice that it is only by bringing temporalities together that we can understand certain facts or certain events.
Scholium 3. It could be said that the central question of our research is the following: ‘What is the history of this painting (The Flight into Egypt) from its creation to its recent arrival at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon?’ But formulating the question in this way, though apparently clear and straightforward, presupposes that the object in question (the painting) has always had the same social existence. The question therefore expresses a point of view which is both retrospective and biased, whereas what we are seeking to construct is the social and cultural history of this object for the actors, the groups and the institutions which have entered into contact with it at different moments in its history. A preferable option would therefore be along the lines of the following: ‘What is the history of this object, of its status, its meaning and its value, both economic and aesthetic, for the actors, the groups or the institutions which have been involved with it at different moments of history, from the moment of its creation to its arrival in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon?’
Following the example of Baxandall, we can list a series of the elements which constitute this history. These would include:
But these elements themselves rest on a broader foundation made up of what is taken for granted, of unquestioned assumptions concerning the sacred status of art, the cult of authenticity and of the original which means that we never appreciate works which are presented to us independently of the status of the artist who painted them, the invention of the museum, the opposition between the sacred and the profane, and the relations of domination which structure this background. All the various actions which take place on this foundation contribute, unconsciously, to making it live. And it is this foundation itself that I have set out to reconstruct here.
10. Not only does the past impose itself on actors as a self-evident fact, but the differentiation of spheres of activity is such that they remain unaware of a large part of what constitutes these self-evident facts over which they have no control.
Scholium. Each person sees the world from the perspective of the position they occupy within the division of labour and remains largely ignorant of much of what constitutes this world which is perceived by their consciousness as an impenetrable reality. What do we know, or understand, about law, science or medicine if we are neither lawyer, scientist nor doctor? Actors remain unaware of the accumulated weight of objectivized history which they discover during the course of their existence in the form of self-evident facts which must implicitly be taken for granted. The social division of labour and responsibilities means that each separate individual sees a considerable part of their surrounding social world as unknown, unfamiliar realities. Such realities often have only indirect or occasional impact on the lives of these individuals. They may, for example, come up against family law or legal documents in the event of divorce, they encounter the State taxation laws when they sell their house or buy a flat, they are obliged to respect certain financial constraints when they take out a bank loan. The same applies to the worlds of science, technology and medicine, etc.
A large part of the structural background of a complex society therefore forms no part of the social experience of individuals and, consequently, remains outside their mental and behavioural tendencies, existing for them as a largely uncharted area. The individual tendencies and competencies necessary for action are always restricted and the innate structures of each individual (their capacity to believe, feel, understand, think, appreciate and act) represent only a tiny part of what we can call the ‘objective social structures’. In other words, the social order in our societies is too complex to be deposited in one individual brain. This explains why we cannot say that ‘the social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds’, and why it is difficult to speak in a general way about the ‘correspondence’ which might exist ‘between real divisions and practical principles of division, between social structures and mental structures’ or to emphasize the link between ‘the real world and the thought world’.62 It explains too that actors can be part of a general social structure without being really conscious of it. The same applies to capitalism or to relations of domination between classes, relationships between the sacred and the profane, etc. What each actor invests into his or her own actions always contributes, whether voluntarily or not, to the maintaining of the major social structures. By doing what they do, in the place where they are, actors are contributing to the ongoing existence of socio-historical structures which are beyond their grasp and whose existence they are only very rarely aware of.
In order to understand these historical structures, these vast presupposed back drops, it is therefore necessary to shift from the point of view of actors or groups of actors to a much broader perspective of what guides behaviour. We need to widen the focus so we are no longer concentrating attention too closely on the actors and their limited vision and instead can see how their actions and gestures pertain to bigger processes or to centuries-old beliefs. The ‘process of social differentiation of functions’, the ‘capitalist production system’, the ‘process of civilization’ or the ‘relationship between the sacred and the profane’63 are the frameworks for these broader perspectives, simultaneously structuring all behaviour and at the same time lying outside the partial consciousness of each individual. These historical backdrops are not strictly speaking unconscious, but more often they are non-conscious, non-perceived and non-known. The actors’ field of consciousness (of perception, representation, reflection, etc.) is very limited in comparison with what historically structures their action in reality.
11. The researcher’s role consists in questioning the obviousness of the obvious, in exposing the presuppositions and the self-evident facts on the basis of which the actors play out their role in the present moment of the action, in revealing the non conscious bases on which conscious strategies are played out.
Scholium. We could compare social practices to moves made in a great game of chess. Not only have the players not invented the chess board and the rules of the game inherited from the past, but they turn up in the middle of the game and any moves they make depend on moves previously made, in other words on a given state of the game. Depending on their focus, researchers could go back to the origins of the game of chess or they could examine the different stages of a game in progress. Latour uses the metaphor of Scrabble to demonstrate how the success of Pasteur and his followers had been prepared in advance by those who had pioneered hygiene: ‘The Pasteurians were to arrive on the scene like players on a Scrabble board. The “triple” words and “double” words were already marked and laid down.’64 In all the various domains involved in studying the trajectory of a painting, it is clear that each individual plays their own game, as gallery owner, auctioneer, expert, art historian, museum curator, arts journalist, mayor, Minister of Culture, company director, etc., and that each of these is caught up in the immediacy of their own practice and immersed in their own interests, whether professional, political, cultural, international, national, regional, municipal, etc., but that the bigger picture in which all of them feature, remains for the most part outside of their consciousness.
The researcher ideally needs to resist becoming caught up in any of the various games observed and instead to guide the different participants to a knowledge and a consciousness of them. Of course, in adopting such an approach the researcher runs the risk of being seen as one of those killjoys who keep themselves aloof from the action and then seem not to care about anything because nothing really excites them. Scholars are in fact like those killjoys who, because they are drinking water while everyone else is getting drunk, spoil the charm of the party. They belong to the ‘iconoclastic and sacrilegious’, intent on ‘the idea of establishing in their turn the rules of a new game that is more pleasant or more serious’65 than that played within the social world. By playing the spoilsport, by undermining the game of beliefs and the magic effects of power, scholars are themselves caught up in a game with its own specific beliefs. The only question worth asking in order to break the vicious circle in which they can be locked is the following: what is to be gained from playing this game of questioning the obviousness of the situations, gestures and words associated with power? And it seems to me that the reply should be that in doing so we gain the possibility of not believing, of having nothing imposed upon us, and also of the possible reopening of fields of action and reaction.
12. When we act and think, we stumble against the bars of an invisible cage made up of all those things which are taken for granted and are imposed on us by history in the form of self-evident facts and of categories of thought as yet un-thought.
Scholium. If the historic situation in which we find ourselves is like a sort of glass bowl within the confines of which human beings perform their actions, this bowl is itself simply the crystallized, multi-layered product of history. Commenting on Foucault’s approach, Paul Veyne states: ‘We constantly think about the inside of the glass bowl and yet we are not even sure this bowl exists […] We cannot see its limits […] Each different era has its own glass bowl that remains invisible to the people of that era and limits their thinking.’66 The researcher can contribute by bringing to light this history, which is the very essence of the matter, without the men and women of the past or the present, who are nevertheless its producers, even being aware of it. Even if it is never fully achievable, the ultimate goal of our research is to attempt to get out of the glass bowl in our imagination and to begin describing it from the outside.
13. Consideration of the self-evident facts, the multi-layered products of history which structure present action, is sufficient grounds to seriously challenge any notions about the freedom of the actor, about his or her individual responsibility or ‘capacity to act’, cut off from all constraints whether external (objectivized) or internal (dispositional).
Scholium 1. Each individual ‘plays his or her game’ according to their place in the world, their skills and aptitudes, and does so only in a world which has been organized and structured by generation upon generation of people before them. Foucault was thus quite right to observe that ‘the fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man from the first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.’67
Baruch Spinoza said that the feeling of liberty came from the fact that individuals are invested in their actions and are conscious of their actions, their desires and their immediate objectives, rather than being aware of what determines them to do what they do and to do it as they do it. In the scholium of Proposition 35 of his ‘Ethics’, Spinoza says: ‘Men are deceived when they think themselves free, and the sole reason for thinking themselves so is that they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which those actions are determined. Their idea of liberty therefore is this – that they know no cause for their own actions; for as to saying that their actions depend upon their will, these are words to which no idea is attached.’68
Whether we regard it as unfair or simply accept it, children are always born into a particular time, in a civilization, within a society, a social group and even a particular family, and it would clearly be an overstatement to claim that they ‘co-construct’ (a misused expression favoured by many child sociologists) language, the social division of labour, the monetary system, the institution of the family, the law and educational, religious, political, cultural, sporting institutions, etc. That does not turn them into a passive being or a kind of puppet who can only do what the ‘structures’ order them to do. ‘Social determination’ does not mean ‘passivity’ on the part of individuals. On the contrary, the products of multi-layered history need energy, effort, the desires and passions of thoroughly active individuals if they are to continue to live and to develop. Yet theories of action are divided in how they view the ‘capacities to act’ (agency) in question: where the theorists of freedom of action take for granted all the active elements of individuals (choice, decision, will, intention, passion, desire, etc.), dispositionalists focus on capacities and show that these are socially formed, via the processes of socialization and are socially and historically variable and more or less coherent or contradictory.
Scholium 2. Combining scientific and political considerations, some of those who we might term the ‘thinkers of freedom’ see in the scientific realism of the ‘thinkers of structure’ (and both external and internal constraints) a conservative approach. By constantly emphasizing the relations of domination that structure human relationships, they will end up failing to recognize actors’ capacities for criticism and for resistance, and, at the same time, their power to act.
Consequently, in the writings of historians critical of linear and quantitative history, we find the idea that this approach would amount to ‘a double powerlessness’. On the one hand, of the historian and, on the other, of the ‘man acting within history, torn between the sequences of events which escape him’ and who would have ‘lost all effectiveness, all capacity to act on the real’.69 This notion seems to me doubly flawed. Firstly, it is unclear how throwing light onto long-term, or even simply structural, historical facts would be a sign of powerlessness on the part of historians who are content to do their work just as astronomers do theirs by helping us discover galaxies, planets or constellations. Secondly, it is difficult to see why actors would be rendered powerless by this type of history. The only question researchers should be asking is that of knowing whether or not this kind of history, which reveals structures and long-term processes, can teach us about reality, and if, in historical reality, men and women are really masters of their own destinies. As the response to the second question is clearly negative, due to social processes which are independent of the subjectivity of researchers and of actors, it then becomes legitimate to ask what people can do with this kind of knowledge and if they can modify their lives in the full knowledge of all the causes which determine it independently of their own will.
The school of thought, based on events and on actions on an individual scale, an approach which focuses a microscope on the multiple decisions, intentions or individual choices (in sociology, ethnomethodology, interactionism or comprehensive and pragmatic sociologies), tends to give the impression that the world is capable of transformation and consequently ends up encouraging certain types of reforming or romantic revolutionary tendencies, relatively common in certain milieus of research. Thus William H. Sewell Jr. writes that the ‘eventful concept of temporality, which sees the course of history as determined by a succession of largely contingent events’ is ‘much more subversive’.70 Conversely, those schools of thought based on structure, and in particular on long-term structure, those based on tradition and on the significance of the major cultural or religious heritages, have often attracted writers with more conservative, and in certain cases downright reactionary, political outlooks. Now this scientifically damaging polarity demonstrates that the two aspects, political and scientific, should be clearly separated. Drawing too much of a contrast between those thinkers favouring structure, the long term and the inherited past (Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges Dumézil, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Pierre Legendre, etc.) and those thinking more along the lines of freedom, of the sudden occurrence of unexpected events, of the uncertainty of current action, of movement, etc., is effectively fatal to any fair understanding of the social world. Fortunately we can turn to some great thinkers in the area of structure and of the sedimentation of the past who have, I believe, sufficiently proved, notably by their sensitivity to the facts of domination, their political position on the side of progress, of the enlightenment, of the desire to make individuals aware of constraints which are outside their consciousness and to give them the opportunity to liberate themselves (Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, to name but a few).