Reading and Teaching Bourdieu

W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute
Reading and Teaching Pierre Bourdieu Outline of a Theory of Practice. by Pierre Bourdieu; The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture. by Pierre Bourdieu; Jean-Claude Passeron; Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. by Pierre Bourdieu; Jean-Claude Passeron; Homo Academicus. by Pierre Bourdieu; Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. by Pierre Bourdieu; The Love of Art. by Pierre Bourdieu; Alain Darbel; The Logic o ... Review by: V. Y. Mudimbe Transition, No. 61 (1993), pp. 144-160 Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935228 . Accessed: 18/04/2013 14:36
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Indiana University Press and W.E.B. Du Bois Institute are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transition.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 189.223.128.146 on Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:36:48 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
T R A NSITIO0N
Under Review
READING
PIERRE
TEACHING BOURDIEU
AND
V. Y. Mudimbe by education,an Sixtyish,a philosopher andsociologistby choice, anthropologist PierreBourdieu-director of studies at L'EcolePratiquedes HautesEtudesand of Sociologyat Le College de Professor France-is today one of the most interintellectuals. French renowned nationally to that of is comparable His achievement some of the most esteemed names in thought. In intellectwentieth-century tual France,the forties and fifties were dominated by Jean-PaulSartre,Maurice and Simonede Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty Then camethe sixtieswith structuralism asa demigod,the andClaudeLevi-Strauss andthe eightieswith poststrucseventies turalism representedby theorists like LyJacquesDerridaand Jean-Francois otard.Can it be saidthat the ninetiesare the reign of Bourdieu? inaugurating It's a tempting judgment,particularly from an Americanperspective.For the tend to framework by which Americans last of the classifythe Frenchthinkers polfifty yearsis built on the haphazard that a happenstance itics of translation, discontinuities. leadsto rather misleading In a smallbook,Modern French Philosophy, that a Vincent Descombesdemonstrates shared set of questions runsfromthe preSartrian period to the poststructuralists. The supposed betweentheseepruptures ochs can be understood,rather,as adand umbrations, redefinitions, adaptations, of the significance reformulations of the humancondition.It's a history of recapitulation,and one that Bourdieu'senseemsto sum up. terprise latestbook is LesRegles Bourdieu's de
l'Art: Geneseet Structure du ChampLitter-
aire(1992). The publicityfor the book has focusedon the claimthat the author unveilsthe foundation of a scienceof litwork and erary presentshis own definitive "Flaubert." The implicit challenge, plainlyenough,is to another"Flaubert," the one offeredby Sartre's classicstudy, L'Idiot dela Famille. But there'smore.Les del'Artincludesa very ambiguous Regles de Methode"-that chapter-"Questions at once celebrates andcriticizesSartre. As Bourdieu the sociologist seesit, Sartre was his own illusionson Flaubert; projecting he lackeda scientific methodwhich could for Flaubert's account creativity. Happily, Bourdieuis not so ill-equipped.In his scheme, the basic rules are clear:comarewhatexpetitionandcompetitiveness
144
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
plain survival and success in the field of
cultureandthe arts.The artistor thinker hasto finda nichefor himselfin the field, affirmhis creativity,and impose his authority. Naturally,one thinks of Bourdieu himselfin this regard,and it's hard references not to view his contradictory asa reflection of animplicitcomto Sartre petition between Pierre Bourdieu, the andsociologist,and youngerphilosopher the masterphilosopher Sartre, Jean-Paul to be surpassed. Indeed,the very titledeMethode"-repeats Sartre's "Questions to The Critique own introduction of Di-
structuralism. He is celebratory when role commenting on Claude Levi-Strauss's in promoting the welfare of the social sciences, but very critical about the transfer of the Saussureanmodel of langue and parole to these disciplines. Bourdieu objects to the fetishization of langue, the underlying ("deep") structure or system of idealized linguistic practices, at the expense of the diverse and living variety of paroles, performances which Bourdieu believes, contra structuralism,involve the creative activity of the speaker. It is precisely here, I'd like to suggest, that Bourdieu's ambitions are revealed: a critical alectical Reason. From his earliest theoreticalworks project that would synthesize the scope ofThe- and scientific rigor of the "philosophy" (whichdatefromthe 1972 Outline Words of systems called structuralism with the In Other ory of Practice)through has humanist appeal of the "philosophy" of Bourdieu to Les de (1990) Rigles l'Art, references to individual freedom and creativity made made similarlyambivalent
Pierre Bourdieu
Photo by Marie-Claire Bourdieu
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
145
Discussed this essay
in
Outline of a Theory of Practice, PierreBourdieu, Cambridge: Cambridge Press University The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture, Pierre BourdieuandJean-Claude Passeron,Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, PierreBourdieuand Passeron, Jean-Claude SagePublications Homo Academicus, PierreBourdieu,Stanford: Press StanfordUniversity Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu,Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press The Love of Art, Pierre Bourdieuand Alain Darbel, Stanford: Stanford Press University The Logic of Practice, PierreBourdieu,Stanford: Press StanfordUniversity Language and Symbolic Power, PierreBourdieu, MA: Harvard Cambridge, Press University In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology, PierreBourdieu, Stanford: StanfordUniversityPress Les Regles de l'Art: Genese et structure du Champ Litt6raire,Pierre Bourdieu,Seuil
fam6us by the Jean-Paul Sartre of Being and Nothingness. What we are witnessing is an attempted reconciliation of the two great antagonists of postwar intellectual France, the objectivist methodology illustrated by Claude Levi-Straussand the subjectivist methodology of existentialism. That Bourdieu's diverse and often flamboyant oeuvre responds to the signal intellectual concerns of the late twentieth century does not belittle his originality and importance. It signifies, on the contrary,both his intellectual orthodoxy as a lector and his powerfully subversive intent as an auctor,a complicated achievement I will explore in the remainderof this essay.
the theory elaborated in the first section, making use of research Bourdieu undertook between 1960 and 1970 in North Africa (Kabylia, Collo, the Chelif valley, and Ouarsenis). In this chapter Bourdieu meditates on the methods of research, convinced that "the practicalprivilege in which all scientific activity arises never more subtly governs that activity than when, unrecognized as privilege, it leads to an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which science is possible." Thinking about a theory of practice thus broaches a series of important issues relevant to anthropology and beyond, the problem of the social production of knowledge. Bourdieu distinguishes three types of theoretical knowledge of the social world, three "moments in a dialecti-
Bourdieu's Outline of a Theoryof Practice, reprinted seven times since its first publication in English in 1977, is a masterpiece. It is the narrationof an intellectual odyssey and a landmark in the reconceptualization of the social sciences. Richard Nice, the translator,aptly (if wordily) introduces the book's importance, as "a reflection on scientific practice which will disconcert both those who reflect on the social sciences without practicing them and those who practice them without reflecting on them, [which] seeks to define the prerequisitesfor a truly scientific discourse about human behavior, that is, an adequate theory of practice which must include a theory of scientific practice." The book contains four chapters. The first, "The Objective Limits of Objectivism," has two sections-a first, entitled Analyses, and a second, A Case Study: Parallel-Cousin Marriage, which applies
African Studies is littered with sweeping formulations like "Bantu philosophy" that have occluded the varieties of native experience for over fifty years
cal advance":a phenomenological or ethnomethodological knowledge which reads, interprets, makes explicit the primary and ordinaryexperience of everyday life in the social world; an objectivist knowledge which, breaking from the primary knowledge, "constructs the objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) which structure practice and representation of practice, i.e., in particular,primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of the familiar world." The final, and crucial, mo-
146
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
mentwouldbe abreaking with objectivist knowledge, a questioningof its conditions of possibilityand thus its limits. This questioningof objectivism is liableto be understood at firstas a rehabilitation andtobemerged ofsubjectivism levels withthecritique thatnaivehumanism atscientific in name the "lived objectification of andtherights In experience" of subjectivity. thetheory andof thepracreality, ofpractice tical in allpractice mode inherent ofknowledge is the a which science rigorous preconditionfor carries out a newreversal of practices of the which hastoconstruct problematic objectivism in order to constitute the socialworldas a relations system ofobjective independent of individual consciousnesses andwills. This finalmomentinvolvesthe simultaneous pursuitof objectivistknowledge, awareness up to a point, andthe constant of the situation,the privilegedposition, of the scientist. What is important is how properly to construe objectivism,as a but limitedtool. powerfuland necessary Bourdieuinsistson what Bachelard calls on the necesepistemological vigilance, sity of making clear the differencebetween "spontaneous semiology"or practical knowledge and the second-order hermeneutic This constitutes paradigms. a radical critiqueof the "implicitphiloswhich pervades the anophy of practice the and tradition," thropological perverse unself-conscious between the relationship observer andthe observed. Stud(African ies is litteredwith suspectsecond order "objectivisms,"sweeping formulations like "Bantu philosophy"and "African philosophy"that have occludedthe varietiesof nativeexperience for over fifty
years.) Bourdieu reminds us that "native theories are dangerous not so much because they lead research towards illusory explanations as because they bring quite superfluousreinforcement to the intellectualist tendency inherent in the objectivist approach to practices." In sum, the objectivist readingsproduce cultureas a done instead of the condeal, an opusoperatum, structed and open work of a modus operandi, culture as a process in the making. Bourdieu's own method follows three basic propositions. One: "One is entitled to undertake to given an 'account of accounts,' so long as one does not put forward one's contribution to the science of pre-scientific representation of the social world as if it were a scientific representation of the social world." Two: "Only by constructing the objective structures (price curves, chances of access to higher education, laws of the matrimonial market, etc.) is one able to pose the questions of mechanisms through which the relationship is established between the structures and the practices or the representations which accompany them instead of treating these 'thought objects' as 'reason' or 'motives' and making them the determining cause of the practices." Three: "Official language, particularly the system of concepts by means of which the members of a given group provide themselves with a representationof their social relations (e.g. the lineage model or the vocabulary of honor), sanctions and imposes what it states, tacitly laying down the dividing line between the thinkable and the unthinkable, thereby contributing towards the maintenance of the symbolic order from which it draws its authority." In other words, the anthropologist should be wary of the fact that
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
147
native experienceis complex and stratified; to use Saussurean categories,there would be always in any social world a of langue (the abstract, inpreeminence andsocialnormof expression) stitutional, overthe parole(the concrete,individual, andcreative of the former). actualization In chaptertwo, "Structures and the Bourdieu elaborates on how to Habitus," move from a method and a practicefato one resulting voringthe opusoperatum in the modus operandi.A key concept here is the habitus,a "durably installed generative principleof regulatedimprovisations, [it] producespracticeswhich tend to reproducethe regularitiesimmanentin the objective conditions of the of theirgenerative production principle." In otherwords,the habitus is anaccretion of internalized lessonsthat the agenthas learnedover the courseof his socialization: or unwittingly, Eachagent,wittingly willy is a and nilly, producer reproducer of objective Because his actions andworks are meaning. theproduct of a modus operandiof which he is not theproducer and has no conscious contain an intention," mastery, they "objective astheScholasticsput which outruns it, always his conscious intentions. Schemesand three,"Generative Chapter PracticalLogic: Inventionwithin LimHabits," and chapterfour, "Structures, itus, Power:Basisfor a Theory of Symbolic Power," amplify the meaning of touchingon postobjectivist anthropology, econspecifictopicssuchas the calendar, omy of logic, cosmogonic practice, He introandritesof passage. thresholds, duces compelling theoretical concepts,
includingsymboliccapital,andproduces of doxa, orthooriginalunderstandings a wide doxy, heterodoxy, range of culturalpractices and beliefs. He concludes that the taskof legitimating theestablished order doesnotfall exclusively to the mechanisms as belonging totheorder traditionally regarded as The such law. of ideology, system of symbolic andthesystem goods production producin addition, i.e. bythe ingtheproducersfulfil ideoverylogicof theirnormal functioning, logical functions,by virtueof thefact that mechanisms whichtheycontribute to through the established thereproduction and order, of tothe remain hidofdomination perpetuation den. Bourdieu's projectis not withoutparallel in the Anglophoneworld.The Outline's is similar to RoyWagner's objective in TheInvention (1975), particof Culture ularlyWagner'sidea of cultureas a way of talkingabout the human and condition, of describing a foreignculture asa process of "inventing" a languageand a practice of familiarity which arenot those of the observer. CliffordGeertz,in "ThickDescription,"the first chapter of his renownedThe Interpretation (1973), ofCulture makes claims that can be comparedto Bourdieu's: that a cultureis a symbolic and functions like a language; that system coherencedoes not seem to be the major test of validityfor a description; that in orderto do ethnography, to describe is to to a turn event into nara narrate, passing rativeaccount.Metaphorically, Geertz's turtle storyjust might be the best illustrationof Bourdieu's of objectivcritique ist knowledge.
148
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
Thereis an Indianstory- at leastI heardit as an Indian story-about an Englishman on who, havingbeentoldthat theworldrested a platformwhich restedon the back of an in turn on the backof elephantwhich rested a turtle,asked (perhaps he was an ethnograit pher; is the way theybehave),what did the turtlereston?Anotherturtle. And thatturtle? all the way "Ah, Sahib, afterthat it is turtles down." Yet Bourdieu's work is different in important respects.It is very much a product of postwar French philosophy, inflected with and responding to the languages of Marxism and phenomenology, as well as the structuralismof Claude Levi-Strauss; a work situated in the social sciences almost by default, because "philosophy as taught in the [French]University was not [then] very inspiring." Even Bourdieu's most important theoretical contribution, the habitus, is largely a critical revision of a philosophical concept, the absolute freedom of the human agent propounded and by the Sartreof Being andNothingness Existentialism Is a Humanism. The central notion of habitus set forth in the Outlinesuggests that legitimacy and power are produced and reproducedby a culture almost naturally;culture results in class differentiations in social space. Let us note here that, contrary to Marxism, which defines class as a relation to the process of production, as an economic or infrastructuralfunction, Bourdieu's class is largely defined with reference to superstructures-to culture, status, and education. TheInheritors: FrenchStudents and TheirRelationto Cultureby Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron is a perfect example. The authors chose a well-circum-
scribed population: students of humanities and social sciences.
Artsstudents exhibitin an exemplary way the relation to culture whichwe tookas our object of study.We realizethatby isolatingan analprivilege, from within a whole ysis of cultural setof current research on education and projects we mayappear to bereducing thewhole culture, to one single quesrangeof possiblequestions tion.But thiswas theriskthathadto betaken, in orderto grasp the fundamentalproblem which the ritualproblematic in this area almostalways manages to conceal. Refusing to take for granted the meaningfulness of the category "student," as though there were a common student condition, the authors take pains to show that the myths of the "student" and of "student life" disguise the actual operation of the educational system, which responds to and reproduces divisive inequalities. They describethe various complicated factors which sediment the process of formalizing class differences: the process of selection, the scholastic exams, the system of concours, the university campus versus the "Grandes Ecoles." All of these directly participatein the reproduction of a culture and its inequalities: "The education system is required to produce individualswho are selected and arranged in a hierarchy once and for all for their whole lifetime." Must education work in this way, must it stigmatize all those who pass through it? Could one not dream of a "real democratic education [to] allow the greatest possible number of individuals to appropriatethe greatest number of abilities which constitute school cul-
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
149
ture?" Bourdieu and Passeron's response to their own question is telling: In the absenceof a rationalpedagogydoing to neutralizethe efect of required everything the socialfactors of culturalinequality,meand continuously, thodically from kindergarten to university, thepoliticalproject ofgiving cannot everyone equaleducational opportunity overcome the real inequalities,even when it institutional andeconomic means. every deploys a rational that is, pedagogy, Conversely, truly onebased on a sociology inequalities, of cultural in would,no doubt,helpto reduce inequalities and culture, butit wouldnot beable education a realityunlessall theconditionsfor to become a true democratization of of the recruitment teachers and pupils were fulfilled, thefirst of which would be the setting up of a rational pedagogy. TheInheritors dramatizesthe vast gulf separating the bourgeois ideal of democratic education from the actual practice of the educational system, often with reference in Eduto statistic surveys. Reproduction and Culture,also coauthored cation,Society by Bourdieuand Passeron,providesa more theoretical interpretation of the same phenomenon, elaborating a theory of symbolic violence. In this case "symbolic" should be understood in its ordinary meaning, as a sign representing something else. The theory of symbolic violence is defined by Bourdieu from a number of closely related paradigms, models of pedagogy. The first paradigm is the process of socialization, the insertion of "individuals" into groups, into systems of reference and value like the family, institutions such as church, school, and vacation camps, as well as into more informal ensembles such
as the neighborhood, the street, and racial or sexual groupings. The pedagogical imperative is to maintain a monopoly on "legitimate" culture, to cement a cultural arbitrarythat cannot, in principle, be deduced from any universal principle. A second paradigm is that of pedagogic authority, relations of dependence, as exemplified by relations between parents and children, teachers and pupils, elders and youths. The parent, teacher, or elder incarnate an auctoritas, "the power of a founder," and inculcate the "truth" of the culture and its traditions in the child, pupil, or youth. Pedagogic authority is at stake in the legitimate modes of educatingand socialization;it calls to mind Descartes's pronouncement that our major predicament is that we have been children. We have been "made" according to a socially defined and ultimately arbitraryunderstandingand definition of culture. Is it possible to challenge this imposition? It is the old paradox of Epimenides, the liar, that we then face, as articulatedin Reproduction: "Either you believe I'm not lying when I tell you education is violence and my teaching isn't legitimate, so you can't believe me; or you believe I'm lying and my teaching is legitimate, so you still can't believe what I say when I tell you it is violence." Is there an answer to this problem, short of a stock admission of culturalrelativism?As Bourdieu observes, it is one thing to introduce someone who has already been "educated" to cultural relativism (awareness of the arbitrariness of any culture) and quite another to conceive of a relativistic education, one that would "produce a cultivated man who [is] the native of all cultures." The concept of pedagogic authority assumes another, that of peda-
150
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
gogic work, the third paradigm. This is a process, a long one, whose objective is to produce a habitus, an "internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary capable of perpetuating itself after the pedagogic action has ceased." From Bourdieu's perspective, education is to cultural order what genes are to biological order. Another paradigm is the educational system itself-its demands, rituals, and symbols. It operatesby producing and reproducing "the conditions which are necessary for the exercise of its functions of reproducing a cultural arbitrary,"so that practices incompatible with that mission become theoretically unthinkable. But, one might say, marginals and revolutionariesexist. The system, as a matter of fact, produces two main types of cultivated people, which could be reduced to two medieval categories:the lector and the auctor.The first is exemplified by the priestlike educatedperson, who sees his mission as one of maintaining the culture and transmitting it-a perfect definition of what a good teacher should be; he comments on the cultural arbitrary.The second is a prophetic figure, who explores new ways of adapting, rearticulating the cultural a priori. The two last paradigms are the school authority and the work of schooling; the first represents the symbolic violence to be actualized, while the second represents the actualization of this violence: The success and more of all schooleducation, all dework, generallyof secondary pedagogic on the education pendsfundamentally previin the earliest ouslyaccomplished yearsof life, evenand especially when the educational system denies this primacy in its ideologyand a history practice by makingthe schoolcareer
withnopre-history: weknow thatthrough all the skill-learningprocesses ofeveryday life,and the acquisition particularly through of the mother or the tongue manipulation of kinship terms andrelationships, are logical dispositions mastered in their state.These dispopractical more orlesscomplex, more orlesselabsitions, on the orated or symbolically, depending group children towards a class, predispose unequally as symbolic implied mastery of theoperations demonstration as in muchin a mathematical a work art. of decoding The books explored thus far describe Bourdieu's horizon:an intellectualconthat figuration aimsto reducethe tension betweentheoryandpractice, subjectivity andobjectivity, the material andsymbolic. More specifically, if we refer to the interviewspublishedundera significant title, In OtherWords-I think of Sartre's The Words-we could, in termsof theoreticalconfrontations, note a few points. One is the oppositionbetweenrulesand thatseparates fromthe Bourdieu strategies structuralists. Structuralism focuses on on rules;it is mappedout on strictures, grids and assumesthe unchangingsystematic coherence of the Saussurian is interested in probing langue.Bourdieu the strategic of deployment rules,the execution of rules in specific,concreteinstances,the realmof possibilitysignified by parole.His hypothesisis simple:Cultureis a game."In the gameyou cannot do just anythingand get away with it. And the feel for the game, which contributes to this necessityandthis logic, is a way of knowingthis necessityand this logic." In any case, the orthodoxyand of modesof practice in the game regularity the a habitus, express disposition referring backto the languageof rules inculcated
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
151
in the agent. Finally, the field of cultural production studied in Outline, but more and Reproduction, visibly in The Inheritors is this universe that we call "the republic of letters." Auctorsor lectors,intellectuals in this field, are producers and "may put [their] power at the service of the dominant. They may also, in the logic of their struggle within the field of power, put their own power at the service of the dominated in the social field taken as whole." HomoAcademicus exemplifies these issues by exoticizing the familiar and trapping the classifier himself, the scholar. The book is simultaneously a self-analysis of the French academic universe and a reflection on Bourdieu's sociological practice. The preface to the English edition describesthe French intellectual milieu and the recent transformations that have made possible the spread of social science discourses.Bourdieu identifies the germinal confrontation between Sartre and Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss's accomplishment was to disinter philosophy and expand the scope of the social sciences, reinforcing new hybrid creativities (like Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault) and accompanying new directions in more established disciplines, as with Emil Benveniste and Andre Martinet in linguistics, Georges Dumezil and Braudel in history. The previously dominant disciplines, philology, literary history and even philosophy, whose intellectual foundations are threatened by their new rivals, disciplineslike linguistics, semiology, anthropolor even that the social ogy, sociology, find their academic existence arealso foundations of undersiegefromthe criticisms welling up on all sides, usually in the name of the social
and on the initiativeof teachersfrom sciences thesedisciplines, againstthe archaicnatureof theircontents and theirpedagogical structures.
Homo Academicus describes this intellectual reconfiguration. Bourdieu begins by reflecting upon his own case, imitating Rousseau at the beginning of the Confes-
Can a native be a good anthropologist?Can an academic be a good sociologist of academe?

sions. Born in North Africa, trained in philosophy, he converted to anthropology and chose his own native region as object of ethnology. Can a native be a good anthropologist? The question retranslatesitself aproposHomoAcademicus: Can an academic be a good sociologist of academe? It is worthwhile in this connection to look at other, nonacademic attempts to conceptualize the educational system. What is the difference between Homo which defines itself as a "soAcademicus, of tribal secrets" and, say, Rayciology mond Aron's The Opiumof theIntellectuals (1955), or a recent polemical analysis by Bernard Maris, Les Sept Peches Capitaux des Universitaires (1991). Aron objectifies the practices and commitments of his Marxist enemies but neglects, refusing to historicize himself, to locate his critique. Maris self-righteously ridicules the academic. Bourdieu, in Homo Academicus, chooses a more difficult path: to describe the present-day field of intellectual production without recourse to naive or selfserving objectifications, and with due respect for epistemological discontinuities.
152
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
His method, finally, is that of a genetic sociology at once reflexive and autocritical. In his words:
Thus we have beentempted to adoptthe title, A Book for Burning, which Li Zhi, a renegademandarin, gave to one of thoseself-conworks the rules suming of his which revealed the We do not in order so, of mandarins'game. to challenge thosewho, despite theirreadiness all in inquisitions, to denounce will condemn tothestakeany workperceived as a sacrilegious outrage againsttheir own beliefs,but simply to statethe contradiction which is inherentin tribal secrets and which is only so divulging because even the partialpublication painful of ourmostintimate details is alsoa kindofpublic confession. The method integrates two complementary visions: an objectivism which breaks with purely subjective experience and a perspectivism which attempts, by historicizing the observer, to overcome or acknowledge the limits of that objectivism. Analyzing the academy, in order to make sense of trends, the author must distininguish between empirical and epistemic the latter are individuals-like dividuals; "Levi-Strauss,father of structuralism"defined by a number of properties in a constructedand theoretical space.And the book, analytically, pictures a culture and its rules. It is about what we could, using Michel Foucault'sterms, call an "art"and a "technique" for the maintenance and regulatedtransformationof traditionalarrangements. Indeed, the authority of the academicus consists of cultural capital. The most celebrated of Bourdieu's A SocialCribooks is probablyDistinction: Taste (1984). One tiqueof theJudgement of could summarize Distinction in five the-
oretical entries: (1) three methodological breaks, (2) sociology understood as a discipline of social topology, (3) the concept of "class on paper," and finally (4) social position and (5) distinction. "The science of taste and of cultural consumption," writes Bourdieu, "begins with a transgression that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the sacredfrontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover the intelligible relations which unite apparentlyincommensurable 'choices,' such as preferences in music and food, painting and sport, literature and hairstyle." He claims that his method is built out of three ruptures: a first with Marxism, whose analytic grid emphasizes "substances" (that is concrete, real groups, at the classes) expense of "relations"; a second rupture with economistic interpretations, which tend to privilege the field of economics in the strict sense and thus reduce the complexity of the social world and its multidimensionality to structuresof economic production and social relations of production; and a third break with objectivism, the usual practice of disciplines which, in the name of rigor and objectivity, overlooks symbolic struggles. The second key to a critical understanding of Distinction might be a redefinition of sociology as a discursive practice on a social topology-a practice concerned, on the one hand, with agents or groups of agents regrouped according to their positions and interrelations in a social space, and, on the other hand, with characteristics possessedby those agentsproperties functioning in the social space as capital, as signs of power. This second key immediately suggests a third, that of class, or more precisely, that of "classes on paper." Bourdieu suggests that "from
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
153
(combining subjectivist representation, objectivist analysis, and interpretative techniques) is given in The Love of Art, a recent work by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, with Dominique Schnapper.The book, after a brief preface, opens with a reflection on the questionnaire, the sample, and the survey; it then proceeds with an analysis of the coding, an analysis of results (the method of successive surveys), the formalization exercise, and a description of the problems that arise when results drawn from the French population are compared with those from four other Europeancountries:Greece, Holland, Poland and Spain. Chapter 3, "The Social Conditions of Cultural Practice," and chapter 5, "The Rules of Cultural Diffusion," as well as the appendices (almost guished,''vulgar,'etc.)." The book demonstrates beyonddoubt one third of the book) are highly maththat,indeed,therearemanytypesof cap- ematicized. Someone without a solid ital: economic (which translates as ma- background in statisticswould tend to focus on the brief chapter dealing with but also cultural terial,monetary wealth) capital(constituted by education-diplo- "Cultural Works and Cultivated Dispomas, knowledge, cultural goods) and sition," an essay that brilliantly demonsymbolic capital (accumulated recogni- strateswhat might seem a truism to some
a knowledgeof the spaceof position,one cancarveout logicalclasses, setsof agents who occupysimilar positionandwho bein similar conditions haveeving situated chance of similar ery having dispositions."Hence a classwhich, contrary to the Marxian concept,is not "mobilized" for a causebut is simply the resultof a In sum, one might saythat classification. TheInheritors borewitnessto the preferencesandvarieties of just such a classon that and formulated paper, Reproduction the rulesthatmakecomprehensible these classes and the symbolic violence that unites and opposesthem. Thus, for inasBourdieu stance,in termsof education, in it The "the conInheritors, puts specific tradictionin the scholasticmode of relies in the opposition between production of the classwhich the eduthe interests cational andthe systemservesstatistically interestsof those membersof the class whom it sacrifices." The fourthkey, that of socialpositionality, couldbe explained as a sortof classunconsciousness, a vague "sense"of one's belonging or not beof one's"place" longing,anunderstanding in the social.Finally,the last key is distinctionor,moreprecisely, the difference, backto a symboliccapqualitythatrefers ital. "Life-styles are thus the systematic of products habitus,which, perceivedin their mutual relations through the schemas of the habitus, becomesign systemsthataresociallyqualified (as'distin-
tions, honors, etc.). Distinctions arise as a result of the complex struggles for survival and success in the fields. Bourdieu relies heavily on quantitativemethods and instruments.The questionnairesat the end of Distinction are very instructive.The first one, for the interviewee, is made to produce a "subjective" representation; the second one, to be completed by a trained interviewer, produces, indeed, a different sort of knowledge concerning the interviewee (home, dress, physical presentation, speech). Let us add that the questionnaires are just one element of the complex body of surveys used by Bourdieu. Another example of this method
154
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
readers:"Statisticsshow that accessto cultural works is the privilege of the cultivated class;however, this privilege has all the outward appearancesof legitimacy. In fact, only those who exclude themselves are ever excluded." In TheLogicofPractice (1990) Bourdieu theorizes his own practices. Book 1 presents a "Critique of Theoretical Reason," significantly introduced by two quotations. The first is from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: "How am I able tofollow a rule?"-if this is not a question aboutcausesthen it is about thejustification for myfollowinga rulein the I do. way I have If I have exhaustedthejustifications reached and myspadeis turned. Then bedrock, I am inclinedto say: "This is simply what I do." The second quotation comes from Aristotle's Poetics:"Man ... is the most imitative ... of all animals and he learns his first lessons through mimicry." Bourdieu's Logic is a strange book, a highly theorized yet very discreet intellectual autobiography. In book 1, Bourdieu dwells almost obsessively on concepts already amply elaborated in his preceding books: the limits of objectification, the habitus, symbolic capital, and modes of cultural domination. The reasoning is clear, solid, sometimes dogmatic. The master statistician of Distinction and The Love of Art now pays careful tribute to philosophy and its teachings. Descartes, Dilthey, Durkheim, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, LeviStrauss, Marx, Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and others are invoked often appropriately and generally quite convincingly. The most amazing
reference from my viewpoint, is, indeed, to Pascal's bet on the existence of God, which Bourdieu makes "work as an a contrario heuristic model." It leads him, first, to the observation that "one cannot rationally pursue the project of founding belief on a rationaldecision without being led to ask reason to collaborate in its own annihilation in belief, a 'disavowal of reason' that is supremely 'in accordancewith reason."' Secondly, he faults Pascal for "falling into the usual error of professional exponents of logos and logic, who always tend, as Marx put it, to take the things of logic for the logic of things." Poor Pascal: He should have known not to confuse "the will to think practice in terms of the logic of decisions of the will"! Book 2 of The Logicof Practice,"Practical Logics," is a very clear and precise discussion of Bourdieu's ethnological researches in North Africa and his anthropological readings. He exploits the notions and realities of land, matrimonial strategies, and kinship in order to reconceptualize structuralistlessons concerning analogy, homology, indeterminacy, and transgression. Here lies his methodological "secret," which one may call "the fundamental division." To escapefromtheforcedchoicebetween intuitionism andpositivism, withoutfallinginto theinterminable to whichstrucinterpretation turalismis condemned when, havingfailedto back to it canonly go thegenerative principles, thelogical which endlessly reproduce operations aremerely theircontingent one actualizations, needsto applya generative modelthat is both verypowerfuland verysimple.Knowing the fundamentalprincipleof division (the paradigm of which is the oppositionbetweenthe sexes), one can recreate-and therefore fully
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
155
understand-all thepractices and ritualsymbols on the basis of two operational schemes conwhich, beingnaturalprocesses culturally stitutedin and through ritualpractice, are inlike the natdissolubly logicaland biological, uralprocesses aim to they reproduce (in both in termsof senses), when they are conceived magicallogic. On the one hand, thereis the reuniting of separatedcontraries,of which marriage, ploughingor the quenching of iron areexemplary cases,and whichengenders life, as the realizedreunionof contraries; and on the otherhand, thereis the separation of reunitedcontraries, the with, for example sacas deenacted rificeof the ox and harvesting, nied murders.
ingness(and his anthropology of human freedom) as opposed to the Sartreof The Critiqueof DialecticalReason and his ambition of circumscribing the missions of a "we-subject." In fact, this leads us back to the CartesianCogitoand, paradoxically, to the power of illusiowhich, to rephrase Bourdieu's quotation of Claudel, makes us understandthat to know is "to be born with." Against the freedom of the Cogitosignified by a subjectivepower, Bourdieu opposes the habitus as lex insita, that is, as immanent law. Let's pause a moment and redescribethe illusioof an identity, as defined by the firstSartre.My consciousness, to refer to the analysis of Being andNothTo sum up, in The Logic of Practiceone ingness,is an attempt to assume my own can readan intellectual autobiography:the unity as being. If, thanks to the Cogito,I determining influence of Claude Levi- can state that I am aware that, indeed, I Strauss(a philosopher and a "model" who think and thus I do exist, then I should chose anthropology as a vocation) and be capableof saying that I have found my how, thanks to the new social sciences, it own existence. Temporalizing this exbecame possible to contemplate overcom- perience, I understandthat my being-foring the distinction between truths of rea- itself nihilates my in-itself in the past, the son and truthsof facts. This, in fact, brings present, and the future. In the past, I am us back to the basic questions that Bour- just an object (the way a table is an object), dieu exposed in Outlineof a Theory of Prac- and the present seems to be a negation of tice:What to think of doxic knowledge my being, since I apprehend myself as an vis-a-vis the phenomenological as de- evasion toward the future; thus, I expescription and reflection of the primaryex- rience a failure in this standing out of perience?What kind of credibility should myself. I can then reflect about it, and in we give to objectivist analyses of the na- a second extasis, discover another failure: tive primary experience? In sum, for how can I, at once, be an identity, since Bourdieu, as already seen, we should in my reflection it is obvious that there is question the Saussurean paradigm of a deviation between the I reflecting and langue versus parole-that is, the socially the I reflected upon? A third extasis opens constructed norm vis-a-vis its individual up, and what I discover is that my forperformances-and move from a her- itself has a self for the other, a self which meneutics concerned with the opusopera- is me, and yet I am not capable of knowtum to a hermeneutics of a modus ope- ing it; I am a being-for-others. I bring this phenomenological reading randi.Interestinglyenough, the best guide seems to be the Sartreof Being and Noth- of my impossible identity (in a mathe-
156
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
matical formula as A = B) as a sign of the complexity of my parole.In principle,such a position should buttress Bourdieu's critique of the system represented by the langue and its rules on me. But once more, like a pendulum, he moves to the other side; thus, he says in The Logicof Practice: "Everything takes places as if the habitus forged coherence and necessity out of accident and contingency; as if it managed to unify the effects of the social necessity undergone from childhood, through the
material conditions of existence, ... as if
idealized form,as theirobjectdomain,so too they havetendedto analyzelinguistic in isolationfrom the specific expression in which they areused." socialconditions we have as seen,wants Bourdieu, already
to reverse this perspective by insisting on
symbolicpower or symbolicviolence as it is deployedin the socialworld and on the active complicityof the dominated. Thus the mainthesisof the book:
it produced a biological (and especially sexual) reading of social properties . . ., thus leading to a social re-use of biological propertiesand a biological re-use of social properties." and This issue is pervasive in Language The is a collection book Power. Symbolic of essays published as articles in the late seventies and early eighties. It is organized around three main themes: the economy of linguistic exchanges, the social institution of symbolic power, and, finally, symbolic power and the political field. The set of chapters leaves no doubt where Bourdieu stands: he believed in Calude Levi-Strauss'sstructuralismin the 1960s but became disenchanted with it because of its blind dependence upon Saussure's linguistic theory. For Bourdieu, the analysisof the linguist carriesan idealization orfictiojuristhat promotes the illusion of a common langue which is, effectively, in political terms, the legitimate and victorious language. Thus, as John B. Thompson, the editor of the American version of Languageand SymbolicPower,puts it, "If linguistic theories have tended to neglect the social historical conditions underlying the formation of the language which they take, in an
all theforms Sociology canfree itselffrom of domination whichlinguistics andits concepts over stillexercise thesocial sciences today only to the of by bringing light operations object construction whichthisscience was through and the social conditions established, of the andcirculation production of itsfundamental wastransposed Thelinguistic model concepts. withsuch ease intothedomain ofanthropology andsociology because oneaccepted inthecore tention the intellecnamely, of linguistics, tualistphilosophywhichtreats as language an object rather thanas an of contemplation instrument action and To the power. accept of Saussurian model anditspresuppositions is to treat thesocial world asa universe ofsymbolic and to reduce actionto an act of exchanges communication likeSaussure's which, parole, isdestined tobedeciphered a means by of cipher ora code, orculture. language In order to break withthissocial philososhow domination-as that, phyonemust symbolic thatis, as relations interactions, of communication and cognition recognition, implying onemustnotforget thattherelations of communication par excellence-linguisticexalsorelations changes-are ofsymbolic power in which thepower between relations speakers or theirrespective are actualized. In groups onemustmove theusualqpposhort, beyond sitionbetween economism andculturalism, in
AND TEACHING BOURDIEU 157
READING
orderto developan economy of symbolicexchanges. Correct usage of the language refers to a linguistic capital, its transmissionthrough education, and, by implication, to the production and reproduction of a legitimate language. Should we not then add that language has an impact in the construction of reality? Neo-Kantian theory (Humboldt-Cassirer, Sapir-Whorf) affirms it and shows that there is a relationship between language and the structuring of perception. In so far as the normative language is that of the dominant class, it is clear that it expresses a symbolic power, the power of constructing a legitimate reality and, indeed, of creating, on this basis of knowledge and mastery of the language, objective and logical classes.
* * 0
set of readings was supposed to help the students understand the French background and included books by Vincent Descombes (Modern French Philosophy, 1980) and H. Stuart Hughes (The Ob-
I recstructed Path,1968).In one semester

ommended and expected the students to read some fifteen books or articles by Bourdieu or about Bourdieu; and I had put on reserve for them at the library a listing with English abstracts of all the works of Bourdieu and about Bourdieu available in English. The members of the seminar were mainly drawn from three departments: anthropology, comparativeliterature,and romancestudies.Some auditorscame from the English department and a few were from philosophy. The seminar was held on Fridaysfrom 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., a good choice for testing the motivation of the participants.We had twelve regular sessions plus one directed by an invited guest professor, Robert Burch (from the philosophy department of the University of Alberta, Canada) on Pierre Bourdieu, reader of Heidegger, which focused on a book that was not included in the reading list, The Political Ontologyof Martin Hei(1991). degger Now that the seminar is over, I can observe three facts: First, Bourdieu seems to constitute an intellectual "event" on American campuses. I was expecting ten or twelve students in this graduate seminar on Friday afternoons. I had thirtyfive at the beginning and, if only fifteen were present the last day of the seminar, nineteen were officially part of the group, not even including my irregularauditors. The second fact, linked to the first, is that I went from a group of thirty-five to fifteen physicallypresent at the end. There
In the fall of 1992 I taught a graduate seminar on Pierre Bourdieu at Duke University. The first day of the seminar, we were thirty-six (including auditors), myself excluded. On the last day, we were fifteen, although the registrar'soffice tells me that nineteen regular students were participatingin the seminar. The final papers I received seem to confirm the figure. In any case, thirty-five American students in September 1992 wanted to follow me in a careful reading of the ten books I have summed up in this paper. There were also complementary readings. They included anthropologists such as Leila Abu-Lughod (Veiled Sentiments, 1986), Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures,1973), and Peter Rigby (Cattle, Capitalismand Class, 1992). A second
158
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61
should be an explanation. Did the reading program discourage some of them? By midsemester it was evident that even the students who had not missed a session were behind in the readings. The midsemester papers were a test. By then, Bourdieu was no longer the lonely cowboy who, by the power of his intelligence, seemed to depopulate the French intellectual field. The students had understood the shape of the French intellectual configuration and needed to ground their arguments in their readings. My students surprisedme. Bourdieu was critically applied to Latin American literature, Soviet Union politics, Chinese policies, the political and contradictory narrations of identity in the Middle East and in India. And it worked. No, really. A number of students seemed not to like Bourdieu, even when they were convinced by his overtures. "He is arrogant"; "He thinks that he is Kant or Hegel"; "He does not quote all his sources"; and so on. This may, I suppose, be a cultural problem. Anthropology students loved The Outline. They could find in it a methodology, a rigor and a new spirit of Einfiihlung for their object of study. The Outline, in effect, not only centralizes Bourdieu's ambition as a postcolonial anthropologist but sums up the dreams of a discipline in crisis. Some of the students went back to the late 1950s in order to confront Bourdieu and read his 1958 sociology of Algeria (translated as The Algerians,1962) and compared it to his analysis in his 1962 "The Algerian Subproletariat"(1973). They found in it reasons to believe in and to act upon a discipline that has been, in an expiating masochism, interrogating itself since the
decolonialization period. Distinction appeared to them a good illustration of a possible conversion which, in its being, makes comprehensible Jeanne Favret's study on sorcery in a French subculture (Deadly Words,1980). Some of them are now exploring research projects on literary and modernization in India, the identity and "distinction" of Indians in the United States, and Soviet totalitarianism and its cultural expressions. Students from romance studies (French and Spanish) as well as those from English literature and from philosophy preferred Bourdieu the theorist. To my surprise, their favorite book was not the The Logic nor Les Reglesde l'Art; it was In of Practice Other Words.The latter is a collection of interviews whose entries read like political proclamations or bad advertisingjingles: "Fieldwork in philosophy," "From rules to strategies," "The interest of the sociologist," "The intellectual field: a world apart,""The uses of the 'people,"' "Opinion polls: a 'science' without a scientist," and so forth. The collection is simply dazzlingly brilliant and reveals an eminently elegant and sophisticatedmind. Is this the reason for the success of the book? Possibly. Bourdieu himself with his usual feel for his own ego put it well in the preface to the English version: The logicof the interview which, in morecases than one, becomes a genuinedialogue, has the effectof removingone of the mainforms of which thefact of belongingto a censorship scientific field can impose,one that may beso thatitspresence internalized is noteven deeply that which suspected: prevents you from anin itself swering, writing questions which,from theprofessional's point of view, can only appear trivialor unacceptable.
READING
AND
TEACHING
BOURDIEU
159
I do know thatthoseof the students who lefttheseminar before midterm wentaway with In OtherWords in theirminds,with its statements aboutthe logic and aberrationsof scientificpractices. They were for looking conceptual gadgetsandtools anddid not want to submitto the rigors of a systematicdecoding of Bourdieu's Why shouldone faultthem? enterprise. I have taught Sartre,Merleau-Ponty, and ClaudeLevi-Strauss for the last ten yearsin the United States,and enjoyed the surprise of seeingyoung mindsopento their ideasand criticallyinteing up grating these perspectives. Teaching Bourdieu-it was my firsttime- was a
new challenge: I saw explosions of love and hatred, respect and rejection, all reactions that the elegance and brilliance of Pierre Bourdieu's work can sustain. But am I going to organize another seminar on Bourdieu? Really, the idea frightens me now that I know his mastery of the game. Well, what to say? If you would believe me, said the good old Simonides, we should not like our own unhappiness. To this masterful statement, one might add the pronouncement of another ancient Greek, Hesiod: "We shouldn't torture ourselves by setting our hearts on grievous unhappiness."
160
TRANSITION
ISSUE
61

Reading and Teaching Bourdieu

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Reading and Teaching Bourdieu

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

W.E.B.

plain survival and success in the field of

Discussed this essay

scribed population: students of humanities and social sciences.

Can a native be a good anthropologist?Can an academic be a good sociologist of academe?

I recstructed Path,1968).In one semester

Você também pode gostar