Bourdieu's Re Exive Politics

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Bourdieu's Reflexive Politics: Socio-Analysis, Biography and Self-Creation

Samer Frangie European Journal of Social Theory 2009 12: 213 DOI: 10.1177/1368431009103706 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/content/12/2/213
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European Journal of Social Theory 12(2): 213229

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Bourdieus Reexive Politics Socio-Analysis, Biography and Self-Creation

Samer Frangie
A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y O F B E I RU T
Abstract Starting from the controversies surrounding Bourdieus political involvement, this article investigates the form of ethico-political involvement consistent with Bourdieus notion of reexivity. The argument begins by drawing the ethico-political dimensions of Bourdieus methodology, especially his notions of socio-analysis and reexivity. These latter emerge as the counterparts of Bourdieus politics of the eld, grounding the conversion of the gaze required for political action and presenting possibilities for social agents to comprehend, accept and even re-create their selves. Applying a dispositional reading to some of Bourdieus texts, the article proposes a new interpretation of the tense relation between Bourdieus biography and writings, consistent with the ethico-political reading of socio-analysis and reexivity. Bourdieus texts can be read as an example of a socio-analysis, a rhetorical strategy devised to enlist individuals into the painful exercise of rewriting their social biographies. Key words biography Bourdieu intellectual reexivity
Vou la mort, cette n qui ne peut tre prise pour n, lhomme est un tre sans raison dtre. Cest la socit, et elle seule, qui dispense, des degrs diffrents, les justications et les raisons dexister; cest elle qui, en produisant les affaires ou les positions que lon dit importantes, produit les actes et les agents que lon juge importants, pour eux-mmes et pour les autres, personnages objectivement et subjectivement assurs de leur valeur et ainsi arrachs lindiffrence et linsigniance. (Bourdieu, 1982: 512)
Bourdieus late political involvement generated considerable debates and controversies regarding his public interventions, the relationships between his academic work and political positions, and more generally, the nature of the relationships between the postures of the academic and the public intellectual (Mongin and Roman, 1998; Verds-Leroux, 1998; Grenfell, 2004; Kauppi, 2000; Swartz, 2003; Poupeau and Discepolo, 2004; Pinto, 2000).1 To a large extent, these debates
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431009103706
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European Journal of Social Theory 12(2)

were about the relations between politics and science, seen by many as necessarily tense and possibly compromising to the scientic integrity of the researcher. In the case of Bourdieu, this tense relation took the form of an opposition between his political involvement and his notion of reexivity. The consensus that seems to dominate this issue is that reexivity is limited to the social scientic endeavour, politics being motivated by different considerations, leading Karakayali to characterize the relationship between reexive sociology and Bourdieus political involvement as extrinsic; Bourdieus politics cannot be derived or related to his work on reexivity (2004: 361). Other commentators have interpreted this extrinsic relation as illustrating Bourdieus defection from his earlier commitment to science. Taking this debate as a starting point, this article investigates the form of political involvement consistent with reexivity. In other words, it attempts to describe the type of ethico-political position that can be deduced from Bourdieus theories, and more precisely his methodology. The argument of this article starts by identifying the ethico-political dimensions of the practice of socio-analysis, the underpinning of the notion of reexivity. The often disregarded potential for resistance and emancipation involved in the practice of socio-analysis raises the question of Bourdieus own interpretation of socio-analysis. To shed some light on this issue, the implications of reexivity regarding the way we read texts need to be fully drawn. Bourdieu, with his emphasis on reexivity, tempted his readers to try out his theories on his own writings, habitus and conclusions, generating an industry of Bourdieusian reading of Bourdieu. These readings located his analyses in their social contexts, i.e. the authors social position and trajectory in the academic and intellectual elds and the history and logic of these elds, undertaking a socio-genetic interpretation of texts and extracting their strategic dimensions. Yet, these attempts, conned to a conceptual, theoretical, logocentric reading (Brubaker, 2000: 33), miss important facets of Bourdieus writings, namely their practical and dispositional dimensions. It is the contention of this article that a dispositional reading of Bourdieu provides a perspective that illuminates the political potential of socio-analysis and illustrates Bourdieus own socio-analysis. The implication of this study is that Bourdieus methodology offers a blueprint for a reexive politics, illustrating an overlooked dimension of his political message, the act of self-creation implied by the ideas of socio-analysis and habitus. In other words, it is the modus operandi of his social scientic endeavour, rather than the symbolic capital associated with his position as a social scientist, that should guide our thinking about the political conclusions of Bourdieus work. Complementing rather than rejecting the conventional account of Bourdieus political project, this reading highlights the ethico-political undercurrent aiming at shaping individual habitus as a political act of resistance to social domination. This article concludes by presenting a sketch of an interpretation of the tense relation between Bourdieus biography and his writings (Jenkins, 2006; ReedDanahay, 2005), highlighting their interplay as an example of a political socioanalysis.
Frangie Bourdieus Reexive Politics

Bourdieus Politics: Field and Habitus At the later stage of his career, Bourdieu, breaking with his self-connement in the academic eld, became more politically involved, signing public petitions, participating in demonstrations and organizing collectives of intellectuals (Grenfell, 2004; Kauppi, 2000; Swartz, 2003). The ofcial date of Bourdieus entry into the political arena was in December 1995, when he demonstrated alongside striking workers in defence of the social security system, public services and welfare state.2 This position was anticipated with the 1993 publication of his bestseller La misre du monde, documenting the plight of those left out in an era of social transformation. In 1995, Bourdieu organized Raisons dagir, a publishing house providing progressive analyses to the wider public, including Sur la tlvision (1996), a critique of the elds of television and media production. Bourdieu gradually became the champion of the struggle against neo-liberal globalization, publishing in 2000, Les structures sociales de lconomie, a critique of neo-classical economics. Alongside his political interventions, Bourdieu was busy organizing collectives of intellectuals, aiming at protecting the autonomy of the elds of cultural, academic and intellectual production. Starting in 1995 and up until his death, Bourdieu became the central public intellectual in France, the modern heir of Zola and, paradoxically, Sartre. Bourdieus entry into politics and the break with his self-imposed connement in the academic eld was subject to numerous interpretations and critiques. Four broad lines of interpretation can be identied. The rst rejects the thesis of a rupture, seeing Bourdieu as having been politically involved all along his career, the modalities of the interventions changing according to the circumstances (Poupeau and Discepolo, 2002). The second view, more polemical, similarly rejects the thesis of a rupture to condemn both Bourdieus political involvement and scientic endeavour as being anti-liberal, deterministic, populist and even Stalinist. A third view attempts to salvage Bourdieus scientic work from his political positions by asserting a rupture in his trajectory, seeing his later political involvement as a renunciation of his earlier commitments to scientic integrity.3 The fourth line of interpretation, and one with which this article will engage, comes from authors who have questioned the relationship between Bourdieus science and politics. Illustrating this brand of critique, Karakayali argues that reexive sociology, Bourdieus main contributions to sociology, has little to offer beyond scholarly discourse and enterprise (2004). According to this argument, reexivity has an epistemological value but lacks the vision that could make it part of a wider emancipatory project, its potential for struggle being limited to science. The political impotence of reexivity is due to the fact that Bourdieu never broke with science and epistemology, limiting reexivity to the practice of the sociologist. The conclusion of this argument is that Bourdieus struggle against social injustice
is not intrinsic to reexive sociology . . . Bourdieu himself makes it clear that his political interventions stem from rage or from something like a sense of duty (Bourdieu,
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1998: vii) which clearly require little reexivity. Bourdieu uses his scientic capital not only with great care but also for the benet of disadvantaged groups. But there is no guarantee that reexive sociology will always be performed this way. (Karakayali, 2004: 361)
Yet, Bourdieu as a committed social scientist and Bourdieu as a vocal public intellectual were not two strangers, united solely by their temporal succession. As Poupeau and Discepolo have argued, Bourdieus work contains a political dimension illustrated by his numerous political interventions in a number of debates, ranging from Algeria in the 1960s to the reform of the public sector in the 1990s (2002, 2004). Moreover, Bourdieu addressed in various writings the working of the political eld, analyzing issues such as the modes of production of political opinions, the practice of delegation, the construction of a public opinion, the structure and logic of the political eld, the modes of production of the dominant ideology, the relations between political capital and other forms of capital, the modes of representation of dominated groups and the conditions of possibility of political action (Fritsch, 2000). But the main critique of the thesis of the rupture resides in the relationships between Bourdieus science and political involvement. In other words, whereas the above-mentioned argument pointed to the fact that Bourdieus political involvement predates the 1990s, the following part argues that there are close links between Bourdieus writings and the political positions he took. Bourdieus analysis of symbolic capital and violence provides one of the theoretical bridges with his later political interventions, and thus a continuity between his academic research and political involvement. But the main link between his theories and politics, or his academic and public postures, is his analysis of the logic of elds, endowing his political involvement with a reexive dimension. His analyses of the functioning of the scientic and the artistic elds provide the blueprint for his political interventions, resulting in a realpolitik of reason aiming at the instauration of social conditions conducive to the establishment of truth (Bourdieu, 1997).4 The political implications of these exemplar elds are the defence of elds autonomy, the guarantee of rationality and emancipation from the interventions of external forces or as Pinto puts it: that which follows more deeply from the immanent forces of the eld, rather than from external powers, is rational, and it is this that deserves to be preserved and developed (2000: 102). The danger represented by neo-liberalism and the encroachment of economic and political considerations on the autonomy of elds of cultural and intellectual production became the main targets for Bourdieus political involvement. But, more importantly, this strategy contained a reexive moment in its focus on the social conditions of possibility of intellectuals political interventions. Even at the height of his political period, Bourdieu was aware of the conditions that allowed him to full this role and thus directed his political interventions at defending them. In this respect, he avoided the self-gratifying tendency of thinking of the intellectual as a marginal, lonely, sometimes eccentric gure, who sacrices the advantage and comfort of power and social recognition for his unquenchable thirst for truth, or as Said described him, as an outsider, in a constant state of exile, whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, unwilling to accept

the visions of the world of the powerful and conventional (1994: 17). Bourdieu, on the contrary, remained aware of the matrix of social determinations and freedoms that grounded his political involvement, introducing a reexive turn into the posture of the public intellectual. As such, one can draw a tight t between Bourdieus writings and his political involvement and positions. Nevertheless, even if one nds relationships between Bourdieus theories and political positions, Karakayalis argument remains valid. Bourdieus later political involvement, as interpreted above, did not exhaust the political potential of his writings, nor gave reexivity its full due. Central to both these claims is the notion of the habitus, the missing element in his political thinking solely targeted at the elds structures. Thinking in terms of habitus introduces a signicant dose of scepticism regarding the emancipatory potential of knowledge, one of the central tenets of Bourdieus political involvement, and highlights the crucial mechanism of the conversion of the gaze required for political actions.5 Bourdieu attempted to circumvent this limitation by enlarging his political interventions to include the structures of the elds, the social conditions of possibility of strategic actions. Yet despite this reexive turn, the failure to consider the role of the habitus leads to similar shortcomings. Fields do not function independently of their corresponding habitus; even the scientic eld requires a scientic habitus to regulate behaviours, strategies and thus to ground the state of continuous upheaval that characterizes it. Moreover, ignoring the habitus misses its role in reproducing domination. The classifying schemes of the habitus are at the roots of the stable character of social life, transforming the social world from a set of disparate elds producing social objects into a highly structured space with a hierarchical distribution of practices and goods according to social positions. The stability that the habitus imparts to the social world is thus related to the process of naturalization of this social space and of the state of social domination that characterizes it. As such, any political strategy should account for the nature of the resulting habitus, and not only the elds structures. The consequences of ignoring the habitus have a parallel in the ambiguous denition of the political eld in Bourdieus writings. This ambiguity is grounded in the characteristic of this eld that sets it apart from the rest of the elds, namely its dependence on the popular verdict and thus the impossibility of complete closure. This characteristic is due to the nature of this elds objects of struggle, which are about the general principles of vision and division of the social world. As Bourdieu writes:
I have said in the beginning that the political eld can be described as a game in which the stakes are about the legitimate imposition of the principles of vision and division of the social world . . . The stakes in the political game are about the monopoly of the capacity to make see and make believe differently. (2000b: 678)
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The denition of the political as the general mode of vision and division of the social world has two main implications. The rst implication relates to the possibility of political action, which is about altering the ways social agents perceive and comprehend the social world. As such, political action starts with a rupture
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with the dominant social order presented as natural and common sense, with this cognitive subversion presupposing an objective crisis that suspend[s] the adherence to the common representation of the social world (Fritsch, 2000: 17). The second implication of this denition is to widen the scope of politics beyond the narrow connes of the political eld. Any intervention that might either change or question the dominant mode of vision and division of the social world becomes political. This denition of the political eld reformulates the question of political involvement as one concerned with altering modes of vision and division of the social world and the conditions for such a change in ones worldview. This reformulation takes us back to the notion of habitus and sheds some doubts on the claim that Bourdieus later political involvement represented the logical conclusion of his writings and exhausted their political potential. More importantly, it raises the question of the political potential of the notions of reexivity and socio-analysis, to which we now turn. Political Involvement in a Reexive Framework Identifying the set of political dispositions consistent with reexivity starts with probing the scope of reexivity itself in Bourdieus framework. Beginning with the question, What good does it do to the social that sociology liberates itself from scholastic fallacies?, Karakayali concludes that a reexive sociology can only struggle in the name of science, thus lacking the potential to be a source of progressive social change (2004: 360). Another way of rephrasing this question is to ask whether reexivity has any role to play regarding the perceptions and self-perceptions of social agents or whether it is limited to social scientists, being a methodological principle aimed at the epistemological solidity of social science. This issue boils down to the mode of acquiring reexivity in Bourdieus framework (Mouzelis, 2007). Whereas a crisis or a disruption between the habitus of a social agent and his location in the eld is usually the painful rst step towards acquiring reexivity, in the social scientic eld, this crisis can be remedied by practices of socio-analyses. As such, Bourdieus methodology, and more precisely his notion of socio-analysis, could offer clues for identifying forms of political involvement consistent with reexivity and ways of acquiring them. When deployed in the academic eld, socio-analysis allows, through the neutralization of the scholastic bias, the production of a better science. But this process, as Bourdieu often noted, has an ethico-political dimension. The conversion of the gaze implied by the exercises of socio-analysis presents possibilities for social agents to comprehend, accept and even change their social selves. Turning the scientic gaze back upon ourselves, writes Bourdieu, enables us to assume ourselves and even . . . to claim ourselves, offering the practitioners of socio-analysis the possibility of assuming their habitus without guilt or suffering (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 199). Socio-analysis allows its practitioners to understand the mixture of existential contingencies and social determinations that makes their disparate selves. It represents the active counterpart of the dis-

location of habitus and positions as the impetus for reexivity. Yet, even though it represents an alternative to this existential crisis, this transformation of the habitus, implied by the exercises of socio-analysis, is nonetheless a painful process of existential rupture and re-creation. This purication of a new birth was for Bourdieu both a sacrilege and a sacrice: an authentic socio-analysis cannot be undertaken without ripping the adherences and adhesions through which we usually belong to groups and without unmasking the self-deception, the lie to ourselves collectively held and encouraged which, in every society, is at the basis of the most sacred values, and through it, of all social existence (Bourdieu, 2004b: 93; 1982: 8, 32). The result of this tragic process of socio-analysis is to become a subject, to move from the mixture of existential contingencies and social determinations making the self towards the understanding and knowledge of a subject. The counterpart of Bourdieus realpolitik of reason is the process of individual socio-analysis, the condition for a political habitus. Seen from this perspective, Bourdieus politics is not only more revolutionary, but also more reexive in that it aims at transforming individual habitus in the direction of more reexivity, of providing social agents with tools to reect on their principles of social production and their imposed subjectivities and at grounding their agency in the constraints of the eld, negating both poles of the agency-structure opposition. Socio-analysis emerges as the set of spiritual exercises necessary for attaining autonomy. In the same way that the creativity of artists is located in and conditioned by specic elds constraints (Fowler, 2006), the autonomy of the social agent is similarly grounded in a specic relationship between dispositions and elds attributes. According to Bourdieu, socio-analysis is the process through which social agents can acquire autonomy, by comprehending the mixture of social determinations and existential contingencies that affect their selves, and thus by limiting the reach of social domination. The therapeutic dimension of socio-analysis and the resulting autonomy are grounded in Bourdieus analysis of social domination. Domination, in Bourdieus framework, works through the imposition of specic subjectivities on objective positions, naturalizing social domination and its reproduction. Social contextualization and denaturalization short-circuit this symbolic violence, contributing to the autonomy of social agents from imposed subjectivities. Moreover, as Bourdieu often noted, the reproduction of domination works through many channels, one of them being the emotional aspect of the habitus. The hierarchical stratication of society and its boundaries are partly grounded in bodily emotions, including shame, humiliation, timidity, anxiety and guilt (Bourdieu, 1997: 389). Even though the process of socioanalysis might not be a sufcient guarantee against domination, it might relieve social agents from the emotional burden associated with social stratication. By levelling the playground and grounding it in an objective structure, socio-analysis short-circuits the symbolic power of domination, and thus provides the bases for becoming an autonomous subject. Reading socio-analysis as an exercise in rupture and self-creation shares some similarities with the philosophy of the art of living or the practices of selffashioning, especially as espoused by Nehamas (1998) and Rorty (1999). Rejecting
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the dominant understanding of philosophy as a theoretical discipline, the tenants of this approach conceive of the philosophical endeavour as having a direct bearing on how we live our lives, aiming at their transformation; what matters is not the rational evaluation of philosophical views but the kind of person, the sort of self, one manages to construct as a result of accepting them (Nehamas, 1998: 12). Redescription, in this framework, replaces the attempt to nd philosophical foundations or establish theoretical models. Even though Bourdieu differs from this trend of philosophy regarding fundamental assumptions, contrasting them can highlight the redescriptive character of socio-analysis, implied by the practices of rephrasing of ones biography and social context, with reexivity in Bourdieus framework replacing authenticity as a description of the outcome of self-creation.6 Yet, if both approaches share redescription as a method, they differ in their characterization of the context of this practice and the benchmark used to evaluate it. Whereas, for Rorty, for example, imposed vocabularies are repressive per se, for Bourdieu, these vocabularies are repressive insofar as they are part of a wider system of social domination. For the philosophers of the art of living, the rejection of any totalizing vocabulary implies that the benchmark for evaluating the success of new vocabularies is aesthetic, having to do with their newness, individuality or authenticity. Socio-analysis with its focus on a sociological redescription would be replacing an imposed description by a new and unique vocabulary, which would be tantamount to the previous one in its unifying, totalizing and repressive consequences. This perception is not totally accurate. It is true that Bourdieus ontology is not characterized by a state of radical contingency, but by social constraints and necessities; what characterizes individuals in Bourdieus world are not their unique way of dealing with ones blind impress, but on the contrary, their homogenous responses to their social conditioning. In this respect, socio-analysis is not akin to the aesthetic proliferation of life forms that mirrors the radical openness of the social world, but resembles more a process of discovery of ones social conditions of possibility. Nevertheless, seeing these two forms of redescription as radically opposed is based on an underlying belief in the opposition between creation and discovery, an opposition that Bourdieu would reject or at least nuance. The duality of creation and discovery has often been conceptualized as pitting the individual act of ex nihilo creation against the practice of discovery aiming at uncovering essences. But Bourdieus analysis of the scientic or artistic elds contextualizes and nuances such an opposition.7 As an illustration of this interplay between creation and discovery or agency and constraints, Bourdieus own socio-analysis (2004b) displayed an articulation of creation and discovery that transcends the opposition mentioned above being an act of self-creation, highly dependent on the context and elds in which it is located. His socio-analysis, as an act of selfcreation, was highly dependent on the context and elds to which he belonged. Socio-analysis does not aim at uncovering some transhistorical principle of determination that, once uncovered, leads to emancipation. Rather, it aims at discovering the historical and eld-dependent social inuences that coalesce to form the individual specic habitus. A certain creativity is implied in this work of

selecting and combining the contingencies and historical determinations that compose ones social trajectory, a creativity not very different from the one involved in a literary enterprise. Socio-analysis has a dual function in Bourdieus theoretical apparatus, captured by Bouveresses description of its aim: to reconcile with oneself and with ones social property through a liberating anamnesis and to have a precious instrument . . . for the study of the social world (2003: 174). This liberating anamnesis, reached through practices of socio-analysis, represents the ethico-political dispositions that Bourdieu attempted to transmit through his writings. Rejecting the two poles of agency/creativity and determination/discovery, the exercises of socio-analysis emerge as a mixture of creativity and discovery, of dealing with contingencies and determination, and of selecting, and sometimes creating, ones social biography, a social biography that allows agents to reach a socially contextualized autonomy and to resist domination, or at least to mitigate its effects. In other words, politics cannot be reexive without reecting on the modes of political involvement it implies. And socio-analysis might offer a way to approach this process of political involvement, and the underlying conversion of the gaze required for political action in a way consistent with Bourdieus commitment to reexivity. Reexive Sociology: Reexive Reading and Socio-Analysis The redescriptive character of socio-analysis and its afnities with self-creation are hinted at by the implications of reexivity regarding the act of reading. Reexivity, in Bourdieus theoretical apparatus, is the principle that links the epistemological security of the social scientic endeavour to the practices of socio-analysis of the researcher as a cultural producer and to the analyses of the conditions of possibility of sociology as a discipline. Socio-analysis, the basis for a reexive sociology, starts with the moment of rupture with common sense and the reigning doxa, but more importantly involves a break with the scholastic bias which leads the social scientist to construct the social world as a set of signications to be interpreted and deciphered, rather than as concrete problems to be solved practically. Whereas the rst rupture requires self-criticisms and an awareness of ones social biography, the second requires a sociology of the intellectual and academic elds, in order to unearth the epistemological unconscious of the sociological discipline (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 3641). Nevertheless, reexivity is not limited to the social scientist undertaking research, but has implications for the modes of appropriating texts. In other words, reexivity not only inuences the methodologies for undertaking social scientic research but also the modes of appropriation of these texts. Reexive reading is grounded in the logic of Bourdieus theoretical work. As Brubaker argues, the idea of the habitus points toward a dispositional understanding of theory as habitus, and against the tendency to apply a conceptualist, theoretical, logocentric reading of Bourdieu (2000: 338). This dispositional
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understanding of theory is grounded in the way theory informs research in a Bourdieusian framework. As a social practice like others, Brubaker writes, social research is governed and informed by internalized dispositions, not by codied propositions, by the practical logic of the habitus, not by the theoretical logic set forth in treatises and textbooks (2000: 34). Theory, sociological work and criticisms are grounded in habitus, and thus have a dispositional anchorage, requiring readers to grasp them as sets of dispositions. Reexive reading is similarly grounded in the modes of production of texts in general, and Bourdieus texts in particular. Texts are intellectual products and strategies deployed in specic elds with concrete histories, reecting their authors position and trajectory in these elds. Bourdieus texts are dened by the interaction of his habitus, position in the eld and the history of this eld, and gain their strategic meaning from this interaction. A reexive reading provides a perspective for understanding this strategic meaning of Bourdieus texts. Lastly, this form of reading applies specically to Bourdieu who, according to Brubaker, used concepts not as logical bearers of meanings but as interventions aimed at communicating a certain theoretical stance or posture, and inculcating and producing certain dispositions and ways of looking at the world. Seen as sets of dispositions, texts acquire a new dimension, a dimension missed if one applies a logocentric reading. To paraphrase Marx, Bourdieus texts are not simply attempts at interpreting the world but more importantly are interventions aimed at changing it, by altering the ways in which we perceive the social world and construct it. Bourdieus theories are performative and not simply descriptive, their efciency being grounded in their impact on the readers dispositions. In this respect, these texts are political insofar as politics is about the different ways social agents perceive and make sense of the social world. The starting point of this reexive reading is the undoing of the socioanalysis that was at the roots of Bourdieus texts, by locating these texts in their double contexts, i.e. the social trajectory of their author and his position in the academic and intellectual elds, on one hand, and on the other, the historical development of the elds of reception and their relationships with other elds. Texts, in this respect, become the outcome of a process of construction whereby Bourdieu reconciled the creative project that was the consequence of his habitus with the predispositions of the anticipated eld of reception (Robbins, 2007: 89). This social-genetic understanding of texts does not negate the reading of texts on their own terms, but, on the contrary, supplements and contextualizes it.8 The authors social biography, including both his social trajectory and the dynamics of the elds of reception, emerges as one of the elements needed for an understanding of his theories as strategic interventions. This undoing mirrors the rst stage of socio-analysis, involving the rupture with common sense and doxa. The second moment of this reexive reading, mirroring the moment of rupture with the scholastic bias, is the break with the theoretical apprehension of texts and involves the practical appropriation of the dispositions deployed and implied by the texts. Bourdieus texts, in this second moment, become designators of particular dispositions, ways of seeing the world and intellectual habits. Reading texts as sets of dispositions goes beyond the structuralist tendency of

grasping them as logical claims and theories and the phenomenological tendency of reading them as the outcomes of the thinking of isolated agents. This mode of appropriation of texts is itself practical, involving the productive consumption of Bourdieus text and requiring the reader to master practically, to incorporate into his or her habitus, the thinking tools that Bourdieu made available in the form of concepts, propositions, and theories (Brubaker, 2000: 39). But mastering practically these dispositions and incorporating them in ones habitus is not simply a matter of rational assent and intellectualist reading, mirroring the critique made above of the political potential of knowledge. It requires a practical process of training, a labour of putting concepts into practice, of repeating the exercises until the dispositions become internalized in the habitus. Reading Bourdieus texts are akin, in this respect to Hadots spiritual exercises, a voluntary and personal practice aiming at operating a transformation of the individual and the self (2001: 145). Such a reading of Bourdieus texts is consistent with his rejection of the theoretical appropriations of his work As he wrote: I blame most of my readers for having considered as theoretical treatises . . . works that, like gymnastics handbooks, were intended for exercise, or even better, for being put into practice (as cited in Karakayali, 2004: 361). Texts, in this respect, are attempts at forming rather than informing the readers, with the key to this difference located in the mode of appropriation of these texts. A reexive reading of Bourdieu, as the next section will argue, provides a perspective for grasping the ethico-political implications of socio-analysis as undertaken by Bourdieu. Bourdieus as an Example: Biography, Theory and Politics Bourdieu used different rhetorical strategies to convey his message. As Brubaker describes Bourdieus style: Products of his intellectual habitus, [his texts] are intended to have an effect on ours. Hence Bourdieus elaborate attempts to control, through a variety of editorial, syntactical, and rhetorical devices, the manner in which we read (2000: 38). Authors aiming to persuade, transform, produce an effect of formation, or in other words, to affect the readers dispositions and habitus, need to elicit in their readers real assent, rather than notional assent, to the painful goal of self-transformation (Hadot, 2001: 10, 102). The point being that such ethico-political transformations often involve more than rational persuasion and intellectualist agreement alone, requiring techniques of description, effect of formation and exercises aiming at altering one worldview and habitus. Such a goal presupposes a different role for intellectuals than the one presenting them as a locus of resistance to power, as Bourdieu was often described. Facing truth with power, standing up to vested interests or unmasking power relations become irrelevant when one is faced with the task of providing individuals with tools for socio-analysis and self-creation. A different posture emerges for the intellectual, more akin to the posture of the artist, concerned with providing individuals with an example on how to lead ones life and opening up possibilities for different life forms. In line with the analysis presented by Rorty
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and Nehamas, intellectuals, artists or authors acquire a new dimension in this framework, that of an example rather than that of a teacher or a gure of resistance. The selves created by philosophers, artists or authors can function as an example that others . . . can either imitate or avoid. It is a sort of blueprint that others with a similar purpose can identify with, ignore, or deny as they form their own selves (Nehamas, 1998: 3). The role of intellectuals as example provides their biographies, understood as the biography created through their writings, with an ethico-political dimension in illustrating the ways authors manage to transcend, fashion or transform their social determinations. It is this movement, implied by a biography as the passage from the social necessities and constraints of a eld to the creative production of a subject, that provides the example for others to emulate, reject, work with or ignore. A reexive reading of Bourdieu aims at capturing his socio-analysis, or the dispositions he deployed and often altered in his writings. The subtext of his writings and the scattered autobiographical references offer an opening for this reexive reading, by hinting at Bourdieus ongoing socio-analysis. As ReedDanahay illustrated in her Locating Bourdieu (2005), Bourdieus uvres were to a large extent self-referential and constituted a description of his social milieu and origins. But in addition to being self-referential, his writings are an indication of an underlying socio-analysis connecting his texts, culminating in Bourdieus self-proclaimed socio-analysis Esquisse pour une Auto-Analyse (2004b). Bourdieus project of individual self-creation was similarly hinted at through the multiple psychoanalytical descriptions of his endeavour. Bourdieus initial revolt was not framed in metanarratives of capitalism or modernity, but was initially apprehended in psychological and emotional terms and related to the symbolic violence he faced due to his dissonant dispositions and positions: a feeling of revolt based on debt and deception toward academic consecration, a feeling of insecurity related to his status as a miraculous survivor, a feeling of despair and emptiness related to his ambiguous relation to himself and the feeling of resentment, always present in the background of Bourdieus socio-analysis (2004b). Taking his last book as the perspective from which to assess Bourdieus socio-analysis, the ideas of rupture, estrangement, and resentment appear fundamental to Bourdieus selfperception and socio-analysis. Be it in his childhood in Barn, his school years, or his career, Bourdieu described himself as a marginal torn between his social origins, on one hand, and, on the other, his ascending trajectory and social position. This situation was described in terms such as porte--faux, transfuge ls de transfuge, and habitus cliv (2004b: 76, 109, 130). This sense of not belonging shaped his life decisions, guiding him toward sociology, the pariah discipline and away from philosophy, with its scholastic and distant relation to the social world, affecting his personal relations, leading him away from the gure of Sartre and closer to that of Canguilhem, and shaping his methodology and political attitude, always going in the opposite direction of the dominant models and modes in the eld (2004b). The socio-analytical undertone of Bourdieus writings is illustrated by the concomitance of Bourdieu as a social agent described through the various bio-

graphical remarks and Bourdieu as a subject undertaken a social scientic research. Regarding biographies, Bourdieu wrote:
I think that I could create two intellectual biographies for myself that were completely different one which made all my successive choices appear to be the product of a project directed in a methodical way, since the beginning; the other, also completely accurate, that described a chain of change, of more or less fortuitous encounters, happy or unhappy. (As cited in Reed-Danahay, 2005: 22)
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The move from one biography to the other, from the more or less fortuitous encounters to the project directed in a methodical way, from the disparate contingent self to the consistent subject, represents the ethico-political dimension of socio-analysis and the individual counterpart of a reexive politics. By providing the biographical undertones of his uvre, Bourdieu presented his own process of socio-analysis, undertaken over the course of his social trajectory. His theoretical models allowed him to provide a perspective through which to comprehend his habitus, in terms different than resentment. His writings, in addition to their sociological worth, were a way to come to terms with his biography, or as he puts it, the task of sociology was to strip the terrorism of resentment from its objective and subjective awlessness (Bourdieu, 1982: 289). For instance, Bourdieu described his work in Barn as a controlled return of the repressed, allowing him to re-appropriate a part of himself, of clarifying his relation to his social origins away from the initial feelings of guilt and shame (Bourdieu, 2004b: 82; Reed-Danahay, 2005: 122). Bourdieus writings on education were similarly justied by the need to gain rational control over the disappointment felt by an oblate faced with the annihilations of the truths and values of which he was destined and dedicated (Reed-Danahay, 2005: 27). The biographical components of Bourdieus writings do not imply that his work can be reduced to the interests of his biography, in a crude Marxian reading. On the contrary, as Jenkins noted in relation to Bourdieus writings on Barn, the successive renements of theoretical concepts were accompanied by a growth in retrospective understanding of his primary experiences with his object of study (2006). His socio-analysis can be read as different attempts to transubstantiate his primary experiences into social scientic interventions, creating a perspective on the world where he could reconcile his split habitus. And it is through this double dimension of socio-analysis, as both a tool for social research and a way to deal with ones blind impress, that Bourdieu emerges as an example of a successful socio-analysis, one that can serve as a benchmark for others to follow. The various autobiographical comments represent Bourdieus rhetorical strategy to enlist individuals into undertaking the painful exercises of rewriting their social biographies by positing himself as an example of a socioanalysis.9 Akin to Rortys Proust who became autonomous by explaining to himself why others were not authorities, but simply fellow contingencies (1999: 102), Bourdieu became autonomous by socially grounding his life and denaturalizing it. Whereas the eld dimension of the reexive politics was captured by Bourdieus later political involvement and his theorization of elds and their
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functioning, the habitus dimension of this politics is illustrated by the various references to autobiography, transmitted by the gure of Bourdieu as an example of a successful socio-analysis. His later political involvements aimed at altering the structures of the elds of intellectual production. His personal autobiographical message aimed at questioning the symbolic violence implied by the imposed subjectivities, offering ways and examples of how to live this domination in a milder way and possibly to resist it by creating a new perspective on the social world. The existing accounts of Bourdieus political involvement overlook its reexive dimension, positing a rupture between Bourdieu as a social scientist and Bourdieu as a public intellectual. Rejecting this dichotomy in apprehending Bourdieus politics, this article posited the notion of socio-analysis as a fruitful way of grasping Bourdieus reection on political involvement. This interpretation of the notion of socio-analysis is supplemented by a reexive reading of Bourdieus texts that illustrates his own socio-analysis. Foucaults project, according to Nehamas, had a public signicance in providing a voice to excluded and oppressed groups through the transformation of his own self (1998: 180). Bourdieu, to a large extent, provided the same example. Through the movement between his biography and his writings, and the resulting creation of a perspective on the social world that allowed him to smooth out the contradictions in his own life, Bourdieu provided an example on how one can deal with the social determinations and existential contingencies that compose ones self. Lacking the assurance, naivety and innocence of those whose life was conned in homogenous social worlds, Bourdieu faced the emptiness and bleakness of the death struggle for a symbolic life or death in all its harshness and despair. By creating a perspective on this world, through which one like him will not only t, but fully belong, Bourdieu managed to tolerate his social existence. It is this message, this disposition that Bourdieu attempted to share with others by transforming their gaze and forcing them to re-invent themselves as fully social subject. As Bourdieu writes:
Nothing will make me happier than to have succeeded in making part of my readers recognize their experiences, difculties, interrogations, sufferings, etc., in mine and that they take from this realist identication, . . . ways to do and live a bit better what they live and do. (2004b: 142)
Notes
1 I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. 2 The rupture involved in this reading between a sociological period and a political period has been challenged by a number of authors, for whom Bourdieu has always been involved in politics. Conceding that this date should not be seen as a rupture, pitting two entirely different postures, one can make the claim that Bourdieus political involvement became more prominent in the 1990s, emerging as the major public intellectual in France. For a critique of the rupture thesis, see Poupeau and Discepolo (2004) and for an interpretation of the rupture, see Swartz (2003). 3 For a review of these critiques, see Swartz (2003).

4 The scientic eld, characterized by its historical autonomy, provides the conditions for linking social recognition to discussion and scrutiny, thus leaving little room for the working of the doxa (Bourdieu, 1975). The dominant principle in this eld is one of continuous upheaval, whereby the oppositions between continuity and upheaval, and revolutionary and normal phases, are weakened. This state of continuous upheaval is at the antipodes of the reproduction of learned elds, characterized by the reign of doxa. A similar functioning guides the logic of the artistic eld, as argued by Fowler (2006). The hardly-won autonomy of the eld of artistic production in the nineteenth century provides the grounding for the main attribute of this eld, namely the interplay between the possibility of agency and its limits. 5 Bouveresse, commenting on this political aspect of Bourdieus project, confesses having always been more sceptical than Bourdieu on the possibility of reaching a transformation of the social world through a better knowledge of its governing mechanisms (2003: 367). Bourdieu himself showed signs of scepticism regarding the political potential of knowledge, suggesting at times the need for a counter-disciplining of bodies as a way to transform the dominated habitus (1997: 248). 6 Despite the few similarities Bourdieu shares with this trend of philosophy, there are deep differences, which make any straightforward comparison difcult, the main one being the relation to truth. The proponents of this approach take as their starting point the contingency and radical plurality that characterize the human condition. Self-fashioning becomes the ethical counterpart of this ontological reality; true selves are true in the sense of being autonomous and authentic, the danger coming from any unifying, totalizing and nal vocabularies that might limit the potential scope of life possibilities. This analysis leads the practitioners of the art of living to think about their self-fashioning practices as unrelated or even antithetical to political goals. Rorty makes the strongest argument against imposing political goals on acts of self-creation, seeing this combination as having disastrous consequences, as exemplied by Nietzsche and Heidegger. This impossibility is grounded in the nature of the two vocabularies making up the private and the public: The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium of argumentative exchange (Rorty, 1999: xiv). 7 The two elds where creation occurs are the scientic and artistic elds, both having a history and logic of functioning. Their creative potential and the agency of the agents in these elds are not opposed to the structural rules of the eld but are based on a specic articulation of these rules. In other words, the act of creation does not emerge from the lone individual in a spirit of freedom, but from specic conjunctures, grounded in a certain history. This interpretation does not explain the act of creativity per se, but contextualizes the opposition between creativity and discovery, as a way to introduce some nuances in it. 8 As Robbins writes: We have to consider his texts both tautegorically and contextually, and this should involve us in specifying the rules of the objective discipline within which we are seeking to make an evaluation of his work, as well as specifying the social ontological roots of his and our deployment of that discipline in seeking to comprehend life experiences. (2007: 89) 9 To some extent, the individual aspect of a reexive politics can only be hinted at, its full specication limiting the scope of creativity that is at its core. As Nehamas warns: Imitation . . . is to become someone on ones own; but the someone one becomes must be different from ones model (1998: 10).
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References
Bourdieu, Pierre (1973) The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge, Social Science Information 12: 5380. (1975) The Specicity of the Scientic Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason, Social Science Information 14: 1947. (1979) La Distinction. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. (1982) Leon sur la Leon. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. (1985) The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups, Theory and Society 14: 72344. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. (1993) La Misre du monde. Paris: Editions du Seuil. (1994) Raisons Pratiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil. (1996) Sur la tlvision. Paris: Editions Raisons dagir. (1997) Mditations Pascaliennes. Paris: Editions du Seuil. (1998) Acts of Resistance. Cambridge: Polity. (2000a) Les structures sociales de lconomie. Paris: Editions du Seuil. (2000b) Propos sur le champ politique. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. (2004a) Si le monde social mest supportable, cest parce que je peux mindigner, in Entretien avec Antoine Spire. Paris: Editions de lAube. (2004b) Esquisse pour une Auto-Analyse. Paris: Editions Raisons dAgir. Bourdieu, Pierre, Chamboredon, Jean-Claude and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1983) Le Mtier de sociologue. Paris: Mouton Editeur. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loc J.D. (1992) An Invitation to Reexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bouveresse, Jacques (2003) Bourdieu, Savant & Politique. Marseilles: Agone. Brubaker, Rogers (2000) Social Theory as Habitus, in Derek Robbins (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 3353. London: Sage Publications. Fowler, Bridget (2006) Autonomy, Reciprocity and Science in the Thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Theory, Culture & Society 23: 99117. Fritsch, Philippe (2000) Introduction, in Propos sur le champ politique. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Grenfell, Michael (2004) Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur. London: Continuum. Hadot, Pierre (2001) La philosophie comme manire de vivre: Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson. Paris: Editions Albin-Michel. Jenkins, Tim (2006) Bourdieus Barnais Ethnography, Theory, Culture & Society 23: 4572. Karakayali, Nedim (2004) Reading Bourdieu with Adorno: The Limits of Critical Theory and Reexive Sociology, Sociology 38: 35168. Kauppi, Niilo (2000) The Sociologist as Moraliste: Pierre Bourdieus Practice of Theory and the French Intellectual Tradition, SubStance 29: 721. Mongin, Olivier and Roman, Jol (1998) Le populisme version Bourdieu ou la tentation du mpris, Esprit 244: 15875. Mouzelis, Nicos (2007) Habitus and Reexivity: Restructuring Bourdieus Theory of Practice, Sociological Research Online, 12. Nehamas, Alexander (1998) The Art of Living: Socratic Reections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pinto, Louis (2000) A Militant Sociology: The Political Commitment of Pierre Bourdieu, in Bridget Fowler (ed.) Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Poupeau, Franck and Discepolo, Thierry (2002) Pierre Bourdieu: Interventions 19612001: Science Sociale et Action Politique. Marseilles: Agone Contre-Feux. (2004) Scholarship with Commitment: On the Political Engagements of Pierre Bourdieu, Constellations 11: 7696. Reed-Danahay, Deborah (2005) Locating Bourdieu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Robbins, Derek (2007) Sociology as Reexive Science: On Bourdieus Project, Theory, Culture & Society 24: 7798. Rorty, Richard (1999) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward W. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage. Swartz, David L. (2003) From Critical Sociology to Public Intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and Politics, Theory and Society 32: 791823. Verds-Leroux, Jeannine (1998) Le Savant et la politique: Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: Bernard Grasset.
Samer Frangie is a visiting professor at the Center for Arab and Middle East Studies at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. His research interests span the elds of social theory, political economy and the history and politics of the Middle East. His current research is in the eld of contemporary Arab political theory. Address: Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, American University of Beirut, P.O. Box 110236/CAMES, Riad El-Solh/Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon. [email: samerfrangie@gmail.com]
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Bourdieu's Reflexive Politics: Socio-Analysis, Biography and Self-Creation

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European Journal of Social Theory 12(2): 213229