The Scholastic Point of View Author(s): Pierre Bourdieu Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp.

380-391 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656183 Accessed: 30/06/2010 01:47
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. 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.

Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Anthropology.

http://www.jstor.org

The Scholastic Point of View

Pierre Bourdieu
College de France

final to of and [Note:Thistextis the transcription Bourdieu's address rejoinder his Sinn"("Taste,Strategies on critics,Conference "Geschmack, Strategien, praktiker andthe Logicof Practice"), held at the FreieUniversitat, Berlin,23-24 October 1989.Translated theFrench LoicJ. D. Wacquant.] from by My scientifichabitushas been exposed to so many stimuliby everythingthat has been said that I would have a lot to say, perhapstoo much, and that I run the risk of being a bit confused and confusing. I would like to organizemy reactions to what I have heardaroundtwo or threethemes. I would like firstto analyze what, borrowingan expressionof Austin, I will call the "scholastic point of view," the point of view of the skhole, that is, the academicvision. Whatdoes the fact of thinkingwithin a scholastic space, an academic space, imply? What does our thinkingowe to the fact that it is produced within an academic space? Isn't our deepest unconsciousrelatedto the fact that we thinkin such an academicspace? This would be the firstquestion. Fromthere, I will try to give some indicationson the particular problem(it aroundthe notion of mimesis was presentthroughout discussion, particularly the but also, obviously, this morning, in the presentationof Jacques Bouveresse of [1989]) thatthe understanding practiceposes and which makes for such a difficulttask for the humansciences. Does the very ambitionof understanding pracand tice makeany sense? And what is involved in understanding knowing a practice with an approachthat is intrinsicallytheoretical? Then, if time allows, I would like to raise the issue that has been up in the air since the birth of the social sciences: the problem of the relations between the undermines foundations reasonandhistory.Isn't sociology, which apparently for of producinginstruments of reasonand therebyits own foundations,capable a rationaldiscourse and even of offering techniquesfor waging a politics forging here of reason, a Realpolitikof reason?The scope of the problematicI adumbrate to is disproportionate the time at my disposal. This is why I welcome the idea of "workshop," which fits perfectly what I want to do and can do today. Firstpoint: the "scholastic view." This is an expressionthat Austin (1962) uses in passing in Sense and Sensibilia and for which he gives an example: the use particular of languagewhere, insteadof graspingand mobilizingthe meaning of a word thatis immediatelycompatiblewith the situation, we mobilize and ex380

SCHOLASTICPOINTOF VIEW 381

amine all the possible meaningsof that word, outside of any referenceto the situation. This example is very significantand I think that one can tease out of it the essentials of what the scholastic view is. The scholastic view is a very peculiar point of view on the social world, on language, on any possible object of thought thatis made possible by the situationof skhole, of leisure, of which the schoola word which also derives from skhole-is a particular form, as an institutionalized situationof studiousleisure. Adoptionof this scholastic point of view is the admissionfee, the custom right tacitly demandedby all scholarlyfields; the neutralizingdisposition(in Husserl's [1983] sense) is, in particular,the condition of the academicexercise as a gratuitousgame, as a mentalexperiencethat is an end in and of itself. I believe indeed thatwe should take Plato's (1973) reflectionson skholevery seriouslyandeven his famous expression, so often commentedupon, spoudaiospaizein, "to play seriously." The scholastic point of view of which Austin speaks cannot be separatedfrom the scholastic situation, a socially instituted situationin which one can play seriously and take ludic things seriously.
Homo scholasticus or homo academicus is someone who is paid to play seriously;

placedoutsidethe urgencyof a practicalsituationandoblivious to the ends which are immanentin it, he or she earnestlybusies herself with problemsthat serious people ignore-actively or passively. To producepracticesor utterancesthat are context-free,one must dispose of time, of skhole and also have this disposition to play gratuitous games which is acquiredand reinforcedby situationsof skhole such as the inclinationand the ability to raise speculative problems for the sole pleasureof resolving them, and not because they are posed, often quite urgently, but by the necessities of life, to treatlanguage not as an instrument as an object of contemplationor speculation. Thuswhatphilosophers,sociologists, historians,and all those whose profession it is to thinkand/orspeak aboutthe world have the most chance of overlookthat ing arethe social presuppositions are inscribedin the scholasticpointof view, what, to awakenphilosophersfromtheirslumber,I shall call by the nameof scholastic doxa or, better,by the oxymoronof epistemicdoxa: thinkersleave in a state of unthought(impense, doxa) the presuppositionsof their thought, that is, the social conditionsof possibilityof the scholasticpoint of view andthe unconscious dispositions, productiveof unconscious theses, which are acquiredthrough an academicor scholasticexperience, often inscribedin prolongationof an originary (bourgeois)experience of distance from the world and from the urgency of necessity. In contradistinction with Plato's (1973) lawyer, or Cicourel's (1989) physician, we have all the time in the world, all our time, and this freedom from urgency, fromnecessity-which often takes the formof economic necessity, due to the convertibilityof time into money-is made possible by an ensemble of social and economic conditions, by the existence of these supplies of free time that accumulatedeconomic resourcesrepresent(Weber [1978] notes in Wirtschaftund Gesellschaft that the primaryaccumulationof political capital appearswith the notablewhen the latterhas amassedsufficientresourcesto be able to leave aside, for a time, the activitythatprovideshis meansof subsistenceor to have somebody

382 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY

replace him). This reminderof the economic and social conditions of the scholastic postureis not designed to condemnor to instill a culpabilitycomplex. The logic in which I reason is not that of conviction or denunciation(the task here is not to judge of this as good or bad) but that of epistemologicalquestioning. This is a fundamental epistemologicalquestionsince it bearson the epistemic posture inscribedin the fact of thinkingthe world, of retiring itself, on the presuppositions from the world and from action in the world in orderto think that action. What we want to know is in what ways this withdrawal,this retirement,this retreat impacton the thoughtthatthey make possible and therebyon what we think. Thus, for instance, if it is truethatthe conditionof possibility of everything that is producedin fields of culturalproduction(Bourdieu 1983a) is this sort of bracketingof temporalemergency and of economic necessity (as can easily be seen in the use of language:I do not use languageto do somethingwith it, I use languageto raise questions about language), if it is true that I am in a universe which is thatof gratuitousness,of finalitywithoutpurpose,of aesthetics, is it not understandable I should understandaesthetics so wrongly? Indeed-this is that what I wantedto tell Jules Vuillemin yesterday-there are questions that we do not ask of aestheticsbecause the social conditions of possibility of our aesthetic questioningare alreadyaesthetic, because we forget to questionall the nonthetic of aestheticpresuppositions all aesthetictheses . . . You may wonderwhy, being a sociologist, I shouldplay the partof the philosopher. Partly, of course, it is in homage to my philosopherfriends who have convenedhere. But it is also because I am obliged to do so. I think that to raise such questionson the very natureof the scientific gaze is an integralpartof scientific work. These questionshave been thrustupon me, outside of any intentor tastefor purespeculation,in a numberof researchsituationswhere to understand my materialsI was compelled to reflect upon the scholarly mode of knowledge (Bourdieu1990a). Thus I discoveredthatthe scholastic vision destroysits object every time it is appliedto practicesthat are the productof the practicalview and which, consequently,arevery difficultto thinkof, or areeven practicallyunthinkable for science . . . I believe that there is a sort of incompatibilitybetween our scholarly mode of thinkingand this strangething thatpracticeis. To apply to practicea mode of thinkingwhich presupposesthe bracketingof practicalnecessity and the use of instruments thoughtconstructedagainstpractice,such as game theory, the theof practiceas such. Sciory of probability,etc., is to forbidourselves to understand what it is to be a scientist or a scholar, entists or scholarswho have not analyzed who have not analyzedwhat it means to have a scholastic view and to find it natural,put into the minds of agents their scholasticview. This epistemocentricfallacy can be found, for instance, in Chomsky (1972), who operatesas if ordinary is Grammar a typicalproductof the scholasticpoint speakerswere grammarians. of view andone could, buildingon the workof Vygotsky (1962), show thatskhole is what allows us to move from primarymastery to secondary mastery of language, to accede to the meta: meta-discourse,meta-practice.Thefundamental
anthropological fallacy consists in injecting meta- into practices. This is what

SCHOLASTICPOINTOF VIEW 383

Chomskydoes; this is also what Levi-Strauss(1969) does when he plays on the notion of rule (see Bourdieu 1986a, 1986b). To substitutekinship strategiesfor kinship rules is not to effect a simple, and somewhat gratuitous,philosophical conversion. It is to constructthe object differently, to ask differentquestions of informants,to analyze marriagesdifferently. Instead of being content with recording, via genealogies, marriages reduced to a kinship relation between spouses, I mustgatherfor each weddingall the data-and therearea lot of themthat may have entered, consciously or unconsciously, in the strategies:the age difference between spouses, differences in wealth, materialand symbolic, between the two families, the legacy of past economic and political relations, etc. And I must in particular treat kinship exchanges quite differently. Where LeviStrausssees an algebra,we must see a symbolic economy. And to effect this theoretical conversion, we must take a theoreticalpoint of view on the theoretical point of view; we must realize that the anthropologistis not, when faced with marriage,in the positionof the head of householdwho wishes to marryhis daughbracketsall practicalinterestsand ter, and to marryher well. The anthropologist stakes. This is ratherobvious in the case of the ethnographer workingin a foreign culture:her situationas an outsidersuffices to puther in a quasi-theoretical, quasischolasticpointof view. Forthe sociologist, however, it is much less obvious and he can easily forget the gap that separatesthe interest that he may have in the school system as a scholar who simply wants to understand and to explain, and thatconsequentlyleads him to set a "pure" gaze on the functioningof the mechanisms of differentialelimination according to culturalcapital, and the interest thathe has in this same system when he acts as a fatherconcernedwith the future of his children. The anthropologist,just like the sociologist, aims at an understandingthatis its own end, this because, as we sometimessay, "ils n'en ont rien a faire," "they have no use for it"; they are, in a sense, indifferentto the game they study. The very idea of matrimonialstrategyand of interest(the interestin maximizingthe materialor symbolic profits obtained throughmarriage)immediately comes to mind when you startthinkingas an agent acting within cultural traditionswhere the bruntof processes of accumulationor dilapidationof (economic or symbolic) capitalwork themselves out via matrimonial exchanges. We have come a long way from the algebraistanthropologistwho draws up genealogies in the hope of establishingrules for which he has no use in practice. The same applies to myth or to ritual, and in a way afortiori. Following the Durkheimand Mauss (1963) of PrimitiveClassification,Levi-Strauss(1968) has caused anthropologyto make immeasurableprogress by striving to capturethe logic of mythicalnarrativesor ritualacts. But, to stay in line with currentrepresentationsof science, he borrowedhis instruments knowledge from the side of of AndreWeil-and he built formal systems algebra-and from the mathematician that, though they account for practices, in no way provide the raison d'etre of practices,theirtrueexplanatoryprinciple. It is only on conditionthat we take up the point of view of practice-on the basis of a theoreticalreflectionon the theoreticalpoint of view as scholasticpoint of view, as a nonpractical point of view, founded upon the neutralizationof practicalinterests and practicalstakes-that

384 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY

we have some chance of graspingthe truthof the specific logic of practice. Ritual action, which structural anthropologysituateson the side of algebra, is in fact a gymnasticsor a dance (one goes fromrightto left, or fromleft to right, one throws above the left or the right shoulder)and follows a practicallogic, that is, a logic thatis intelligible,coherent,but only up to a certainpoint (beyondwhich it would no longerbe "practical"), and orientedtowardpracticalends, that is, the actualizationof wishes, of desires (of life or of death)and, throughthem, of the social structuresthat have producedthese dispositions. Here again, the change in the theory of practiceprovoked by theoreticalreflectionon the theoreticalpoint of view, on the practicalpoint of view, and on their profounddifferences, is not purely speculative:it is accompaniedby a drasticchange in the practicaloperations of researchand by quite tangible scientific profits. For instance, one is led to pay attentionto propertiesof ritual practice that structuralist logicism would incline to push aside or to treatas meaninglessmisfiringsof the mythicalalgebra, and particularly polysemic realities, underdetermined indeterminate,not to or to of partialcontradictions of the fuzziness thatpervadethe whole system and speak and account for its flexibility, its openness, in short everything that makes it in "practical"and thus gearedto respondat the least cost (in particular terms of logical search)to the emergencies of ordinaryexistence and practice(see "Irresistible Analogy" in Bourdieu 1990a:200-270). In short,to play on a famoustitle of Ryle's, I would say thatignoringeverythingthatis implicatedin the "scholastic point of view" leads to the most serious epistemologicalmistakein the social sciences, namely, thatwhich consists in putting "a scholarinside the machine," in picturingall social agents in the image of the scientist (of the scientist reasoning on human practiceand not of the acting scientist, the scientist in action) or, more precisely, to place the models that the scientistmust constructto accountfor practicesinto the consciousness of agents, to operateas if the constructionsthat the scientist must produce to understand practices, to account for them, were the main determinants,the actual cause of practices. The rationalcalculatorthat the advocates of RationalAction Theory portrayas the principleof humanpractices is no less absurd-even if this does not strikeus as much, perhapsbecause it flattersour "spiritualpoint of honor"thanthe angelus rector, the far-seeingpilot to which some pre-Newtonianthinkers attributed regulatedmovementof the planets. the One would need here to push the analysis furtherand to trackdown all the scientificmistakes that derive from what could be called the scholasticfallacy, such as the fact of asking interviewees to be their own sociologists (as with all questionsof the type: "According to you, how many social classes are there?") for lack of having questioned the questionnaireor, better, the situation of the questionnaire designer who has the leisure or the privilege to tear herself away fromthe evidences of doxa to raise questions. Or worse:the fact of asking survey respondents questionsto which they can always respondby yes or no but which they do not raise and could not ask themselves (that is, truly produce as such) unless they were predisposedand prepared theirsocial conditionsof existence by to take up a "scholastic point of view" on the social world (as in so many ques-

SCHOLASTICPOINTOF VIEW 385

tions of political theory). We would also need to uncover all the unnoticedtheoretical effects producedby the mere use of instrumentsof thought that, having been producedin a "scholastic situation," reproducein theirfunctioningthe presuppositionsinscribedin the social conditions of their construction,such as the bracketingof time, of temporalurgency, or the philosophy of gratuitousness,of the neutralization practicalends. of It is at this juncture, for instance, that we would have to question, in the perspectiveput forthby GunterGebauerand ChristophWulff (1989), the effects produced,in and throughtheir very use, by the most ordinaryinstrumentsof the scholarlytradition: writing, as shown by the operationof recordingand transcribing of an interviewor a dialogue, effects or makes possible a synchronizationof the successive momentsin the linearunfoldingof discourse, therebycreatingthe conditions of possibility (as we see with Socrates) of the logical critique of argumentationbut tending also, when we forget these effects, to destroy this fundamentalpropertyof practiceor of speech: their embeddednessin duration.(For instance, the structural analysis of a poem, which synchronizessuccessive mooften thanksto the use of a spatial schema, causes an essentialpropertyof ments, readingto disappear,namely, that it unfolds in time, which makes it possible to createeffects of surpriseas frustrated expectation, etc.) Likewise, by "simultaneizing" the successive moments of social processes, all the techniquesthat the routinely utilizes, such as the two-by-two table analyzed by Jack ethnographer Goody (1977) or, more generally, genealogies, kill the properlystrategicdimension of practiceswhich is relatedto the existence, at every moment, of uncertainif ties, indeterminations, only subjectiveones. In sum, we must carryout a veritable critiqueof scholarly or scholastic reason to uncover the intellectualistbias thatis inscribedin the most ordinaryinstruments intellectualwork (we would of have to includealso mathematical signs) and in the posturewhich is the tacit condition of theirproductionand of their utilization. When we unthinkinglyput to work our most ordinarymodes of thinkingall those, for instance, which underpinthe most elemental logical operationswe inflictuponourobjecta fundamental adulteration we see very clearlytoday (as when we try to apply logic to naturallanguages), which can go all the way to pure
and simple destruction and that remains unnoticed as such. The same is true when

we apply beyond their conditions of historical or social validity (leading to anachronismor to class ethnocentrism)concepts that, as Kant (1952) put it, seem to "pretendto universal validity" because they are producedin particularconditionswhose particularity eludes us. How could we not see-to be more Kantian than Kant, and than my friend Jules Vuillemin (1989)-that the disinterested game of sensitiveness, the pureexercise of the faculty of feeling, in short, the socalled transcendental of sensitivity presupposeshistorical and social condiuse tions of possibility and that aesthetic pleasure, this pure pleasure which "every manoughtto be able to experience," is the privilegeof those who have had access to the conditionsin which such a "pure" dispositioncan be durablyconstituted? What do we do, for instance, when we talk of a "popular aesthetics" or when we want at all costs to creditthe "people" (le peuple), who do not care to

386 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY

have one, with a "popularculture"?Forgettingto effect the epoche of the social conditionsof the epoche of practicalintereststhat we effect when we pass a pure aesthetic appreciation,we purely and simply universalizethe particularcase in which we are placed or, to speak a bit more roughly, we, in an unconscious and theoreticalmanner,grantthe economic and social privilege thatis the thoroughly preconditionof the pure and universal aesthetic point of view to all men and women (and in particular this good old peasant, capable of appreciating,like to us, the beautyof a landscape, or to the black subproletarian capable of appreciating the rhythmor appeal of a rap melody). Most of the humanworks that we are accustomedto treatingas universal-law, science, the fine arts, ethics, religion, etc.-cannot be disassociatedfrom the scholastic point of view and from the social and economic conditions which make the latter possible. They have been engenderedin these very peculiarsocial universesthat the fields of cultural are-the religiousfield, the artisticfield, the philosophicalfield (Bourproduction dieu 1983a, 1983b, 1990c)-and in which agents are engaged who have in common the privilege of fighting for the monopoly of the universal, and therebyeffectively to cause truthsand values thatare held, at each moment, to be universal, nay eternal,to advance. I am readyto concede that Kant's aesthetics is true, but only as a phenomenology of the aesthetic experience of all the people who are the product of skhole. That is to say, the experience of the beautifulof which Kant offers us a rigorousdescriptionhas definiteeconomic and social conditionsof possibilitythat are ignored by Kant and whose universal anthropologicalpossibility of which Kantadumbrates analysiscould become real only if those economic and social an conditionswere universallyallocated. It means also that the condition of actual of universalization this (theoretical)universalpossibility is thus the actualuniversalizationof the economic and social conditions, that is, of skhole, which, being monopolizedby some today, confer upon them the monopoly over the universal. To drive the point home and at the risk of appearingoverly insistent-but in such matters,it is so easy to have a light touch-I would say thatthe datumfrom which sociological reflectionstartsis not the universalcapacityto graspthe beautiful but the incomprehension,the indifference, nay the disgust of some social in agents(deprivedof the adequatecategoriesof perceptionand appreciation) the face of certain objects consecrated as beautiful (the "beau classique" for instance;cf. Bourdieu 1984). And to recall the social conditions of possibility of thisjudgmentthatclaims universalvalidity leads to circumscribethe pretensions to universalityof Kantiananalysis:we may grantthe Critiqueof Judgementa limited validity as a phenomenological(or, for the pleasureof shocking, ethnomethodological) analysis of the lived experienceof certaincultivatedmen and women in certainhistorical societies, and we can describe very precisely the decidedly nontranscendental genesis of this experience. But only to add immediatelythat
the unconscious universalization of the particular case which it effects (by ignor-

ing its own social conditions of possibility or, to be Kantianto the end, its own limits)has the effect of constitutinga particularexperienceof the work of art(or of the world, as with the idea of "naturalbeauty") as a universal norm of all

SCHOLASTICPOINTOF VIEW 387

form of possible aestheticexperience, and thus of tacitly legitimizinga particular and, thereby,those who have the privilege of access to it. On the basis experience of these analyses, one could show that the "purest" concepts of aestheticjudgment("beautiful," "sublime," etc.) have an inescapablypoliticaldimensionand that aestheticdebates conceal more or less effectively properlypolitical oppositions between antagonisticpositions within the artisticor intellectual field and, beyondit, in the social field as a whole. (It is the case for instancewith the debates on decline and democratictaste which have been evoked here, or on the disproportionateand the sublime, and which often combine social antagonismswith nationalantagonisms,between Franceand Germanyin particular.) What is true of pure aesthetic experience is true of all the anthropological possibilitiesthatwe tend to thinkof as universal:the abilityto producea complex chain of logical reasoningor the ability to accomplish a perfectlyrigorousmoral act are, by way of anthropologicalpossibilities, virtually grantedto everybody and no one can maintainthat they are a priori reserved for some. And yet they remainthe privilege of a happy few because these anthropological potentialities find theirfull realizationonly underdefinite social and economic conditions;and because, inversely, there are economic and social conditions underwhich they become atrophied, annulled. This is to say that one cannot, at the same time, denouncethe inhumansocial conditions of existence imposed upon proletarians and subproletarians, especially in the black ghettos of the United States and elsewhere, and credit the people placed in such situationswith the full accomplishwith the gratuitousand disment of their humanpotentialities, and in particular interested dispositionsthatwe tacitlyor explicitly inscribein notionssuch as those of "culture" or "aesthetics." In this case, the commendableconcern to rehabitaken litate (by showing, as I did for instancea long time ago, thatthe photographs by membersof the workingclass pursuean immanentintentionwhich has its own coherence, its own logic, its justification-which still does not entitle us to speak of an aesthetics [Bourdieuet al. 1990]) can end up yielding the opposite result: thereis a manner,quite comfortablein short, of "respectingthe people" which consists in confiningthem to what they are, in pushing themfurther down, as we could say, by convertingdeprivationand hardshipinto an elective choice. The Proletkultis a formof essentialism, for the same reasonas the class racismwhich reducespopularpracticesto barbarity (and of which it often is nothingmore than the mere inversion, and a falsely radicalone at that:indeed, it offers all the benefits of apparentsubversion, of "radical chic," while at the same time leaving everythingas is, the ones with theiractuallyculturedcultureanda culturecapable of sustainingits own questioning,the others with theirdecisively and fictitiously Labov (1973) when he purportsto show that rehabilitated culture). I understand the dialectof the residentsof blackghettos can convey theological truthsas subtle and sophisticatedas do the knowingly euphemizeddiscoursesof the graduatesof Harvard University;it remains,however, thatthe most hazy and fuzzy utterances of the latteropen all doors in society whereas the most unpredictablelinguistic inventionsof the formerremaintotallydevoid of value on the marketof the school and in all social situationsof the same nature. (This does not mean that we need

388 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY

to accept the quasi-essentialistdescriptionthat Basil Bernstein [1973] gives of popularlanguage.) Populist aestheticism is yet anotherone of the effects, no doubtone of the most unexpected,of scholasticbias since it operatesa tacit universalizationof the scholasticpoint of view which is by no means accompaniedby the will to universalizethe conditionsof possibility of this point of view. Thus, we must acknowledgethat if everythingleads us to thinkthat certain fundamental dispositions towardthe world, certain fundamentalmodes of constructionof reality-aesthetic, scientific, etc.-constitute universalanthropological possibilities, these potentialitiesare actualizedonly in definiteconditionsand thatthese conditions,startingwith skhole as distancefromnecessity andurgency, and especially academic skhole and the whole accumulatedproduct of prior skhole that it carries, are unevenly allocated across civilizations, from the TrobriandIslandsto the United States of today, and within our own societies, across social classes or ethnic groups or, in a more rigorouslanguage, across positions in social space. These are all very simple things but very fundamental ones, and it is not superfluous insist on them, especially in a scholastic situation,that is, to among people ready to join in the forgettingof the presuppositionsinscribedin theircommonprivilege. This simple observationleads us to an ethicalor political programthatis itself very simple: we can escape the alternativeof populism and conservatism,two forms of essentialismwhich tend to consecratethe statusquo, only by workingto universalizethe conditionsof access to universality. But to give a concrete and precise content to this kind of slogan that has at least the virtueof being clear and rigorousand to put us on notice againstpopulist make-believe,we would need to reintroducethe whole analysis of the genesis of the specific structure these quite peculiarsocial worlds where the universalis of engenderedand that I call fields. I believe indeed that there is a social historyof reason, which is coextensive with the history of these social microcosms where the social conditions of the development of reason are engendered (Bourdieu 1990b). Reason is historicalthroughand through,which does not mean that it is for that matterrelative and reducibleto history. The history of reason is the peculiar history of the genesis of these peculiar social universes that, having for prerequisiteskhole and for foundationscholastic distance from necessity (and from economic necessity in particular)and urgency, offer conditions propitious to the developmentof a formof social exchange, of competition,even of struggle, which areindispensablefor the developmentof certainanthropological potentialities. To make you understand,I will say that if those universesare propitiousto the developmentof reason, it is because, in orderto make the most of yourself in them, you must make the most of reason; to triumphin them, you must make refutationstriumphin them. To be recognized, that arguments,demonstrations, efficient in these universes, the "pathological motivations" is, symbolically about which Kant (1950) writes must be converted into logical motives. These social universesthat, in some ways, arelike all otheruniverses, with theirpowers, their monopolies, their interests and so on, are, in other ways, very different, exceptional, if not a bit miraculousand, being born of a considerablehistorical work, they remain very fragile, very vulnerable, at the mercy of authoritarian

SCHOLASTICPOINTOF VIEW 389

governmentsas we saw in Germanyor Russia. It remainsthat the social conditions of theirfunctioning,the tacitly or explicitly imposedrules of competitionin them are such that the most "pathological" functionsare obliged to mold themselves into social forms and social formalisms,to submitthemselves to regulated proceduresand processes, notably in mattersof discussion and confrontation,to that accord with what is seen, at each moment in history, as reaobey standards son. The scientificfield, this scholasticuniversewhere the most brutalconstraints of the ordinarysocial world are bracketed, is the locus of the genesis of a new form of necessity or constraintor, if you want, of a specific legality, an Eigengesetzlichkeit:in it the logical constraints,whose specificity Bouveresse (1989) tried to uncover this morning, take the form of social constraints-and conversely. Inscribedinto minds in the form of dispositions acquiredvia the disciplines of the Scientific City (and, more simply, throughthe acquisitionof stateof-the-artmethods and knowledge), they are also inscribedin the objectivity of the scientific field in the form of institutionssuch as proceduresand processes of discussion,refutation,andregulateddialogue andespecially, perhaps,in the form of positive and negative sanctionsthat the field, functioningas a market,inflicts upon individualproducts. This is to say in passing that there is no need to wrenchourselves free from the embraceof relativism,to inscribethe universalstructures reason, no longer of in consciousnessbut in language, by way of a revived form of the transcendental illusion. Habermas(1981) stops his efforts in midcoursewhen he seeks a way out of the historicistcircle to which the social sciences seem to condemnthemselves in the social sciences (and in particularin Grice's principles). The sociological constructivism I proposeallows us to accountfor the transcendance (maththat of ematical, artistic, scientific, etc.) works which are engenderedin scholarlyfields and which are tested throughthe constraintdiscussed by Bouveresse, and to account also for the Platonicillusion which can be found, underdifferentguises, in all these fields. We must, by takinghistoricistreductionto its logical conclusion, seek the origins of reason not in a human "faculty," that is, a nature, but in the very historyof these peculiarsocial microcosms in which agents struggle, in the nameof the universal, for the legitimatemonopoly over the universal, and in the of progressiveinstitutionalization a dialogical languagewhich owes its seemingly intrinsicproperties the social conditionsof its genesis andof its utilization.This to analysis allows us to move past the moralismof the glorificationof rationaldialogue towarda genuine Realpolitikof reason (Bourdieu 1987, 1989). Indeed, I think that, short of believing in miracles, we can expect the progress of reason only from a permanentstruggle to defend and promotethe social conditions that are most favorableto the developmentof reason, that is, institutionsof research and teachingno less than scientificjournals, the diffusion and defense of books of quality, the denunciationof censorship,academicor otherwise, etc., thus from renewinga great traditionof philosophy-and especially Germanphilosophywhich did not disdainto incarnateits strugglefor the developmentof the human spiritin grandeducationalprojects aimed at endowing reason and freedom with the properlypolitical instrumentswhich are the preconditionof their realization in history.

390 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

References Cited
Austin, John L. 1962 Sense and Sensibilia. Reconstructed from Manuscript Notes by G. J. Warnock. Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress. Bernstein,Basil 1973 Class, Codes, and Control. Volume 1. London:Routledge& Kegan Paul. Bourdieu,Pierre 1983a The Field of CulturalProductionor: The Economic World Reversed. Poetics 12(November):311-356. 1983b The PhilosophicalEstablishment.In Philosophy in FranceToday. A. Montefiore, ed. Pp. 1-8. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgementof Taste. Cambridge: 1984[1979] Harvard UniversityPress. 1986a[1985] FromRules to Strategies.CulturalAnthropology1(1):110-120. 1986b Habitus, Code, Codification. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 64(September):40-44. [translated In OtherWords. Stanford:StanfordUniversity Press, 1990.] 1987 Fur eine Realpolitik der Vernunft. In Das Bildungswesen der Zukunft. S. ErnstKlett. Muller-Rolli,ed. Pp. 229-234. Stuttgart: 1989 The Corporatismof the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modem World. Telos 81(Fall):99-110. 1990a[1980] The Logic of Practice. Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress. 1990b The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason. Sociological Forum (Winter). (in press) of 1990c Maxwell's Devil: The Genesis andStructure the Religious Field. In Practice, Class, and Culture:Selected Papersby Pierre Bourdieu. Loic Wacquant,ed. Cambridge:Polity Press. (in press) Bourdieu,Pierre,H. L. Boltanski, and J. C. Chaboredon The Social Uses of a Middle-BrowArt. Stanford:Stanford 1990[1970] Photography: Press. University Bouveresse, Jacques 1989 La force de la regle. Paperpresentedat the Conferenceon Geschmack, StrateSinn, Freie Universitat,Berlin, 23-24 October. gien, praktiker Noam Chomsky, 1972 Languageand Mind. New York:HarcourtBrace Jovanovich. Cicourel, AaronV. 1989 Habitusand the Developmentof Emergenceof PracticalReasoning, Paperpresentedat the Conferenceon Geschmack,Strategien,praktiker Sinn, FreieUniversitat, Berlin, 23-24 October. Durkheim,Emile, and MarcelMauss 1963[1903] PrimitiveClassification.Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press. Gebauer,Giinter,and ChristophWulff 1989 Mimesis und pratikerSinn. Paperpresentedat the Conferenceon Geschmack, Sinn, Freie Universitat,Berlin, 23-24 October. Strategien,praktiker Goody, Jack 1977 The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

SCHOLASTIC POINT VIEW 391 OF Habermas,Jurgen Handelns. Frankfurt: 1981 Theoriedes Kommunikativen Suhrkamp. Husserl, Edmund 1983[1913] Ideas Pertainingto a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological to Philosophy. FirstBook: GeneralIntroduction a PurePhenomenology.The Hague: MartinusNijhoff. Kant, Immanuel 1950[1791] Prolegomenato Any FutureMetaphysics. New York:Macmillan. 1952[1790] Critiqueof Judgement.Oxford:Oxford UniversityPress. Labov, William 1973 Languagein the InnerCity: Studies in the Black English Vernacular.Philadelphia:Universityof PennsylvaniaPress. Claude Ldvi-Strauss, to 1968[1964] The Raw and the Cooked:Introduction a Science of Mythology I. New York:Harper& Row. of 1969[1949] The ElementaryStructures Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. Plato 1973 The Republicand OtherWorks. New York:Doubleday. Vuillemin, Jules 1989 Rdflexionsur raison et jugement de goOt. Paperpresentedat the Conferenceon Geschmack,Strategien,praktiker Sinn, Freie Universitat,Berlin, 23-24 October. Vygotsky, L. S. MIT Press. 1962[1934] Thoughtand Language. Cambridge: Weber, Max 1978[1918-20] Economy and Society. Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress.