Teaching Bourdieu

W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Review: Reading and Teaching Pierre BourdieuAuthor(s): V. Y. MudimbeSource: Transition, No. 61 (1993), pp. 144-160Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935228Accessed: 18/11/2010 00:06

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T R A NSITIO0N ( Under Review

READING AND TEACHING

PIERRE BOURDIEU

V. Y. Mudimbe

Sixtyish, a philosopher by education, an

anthropologist and sociologist by choice, Pierre Bourdieu-director of studies at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Professor of Sociology at Le College de France-is today one of the most inter-

nationally renowned French intellectuals. His achievement is comparable to that of some of the most esteemed names in

twentieth-century thought. In intellectual France, the forties and fifties were dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Then came the sixties with structuralism and Claude Levi-Strauss as a demigod, the seventies and the eighties with poststruc- turalism represented by theorists like

Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Ly- otard. Can it be said that the nineties are

inaugurating the reign of Bourdieu? It's a tempting judgment, particularly

from an American perspective. For the framework by which Americans tend to

classify the French thinkers of the last

fifty years is built on the haphazard politics of translation, a happenstance that leads to rather misleading discontinuities. In a small book, Modern French Philosophy, Vincent Descombes demonstrates that a

shared set of questions runs from the pre- Sartrian period to the poststructuralists. The supposed ruptures between these ep- ochs can be understood, rather, as ad- umbrations, adaptations, redefinitions, and reformulations of the significance of the human condition. It's a history of reca- pitulation, and one that Bourdieu's en-

terprise seems to sum up. Bourdieu's latest book is Les Regles de

l'Art: Genese et Structure du Champ Litter- aire (1992). The publicity for the book has focused on the claim that the author unveils the foundation of a science of lit-

erary work and presents his own defini- tive "Flaubert." The implicit challenge, plainly enough, is to another "Flaubert," the one offered by Sartre's classic study, L'Idiot de la Famille. But there's more. Les

Regles de l'Art includes a very ambiguous chapter-"Questions de Methode"-that at once celebrates and criticizes Sartre. As Bourdieu the sociologist sees it, Sartre was

projecting his own illusions on Flaubert; he lacked a scientific method which could account for Flaubert's creativity. Happily, Bourdieu is not so ill-equipped. In his scheme, the basic rules are clear: com-

petition and competitiveness are what ex-

144 TRANSITION ISSUE 61

plain survival and success in the field of structuralism. He is celebratory when Pierre Bourdieu

culture and the arts. The artist or thinker has to find a niche for himself in the field, affirm his creativity, and impose his au-

thority. Naturally, one thinks of Bour- dieu himself in this regard, and it's hard not to view his contradictory references to Sartre as a reflection of an implicit com-

petition between Pierre Bourdieu, the

younger philosopher and sociologist, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the master philosopher to be surpassed. Indeed, the very title-

"Questions de Methode"-repeats Sartre's own introduction to The Critique of Di- alectical Reason.

From his earliest theoretical works

(which date from the 1972 Outline of The-

ory of Practice) through In Other Words

(1990) to Les Rigles de l'Art, Bourdieu has made similarly ambivalent references to

commenting on Claude Levi-Strauss's role in promoting the welfare of the social

sciences, but very critical about the trans-

fer of the Saussurean model of langue and

parole to these disciplines. Bourdieu ob-

jects to the fetishization of langue, the

underlying ("deep") structure or system of idealized linguistic practices, at the ex-

pense of the diverse and living variety of

paroles, performances which Bourdieu

believes, contra structuralism, involve the

creative activity of the speaker. It is precisely here, I'd like to suggest, that Bour- dieu's ambitions are revealed: a critical

project that would synthesize the scope and scientific rigor of the "philosophy" of systems called structuralism with the

humanist appeal of the "philosophy" of individual freedom and creativity made

READING AND TEACHING BOURDIEU 145

Photo by Marie-Claire Bourdieu

Discussed in this essay

Outline of a Theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

The Inheritors: French Students and Their Re- lation to Culture, Pierre Bourdieu andJean-Claude Passeron, Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press

Reproduction in Educa- tion, Society and Cul- ture, Pierre Bourdieu and

Jean-Claude Passeron, Sage Publications

Homo Academicus, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanford: Stanford University Press

Distinction: A Social

Critique of the Judge- ment of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

The Love of Art, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Dar- bel, Stanford: Stanford University Press

The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanford: Stanford University Press

Language and Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press

In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflexive So-

ciology, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanford: Stanford Uni-

versity Press

Les Regles de l'Art: Genese et structure du

Champ Litt6raire, Pierre Bourdieu, Seuil

fam6us by the Jean-Paul Sartre of Being and Nothingness. What we are witnessing is an attempted reconciliation of the two

great antagonists of postwar intellectual

France, the objectivist methodology il- lustrated by Claude Levi-Strauss and the

subjectivist methodology of existentialism.

That Bourdieu's diverse and often

flamboyant oeuvre responds to the signal intellectual concerns of the late twentieth

century does not belittle his originality and importance. It signifies, on the con-

trary, both his intellectual orthodoxy as a lector and his powerfully subversive intent as an auctor, a complicated achievement I will explore in the remainder of this essay.

Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice, reprinted seven times since its first publication in English in 1977, is a master-

piece. It is the narration of an intellectual

odyssey and a landmark in the reconcep- tualization of the social sciences. Richard

Nice, the translator, aptly (if wordily) in- troduces the book's importance, as "a reflection on scientific practice which will disconcert both those who reflect on the social sciences without practicing them and those who practice them without re-

flecting on them, [which] seeks to define the prerequisites for a truly scientific dis- course about human behavior, that is, an

adequate theory of practice which must include a theory of scientific practice."

The book contains four chapters. The

first, "The Objective Limits of Objectiv- ism," has two sections-a first, entitled

Analyses, and a second, A Case Study: Parallel-Cousin Marriage, which applies

the theory elaborated in the first section,

making use of research Bourdieu under- took between 1960 and 1970 in North Africa (Kabylia, Collo, the Chelif valley, and Ouarsenis). In this chapter Bourdieu meditates on the methods of research, convinced that "the practical privilege in which all scientific activity arises never more subtly governs that activity than

when, unrecognized as privilege, it leads to an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which science is possible." Thinking about a theory of practice thus broaches a series of important issues rel- evant to anthropology and beyond, the

problem of the social production of

knowledge. Bourdieu distinguishes three

types of theoretical knowledge of the social world, three "moments in a dialecti-

African Studies is littered with sweeping formulations

like "Bantu philosophy" that have occluded the

varieties of native experience for over fifty

years

cal advance": a phenomenological or eth-

nomethodological knowledge which

reads, interprets, makes explicit the primary and ordinary experience of everyday life in the social world; an objectivist knowledge which, breaking from the primary knowledge, "constructs the objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) which structure practice and representation of practice, i.e., in particular, primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of the familiar world." The final, and crucial, mo-


ment would be a breaking with objectivist knowledge, a questioning of its conditions of possibility and thus its limits.

This questioning of objectivism is li- able to be understood at first as a

rehabilitation of subjectivism and to be merged with the critique that naive humanism levels at scientific objectification in the name of "lived

experience" and the rights of subjectivity. In

reality, the theory of practice and of the practical mode of knowledge inherent in allpractice which is the preconditionfor a rigorous science

of practices carries out a new reversal of the

problematic which objectivism has to construct in order to constitute the social world as a

system of objective relations independent of individual consciousnesses and wills.

This final moment involves the simulta- neous pursuit of objectivist knowledge, up to a point, and the constant awareness of the situation, the privileged position, of the scientist. What is important is how

properly to construe objectivism, as a

powerful and necessary but limited tool. Bourdieu insists on what Bachelard calls

epistemological vigilance, on the neces-

sity of making clear the difference between "spontaneous semiology" or practical knowledge and the second-order hermeneutic paradigms. This constitutes a radical critique of the "implicit philosophy of practice which pervades the an-

thropological tradition," the perverse and unself-conscious relationship between the observer and the observed. (African Stud- ies is littered with suspect second order

"objectivisms," sweeping formulations like "Bantu philosophy" and "African

philosophy" that have occluded the varieties of native experience for over fifty

years.) Bourdieu reminds us that "native theories are dangerous not so much because they lead research towards illusory explanations as because they bring quite superfluous reinforcement to the intellec- tualist tendency inherent in the objectivist approach to practices." In sum, the ob-

jectivist readings produce culture as a done

deal, an opus operatum, instead of the constructed and open work of a modus operandi, culture as a process in the making.

Bourdieu's own method follows three basic propositions. One: "One is entitled to undertake to given an 'account of ac-

counts,' so long as one does not put for- ward one's contribution to the science of

pre-scientific representation of the social world as if it were a scientific representation of the social world." Two: "Only by constructing the objective structures

(price curves, chances of access to higher education, laws of the matrimonial mar-

ket, etc.) is one able to pose the questions of mechanisms through which the rela-

tionship is established between the structures and the practices or the represen- tations which accompany them instead of

treating these 'thought objects' as 'reason' or 'motives' and making them the deter-

mining cause of the practices." Three: "Official language, particularly the system of concepts by means of which the members of a given group provide themselves with a representation of their social relations (e.g. the lineage model or the

vocabulary of honor), sanctions and im-

poses what it states, tacitly laying down the dividing line between the thinkable and the unthinkable, thereby contribut-

ing towards the maintenance of the

symbolic order from which it draws its

authority." In other words, the anthro-

pologist should be wary of the fact that


native experience is complex and strati- fied; to use Saussurean categories, there would be always in any social world a

preeminence of langue (the abstract, institutional, and social norm of expression) over the parole (the concrete, individual, and creative actualization of the former).

In chapter two, "Structures and the Habitus," Bourdieu elaborates on how to move from a method and a practice fa-

voring the opus operatum to one resulting in the modus operandi. A key concept here is the habitus, a "durably installed

generative principle of regulated impro- visations, [it] produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the

production of their generative principle." In other words, the habitus is an accretion of internalized lessons that the agent has learned over the course of his socialization:

Each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning. Because his actions and works are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer and has no conscious

mastery, they contain an "objective intention," as the Scholasticsput it, which always outruns his conscious intentions.

Chapter three, "Generative Schemes and Practical Logic: Invention within Lim- its," and chapter four, "Structures, Hab- itus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Sym- bolic Power," amplify the meaning of

postobjectivist anthropology, touching on

specific topics such as the calendar, econ-

omy of logic, cosmogonic practice, thresholds, and rites of passage. He intro- duces compelling theoretical concepts,

including symbolic capital, and produces original understandings of doxa, ortho-

doxy, heterodoxy, a wide range of cultural practices and beliefs. He concludes that

the task of legitimating the established order does not fall exclusively to the mechanisms

traditionally regarded as belonging to the order

of ideology, such as law. The system of symbolic goods production and the system producing the producersfulfil in addition, i.e. by the

very logic of their normal functioning, ideo-

logical functions, by virtue of the fact that mechanisms through which they contribute to the reproduction of the established order, and to the perpetuation of domination remain hid- den.

Bourdieu's project is not without parallel in the Anglophone world. The Out- line's objective is similar to Roy Wagner's in The Invention of Culture (1975), particularly Wagner's idea of culture as a way of talking about the human condition, and of describing a foreign culture as a process of "inventing" a language and a practice of familiarity which are not those of the observer. Clifford Geertz, in "Thick De-

scription," the first chapter of his renowned The Interpretation of Culture (1973), makes claims that can be compared to Bourdieu's: that a culture is a symbolic system and functions like a language; that coherence does not seem to be the major test of validity for a description; that in order to do ethnography, to describe is to narrate, to turn a passing event into a nar- rative account. Metaphorically, Geertz's turtle story just might be the best illustration of Bourdieu's critique of objectivist knowledge.


There is an Indian story- at least I heard it as an Indian story-about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an

elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnogra-

pher; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Yet Bourdieu's work is different in im-

portant respects. It is very much a product of postwar French philosophy, inflected with and responding to the languages of Marxism and phenomenology, as well as the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss; a work situated in the social sciences almost by default, because "philosophy as

taught in the [French] University was not

[then] very inspiring." Even Bourdieu's most important theoretical contribution, the habitus, is largely a critical revision of a philosophical concept, the absolute freedom of the human agent propounded by the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and Existentialism Is a Humanism.

The central notion of habitus set forth in the Outline suggests that legitimacy and

power are produced and reproduced by a culture almost naturally; culture results in class differentiations in social space. Let us note here that, contrary to Marxism, which defines class as a relation to the

process of production, as an economic or infrastructural function, Bourdieu's class is largely defined with reference to su-

perstructures-to culture, status, and education. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture by Bourdieu and

Jean-Claude Passeron is a perfect exam-

ple. The authors chose a well-circum-

scribed population: students of humani- ties and social sciences.

Arts students exhibit in an exemplary way the relation to culture which we took as our object

of study. We realize that by isolating an anal-

ysis of cultural privilege, from within a whole set of current research projects on education and

culture, we may appear to be reducing the whole

range of possible questions to one single question. But this was the risk that had to be taken, in order to grasp the fundamental problem which the ritual problematic in this area almost always manages to conceal.

Refusing to take for granted the mean-

ingfulness of the category "student," as

though there were a common student

condition, the authors take pains to show that the myths of the "student" and of "student life" disguise the actual oper- ation of the educational system, which

responds to and reproduces divisive in-

equalities. They describe the various com-

plicated factors which sediment the process of formalizing class differences: the

process of selection, the scholastic exams, the system of concours, the university cam-

pus versus the "Grandes Ecoles." All of these directly participate in the reproduction of a culture and its inequalities: "The education system is required to produce individuals who are selected and arranged in a hierarchy once and for all for their whole lifetime." Must education work in this way, must it stigmatize all those who

pass through it? Could one not dream of a "real democratic education [to] allow the greatest possible number of individuals to appropriate the greatest number of abilities which constitute school cul-


ture?" Bourdieu and Passeron's response to their own question is telling:

In the absence of a rational pedagogy doing everything required to neutralize the efect of the social factors of cultural inequality, me-

thodically and continuously, from kindergar- ten to university, the political project of giving

everyone equal educational opportunity cannot

overcome the real inequalities, even when it

deploys every institutional and economic means.

Conversely, a truly rational pedagogy, that is, one based on a sociology of cultural inequalities, would, no doubt, help to reduce inequalities in

education and culture, but it would not be able

to become a reality unless all the conditionsfor a true democratization of the recruitment of teachers and pupils were fulfilled, the first of which would be the setting up of a rational

pedagogy.

The Inheritors dramatizes the vast gulf sep- arating the bourgeois ideal of democratic

education from the actual practice of the

educational system, often with reference

to statistic surveys. Reproduction in Edu-

cation, Society and Culture, also coauthored

by Bourdieu and Passeron, provides a more

theoretical interpretation of the same

phenomenon, elaborating a theory of

symbolic violence. In this case "symbolic" should be understood in its ordinary

meaning, as a sign representing some-

thing else. The theory of symbolic vio-

lence is defined by Bourdieu from a num-

ber of closely related paradigms, models

of pedagogy. The first paradigm is the process of

socialization, the insertion of "individu-

als" into groups, into systems of reference

and value like the family, institutions such

as church, school, and vacation camps, as

well as into more informal ensembles such

as the neighborhood, the street, and racial or sexual groupings. The pedagogical im-

perative is to maintain a monopoly on

"legitimate" culture, to cement a cultural

arbitrary that cannot, in principle, be de- duced from any universal principle.

A second paradigm is that of pedagogic authority, relations of dependence, as exemplified by relations between par- ents and children, teachers and pupils, el- ders and youths. The parent, teacher, or elder incarnate an auctoritas, "the power of a founder," and inculcate the "truth" of the culture and its traditions in the

child, pupil, or youth. Pedagogic author-

ity is at stake in the legitimate modes of

educating and socialization; it calls to mind Descartes's pronouncement that our ma-

jor predicament is that we have been children. We have been "made" according to a socially defined and ultimately arbi-

trary understanding and definition of culture. Is it possible to challenge this im-

position? It is the old paradox of

Epimenides, the liar, that we then face, as articulated in Reproduction: "Either you believe I'm not lying when I tell you education is violence and my teaching isn't

legitimate, so you can't believe me; or you believe I'm lying and my teaching is le-

gitimate, so you still can't believe what I

say when I tell you it is violence." Is there

an answer to this problem, short of a stock

admission of cultural relativism? As Bour- dieu observes, it is one thing to introduce someone who has already been "educated" to cultural relativism (awareness of the arbitrariness of any culture) and quite another to conceive of a relativistic edu-

cation, one that would "produce a cultivated man who [is] the native of all cul-

tures." The concept of pedagogic authority assumes another, that of peda-


gogic work, the third paradigm. This is a process, a long one, whose objective is to produce a habitus, an "internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary

capable of perpetuating itself after the

pedagogic action has ceased." From Bour- dieu's perspective, education is to cultural order what genes are to biological order.

Another paradigm is the educational

system itself-its demands, rituals, and

symbols. It operates by producing and re-

producing "the conditions which are nec-

essary for the exercise of its functions of

reproducing a cultural arbitrary," so that

practices incompatible with that mission

become theoretically unthinkable. But, one might say, marginals and revolution- aries exist. The system, as a matter of fact,

produces two main types of cultivated

people, which could be reduced to two medieval categories: the lector and the auctor. The first is exemplified by the priest- like educated person, who sees his mission as one of maintaining the culture and

transmitting it-a perfect definition of what a good teacher should be; he com- ments on the cultural arbitrary. The second is a prophetic figure, who explores new ways of adapting, rearticulating the cultural a priori.

The two last paradigms are the school

authority and the work of schooling; the first represents the symbolic violence to be actualized, while the second represents the actualization of this violence:

The success of all school education, and more

generally of all secondary pedagogic work, de-

pends fundamentally on the education previously accomplished in the earliest years of life, even and especially when the educational system denies this primacy in its ideology and

practice by making the school career a history

with no pre-history: we know that through all the skill-learningprocesses of everyday life, and

particularly through the acquisition of the mother tongue or the manipulation of kinship terms and relationships, logical dispositions are mastered in their practical state. These dispositions, more or less complex, more or less elaborated symbolically, depending on the group or class, predispose children unequally towards a

symbolic mastery of the operations implied as much in a mathematical demonstration as in

decoding a work of art.

The books explored thus far describe Bourdieu's horizon: an intellectual con-

figuration that aims to reduce the tension between theory and practice, subjectivity and objectivity, the material and symbolic. More specifically, if we refer to the interviews published under a significant title, In Other Words-I think of Sartre's The Words-we could, in terms of theoretical confrontations, note a few points. One is the opposition between rules and

strategies that separates Bourdieu from the structuralists. Structuralism focuses on strictures, on rules; it is mapped out on

grids and assumes the unchanging systematic coherence of the Saussurian

langue. Bourdieu is interested in probing the strategic deployment of rules, the ex- ecution of rules in specific, concrete in- stances, the realm of possibility signified by parole. His hypothesis is simple: Cul- ture is a game. "In the game you cannot do just anything and get away with it. And the feel for the game, which con- tributes to this necessity and this logic, is a way of knowing this necessity and this

logic." In any case, the orthodoxy and

regularity of modes of practice in the game express the habitus, a disposition referring back to the language of rules inculcated


in the agent. Finally, the field of cultural

production studied in Outline, but more

visibly in The Inheritors and Reproduction, is this universe that we call "the republic of letters." Auctors or lectors, intellectuals in this field, are producers and "may put [their] power at the service of the dominant. They may also, in the logic of their

struggle within the field of power, put their own power at the service of the dominated in the social field taken as whole."

Homo Academicus exemplifies these issues by exoticizing the familiar and trap- ping the classifier himself, the scholar. The book is simultaneously a self-analysis of the French academic universe and a reflection on Bourdieu's sociological practice. The preface to the English edi- tion describes the French intellectual mi- lieu and the recent transformations that have made possible the spread of social science discourses. Bourdieu identifies the

germinal confrontation between Sartre and Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss's accom-

plishment was to disinter philosophy and

expand the scope of the social sciences,

reinforcing new hybrid creativities (like Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida,

Foucault) and accompanying new direc- tions in more established disciplines, as with Emil Benveniste and Andre Marti- net in linguistics, Georges Dumezil and Braudel in history.

The previously dominant disciplines, philology, literary history and

even philosophy, whose intellectual foundations are threatened by their new rivals, dis-

ciplines like linguistics, semiology, anthropology, or even sociology, find that the social

foundations of their academic existence are also under siegefrom the criticisms welling up on all sides, usually in the name of the social

sciences and on the initiative of teachersfrom these disciplines, against the archaic nature of their contents and their pedagogical structures.

Homo Academicus describes this intellectual reconfiguration. Bourdieu begins by reflecting upon his own case, imitating Rousseau at the beginning of the Confes-

Can a native be a good anthropologist? Can an

academic be a good sociologist of academe?

sions. Born in North Africa, trained in

philosophy, he converted to anthropology and chose his own native region as

object of ethnology. Can a native be a

good anthropologist? The question re- translates itself apropos Homo Academicus: Can an academic be a good sociologist of academe? It is worthwhile in this con- nection to look at other, nonacademic at-

tempts to conceptualize the educational

system. What is the difference between Homo

Academicus, which defines itself as a "so-

ciology of tribal secrets" and, say, Ray- mond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals

(1955), or a recent polemical analysis by Bernard Maris, Les Sept Peches Capitaux des Universitaires (1991). Aron objectifies the practices and commitments of his Marxist enemies but neglects, refusing to historicize himself, to locate his critique. Maris self-righteously ridicules the academic. Bourdieu, in Homo Academicus, chooses a more difficult path: to describe the present-day field of intellectual production without recourse to naive or self-

serving objectifications, and with due re-

spect for epistemological discontinuities.


His method, finally, is that of a genetic sociology at once reflexive and autocrit- ical. In his words:

Thus we have been tempted to adopt the title, A Book for Burning, which Li Zhi, a ren-

egade mandarin, gave to one of those self-con-

suming works of his which revealed the rules

of the mandarins'game. We do so, not in order to challenge those who, despite their readiness to denounce all in inquisitions, will condemn to the stake any work perceived as a sacrilegious

outrage against their own beliefs, but simply to state the contradiction which is inherent in

divulging tribal secrets and which is only so

painful because even the partial publication of our most intimate details is also a kind of public

confession.

The method integrates two complementary visions: an objectivism which breaks with purely subjective experience and a

perspectivism which attempts, by histor-

icizing the observer, to overcome or ac-

knowledge the limits of that objectivism.

Analyzing the academy, in order to make

sense of trends, the author must distin-

guish between empirical and epistemic in-

dividuals; the latter are individuals-like

"Levi-Strauss, father of structuralism"-

defined by a number of properties in a

constructed and theoretical space. And the

book, analytically, pictures a culture and

its rules. It is about what we could, using Michel Foucault's terms, call an "art" and a "technique" for the maintenance and

regulated transformation of traditional ar-

rangements. Indeed, the authority of the academicus consists of cultural capital.

The most celebrated of Bourdieu's books is probably Distinction: A Social Cri-

tique of theJudgement of Taste (1984). One could summarize Distinction in five the-

oretical entries: (1) three methodological breaks, (2) sociology understood as a dis-

cipline of social topology, (3) the concept of "class on paper," and finally (4) social

position and (5) distinction. "The science of taste and of cultural consumption," writes Bourdieu, "begins with a trans-

gression that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes

legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover the intelligible relations which unite apparently incommensurable

'choices,' such as preferences in music and

food, painting and sport, literature and

hairstyle." He claims that his method is built out of three ruptures: a first with

Marxism, whose analytic grid emphasizes "substances" (that is concrete, real groups, classes) at the expense of "relations"; a second rupture with economistic inter-

pretations, which tend to privilege the field of economics in the strict sense and thus reduce the complexity of the social world and its multidimensionality to structures of economic production and social relations of production; and a third break with objectivism, the usual practice of disciplines which, in the name of rigor and objectivity, overlooks symbolic struggles.

The second key to a critical under-

standing of Distinction might be a rede- finition of sociology as a discursive practice on a social topology-a practice concerned, on the one hand, with agents or groups of agents regrouped according to their positions and interrelations in a social space, and, on the other hand, with characteristics possessed by those agents-

properties functioning in the social space as capital, as signs of power. This second

key immediately suggests a third, that of

class, or more precisely, that of "classes on paper." Bourdieu suggests that "from


a knowledge of the space of position, one can carve out logical classes, sets of agents who occupy similar position and who be-

ing situated in similar conditions have ev-

ery chance of having similar dispositions." Hence a class which, contrary to the Marxian concept, is not "mobilized" for a cause but is simply the result of a classification. In sum, one might say that The Inheritors bore witness to the preferences and varieties of just such a class on

paper, and that Reproduction formulated the rules that make comprehensible these classes and the symbolic violence that unites and opposes them. Thus, for in- stance, in terms of education, as Bourdieu

puts it in The Inheritors, "the specific contradiction in the scholastic mode of re-

production lies in the opposition between the interests of the class which the educational system serves statistically and the interests of those members of the class whom it sacrifices." The fourth key, that of social positionality, could be explained as a sort of class unconsciousness, a vague "sense" of one's belonging or not be-

longing, an understanding of one's "place" in the social. Finally, the last key is distinction or, more precisely, difference, the

quality that refers back to a symbolic capital. "Life-styles are thus the systematic products of habitus, which, perceived in their mutual relations through the schemas of the habitus, become sign systems that are socially qualified (as 'distin-

guished,' 'vulgar,' etc.)." The book demonstrates beyond doubt

that, indeed, there are many types of capital: economic (which translates as material, monetary wealth) but also cultural

capital (constituted by education-diplo- mas, knowledge, cultural goods) and

symbolic capital (accumulated recogni-

tions, honors, etc.). Distinctions arise as a result of the complex struggles for survival and success in the fields. Bourdieu relies heavily on quantitative methods and instruments. The questionnaires at the end of Distinction are very instructive. The first

one, for the interviewee, is made to produce a "subjective" representation; the second one, to be completed by a trained

interviewer, produces, indeed, a different sort of knowledge concerning the interviewee (home, dress, physical presenta- tion, speech). Let us add that the questionnaires are just one element of the

complex body of surveys used by Bour- dieu.

Another example of this method

(combining subjectivist representation, objectivist analysis, and interpretative techniques) is given in The Love of Art, a recent work by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, with Dominique Schnapper. The

book, after a brief preface, opens with a reflection on the questionnaire, the sam-

ple, and the survey; it then proceeds with an analysis of the coding, an analysis of results (the method of successive surveys), the formalization exercise, and a description of the problems that arise when results drawn from the French population are compared with those from four other

European countries: Greece, Holland, Po- land and Spain. Chapter 3, "The Social Conditions of Cultural Practice," and

chapter 5, "The Rules of Cultural Dif-

fusion," as well as the appendices (almost one third of the book) are highly math- ematicized. Someone without a solid

background in statistics would tend to fo- cus on the brief chapter dealing with "Cultural Works and Cultivated Dispo- sition," an essay that brilliantly demonstrates what might seem a truism to some


readers: "Statistics show that access to cultural works is the privilege of the cultivated class; however, this privilege has all the outward appearances of legitimacy. In

fact, only those who exclude themselves are ever excluded."

In The Logic of Practice (1990) Bourdieu theorizes his own practices. Book 1 presents a "Critique of Theoretical Reason,"

significantly introduced by two quota- tions. The first is from Wittgenstein's

Philosophical Investigations:

"How am I able to follow a rule?"-if this is not a question about causes then it is about the justification for myfollowing a rule in the

way I do.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

The second quotation comes from Aris- totle's Poetics: "Man ... is the most im-

itative ... of all animals and he learns his

first lessons through mimicry." Bour-

dieu's Logic is a strange book, a highly theorized yet very discreet intellectual au-

tobiography. In book 1, Bourdieu dwells

almost obsessively on concepts already

amply elaborated in his preceding books:

the limits of objectification, the habitus,

symbolic capital, and modes of cultural

domination. The reasoning is clear, solid, sometimes dogmatic. The master statis-

tician of Distinction and The Love of Art

now pays careful tribute to philosophy and its teachings. Descartes, Dilthey, Durkheim, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, Levi-

Strauss, Marx, Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato,

Sartre, Wittgenstein, and others are in-

voked often appropriately and generally

quite convincingly. The most amazing

reference from my viewpoint, is, indeed, to Pascal's bet on the existence of God, which Bourdieu makes "work as an a con- trario heuristic model." It leads him, first, to the observation that "one cannot ra-

tionally pursue the project of founding belief on a rational decision without being led to ask reason to collaborate in its own annihilation in belief, a 'disavowal of reason' that is supremely 'in accordance with reason."' Secondly, he faults Pascal for

"falling into the usual error of professional exponents of logos and logic, who

always tend, as Marx put it, to take the

things of logic for the logic of things." Poor Pascal: He should have known not to confuse "the will to think practice in terms of the logic of decisions of the will"!

Book 2 of The Logic of Practice, "Prac- tical Logics," is a very clear and precise discussion of Bourdieu's ethnological re- searches in North Africa and his anthro-

pological readings. He exploits the no- tions and realities of land, matrimonial

strategies, and kinship in order to recon-

ceptualize structuralist lessons concerning analogy, homology, indeterminacy, and

transgression. Here lies his methodological "secret," which one may call "the fundamental division."

To escapefrom theforced choice between in- tuitionism and positivism, withoutfalling into the interminable interpretation to which structuralism is condemned when, havingfailed to

go back to thegenerative principles, it can only endlessly reproduce the logical operations which are merely their contingent actualizations, one needs to apply a generative model that is both

very powerful and very simple. Knowing the

fundamental principle of division (the paradigm of which is the opposition between the

sexes), one can recreate-and therefore fully


understand-all the practices and ritual symbols on the basis of two operational schemes

which, being natural processes culturally constituted in and through ritual practice, are in-

dissolubly logical and biological, like the natural processes they aim to reproduce (in both

senses), when they are conceived in terms of magical logic. On the one hand, there is the

reuniting of separated contraries, of which

marriage, ploughing or the quenching of iron are exemplary cases, and which engenders life, as the realized reunion of contraries; and on the other hand, there is the separation of re- united contraries, with, for example the sac-

rifice of the ox and harvesting, enacted as de- nied murders.

To sum up, in The Logic of Practice one can read an intellectual autobiography: the

determining influence of Claude Levi- Strauss (a philosopher and a "model" who chose anthropology as a vocation) and

how, thanks to the new social sciences, it

became possible to contemplate overcom-

ing the distinction between truths of rea-

son and truths of facts. This, in fact, brings us back to the basic questions that Bour- dieu exposed in Outline of a Theory of Prac- tice: What to think of doxic knowledge vis-a-vis the phenomenological as de-

scription and reflection of the primary ex-

perience? What kind of credibility should

we give to objectivist analyses of the native primary experience? In sum, for

Bourdieu, as already seen, we should

question the Saussurean paradigm of

langue versus parole-that is, the socially constructed norm vis-a-vis its individual

performances-and move from a her-

meneutics concerned with the opus operatum to a hermeneutics of a modus operandi. Interestingly enough, the best guide seems to be the Sartre of Being and Noth-

ingness (and his anthropology of human

freedom) as opposed to the Sartre of The

Critique of Dialectical Reason and his ambition of circumscribing the missions of a "we-subject." In fact, this leads us back to the Cartesian Cogito and, paradoxically, to the power of illusio which, to rephrase Bourdieu's quotation of Claudel, makes us understand that to know is "to be born with."

Against the freedom of the Cogito signified by a subjective power, Bourdieu opposes the habitus as lex insita, that is, as immanent law. Let's pause a moment and redescribe the illusio of an identity, as defined by the first Sartre. My consciousness, to refer to the analysis of Being and Noth-

ingness, is an attempt to assume my own

unity as being. If, thanks to the Cogito, I can state that I am aware that, indeed, I think and thus I do exist, then I should be capable of saying that I have found my own existence. Temporalizing this ex-

perience, I understand that my being-for- itself nihilates my in-itself in the past, the

present, and the future. In the past, I am

just an object (the way a table is an object), and the present seems to be a negation of

my being, since I apprehend myself as an evasion toward the future; thus, I experience a failure in this standing out of

myself. I can then reflect about it, and in a second extasis, discover another failure: how can I, at once, be an identity, since in my reflection it is obvious that there is a deviation between the I reflecting and the I reflected upon? A third extasis opens up, and what I discover is that my for- itself has a self for the other, a self which is me, and yet I am not capable of know-

ing it; I am a being-for-others. I bring this phenomenological reading

of my impossible identity (in a mathe-


matical formula as A = B) as a sign of the

complexity of my parole. In principle, such

a position should buttress Bourdieu's cri-

tique of the system represented by the

langue and its rules on me. But once more, like a pendulum, he moves to the other

side; thus, he says in The Logic of Practice:

"Everything takes places as if the habitus

forged coherence and necessity out of ac-

cident and contingency; as if it managed to unify the effects of the social necessity

undergone from childhood, through the

material conditions of existence, ... as if

it produced a biological (and especially sexual) reading of social properties . . ., thus leading to a social re-use of biological

properties and a biological re-use of social

properties." This issue is pervasive in Language and

Symbolic Power. The book is a collection of essays published as articles in the late seventies and early eighties. It is orga- nized around three main themes: the

economy of linguistic exchanges, the social institution of symbolic power, and,

finally, symbolic power and the political field. The set of chapters leaves no doubt

where Bourdieu stands: he believed in

Calude Levi-Strauss's structuralism in the

1960s but became disenchanted with it

because of its blind dependence upon Saussure's linguistic theory. For Bour-

dieu, the analysis of the linguist carries an

idealization orfictiojuris that promotes the illusion of a common langue which is,

effectively, in political terms, the legitimate and victorious language. Thus, as

John B. Thompson, the editor of the American version of Language and Sym- bolic Power, puts it, "If linguistic theories have tended to neglect the social histor- ical conditions underlying the formation of the language which they take, in an

idealized form, as their object domain, so too they have tended to analyze linguistic expression in isolation from the specific social conditions in which they are used." Bourdieu, as we have already seen, wants to reverse this perspective by insisting on

symbolic power or symbolic violence as it is deployed in the social world and on the active complicity of the dominated. Thus the main thesis of the book:

Sociology canfree itselffrom all theforms of domination which linguistics and its concepts still exercise today over the social sciences only by bringing to light the operations of object construction through which this science was established, and the social conditions of the

production and circulation of itsfundamental concepts. The linguistic model was transposed with such ease into the domain of anthropology and sociology because one accepted the core intention of linguistics, namely, the intellec- tualist philosophy which treats language as an object of contemplation rather than as an instrument of action and power. To accept the Saussurian model and its presuppositions is to treat the social world as a universe of symbolic exchanges and to reduce action to an act of communication which, like Saussure's parole, is destined to be deciphered by means of a cipher or a code, language or culture.

In order to break with this social philosophy one must show that, domination-as symbolic interactions, that is, as relations of communication implying cognition and recognition, one must notforget that the relations of communication par excellence-linguistic ex-

changes-are also relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers or their respective groups are actualized. In short, one must move beyond the usual qppo- sition between economism and culturalism, in


order to develop an economy of symbolic ex-

changes.

Correct usage of the language refers to a

linguistic capital, its transmission through education, and, by implication, to the production and reproduction of a legitimate language. Should we not then add that

language has an impact in the construction of reality? Neo-Kantian theory (Humboldt-Cassirer, Sapir-Whorf) af- firms it and shows that there is a rela-

tionship between language and the struc-

turing of perception. In so far as the normative language is that of the dominant class, it is clear that it expresses a

symbolic power, the power of construct-

ing a legitimate reality and, indeed, of

creating, on this basis of knowledge and

mastery of the language, objective and

logical classes.

* * 0

In the fall of 1992 I taught a graduate seminar on Pierre Bourdieu at Duke Uni-

versity. The first day of the seminar, we were thirty-six (including auditors), myself excluded. On the last day, we were

fifteen, although the registrar's office tells me that nineteen regular students were

participating in the seminar. The final papers I received seem to confirm the figure.

In any case, thirty-five American students in September 1992 wanted to follow me in a careful reading of the ten books I have summed up in this paper. There were also complementary readings. They included anthropologists such as Leila Abu-Lughod (Veiled Sentiments,

1986), Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation

of Cultures, 1973), and Peter Rigby (Cat- tle, Capitalism and Class, 1992). A second

set of readings was supposed to help the students understand the French back-

ground and included books by Vincent Descombes (Modern French Philosophy, 1980) and H. Stuart Hughes (The Ob- structed Path, 1968). In one semester I rec- ommended and expected the students to read some fifteen books or articles by Bourdieu or about Bourdieu; and I had

put on reserve for them at the library a

listing with English abstracts of all the works of Bourdieu and about Bourdieu available in English.

The members of the seminar were

mainly drawn from three departments: anthropology, comparative literature, and

romance studies. Some auditors came from the English department and a few were from philosophy. The seminar was held on Fridays from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m., a good choice for testing the motivation of the

participants. We had twelve regular ses- sions plus one directed by an invited guest

professor, Robert Burch (from the phi-

losophy department of the University of

Alberta, Canada) on Pierre Bourdieu, reader of Heidegger, which focused on a

book that was not included in the reading list, The Political Ontology of Martin Hei-

degger (1991). Now that the seminar is over, I can

observe three facts: First, Bourdieu seems

to constitute an intellectual "event" on

American campuses. I was expecting ten or twelve students in this graduate seminar on Friday afternoons. I had thirty- five at the beginning and, if only fifteen

were present the last day of the seminar, nineteen were officially part of the group, not even including my irregular auditors.

The second fact, linked to the first, is

that I went from a group of thirty-five to fifteen physically present at the end. There


should be an explanation. Did the reading program discourage some of them? By midsemester it was evident that even the students who had not missed a session were behind in the readings. The midsemester papers were a test. By then, Bourdieu was no longer the lonely cow-

boy who, by the power of his intelligence, seemed to depopulate the French intellectual field. The students had understood the shape of the French intellectual con-

figuration and needed to ground their ar-

guments in their readings. My students

surprised me. Bourdieu was critically ap- plied to Latin American literature, Soviet Union politics, Chinese policies, the political and contradictory narrations of

identity in the Middle East and in India. And it worked. No, really.

A number of students seemed not to like Bourdieu, even when they were convinced by his overtures. "He is arrogant"; "He thinks that he is Kant or Hegel"; "He does not quote all his sources"; and so on. This may, I suppose, be a cultural

problem. Anthropology students loved The

Outline. They could find in it a meth-

odology, a rigor and a new spirit of Ein-

fiihlung for their object of study. The Out-

line, in effect, not only centralizes

Bourdieu's ambition as a postcolonial an-

thropologist but sums up the dreams of a

discipline in crisis. Some of the students went back to the late 1950s in order to confront Bourdieu and read his 1958 so-

ciology of Algeria (translated as The Al-

gerians, 1962) and compared it to his anal-

ysis in his 1962 "The Algerian

Subproletariat" (1973). They found in it reasons to believe in and to act upon a

discipline that has been, in an expiating masochism, interrogating itself since the

decolonialization period. Distinction ap- peared to them a good illustration of a

possible conversion which, in its being, makes comprehensible Jeanne Favret's

study on sorcery in a French subculture

(Deadly Words, 1980). Some of them are now exploring research projects on lit-

erary and modernization in India, the

identity and "distinction" of Indians in

the United States, and Soviet totalitari-

anism and its cultural expressions. Stu- dents from romance studies (French and

Spanish) as well as those from English literature and from philosophy preferred Bourdieu the theorist. To my surprise, their favorite book was not the The Logic

of Practice nor Les Regles de l'Art; it was In

Other Words. The latter is a collection of

interviews whose entries read like political proclamations or bad advertising jin- gles: "Fieldwork in philosophy," "From rules to strategies," "The interest of the

sociologist," "The intellectual field: a world apart," "The uses of the 'people,"' "Opinion polls: a 'science' without a sci-

entist," and so forth. The collection is

simply dazzlingly brilliant and reveals an

eminently elegant and sophisticated mind. Is this the reason for the success of the book? Possibly. Bourdieu himself with his usual feel for his own ego put it well in the preface to the English version:

The logic of the interview which, in more cases than one, becomes a genuine dialogue, has the

effect of removing one of the main forms of censorship which the fact of belonging to a

scientific field can impose, one that may be so

deeply internalized that its presence is not even

suspected: that which prevents you from an-

swering, in writing itself questions which,from the professional's point of view, can only appear trivial or unacceptable.


I do know that those of the students who left the seminar before midterm went away with In Other Words in their minds, with its statements about the logic and aber- rations of scientific practices. They were

looking for conceptual gadgets and tools and did not want to submit to the rigors of a systematic decoding of Bourdieu's

enterprise. Why should one fault them? I have taught Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,

and Claude Levi-Strauss for the last ten

years in the United States, and enjoyed the surprise of seeing young minds open- ing up to their ideas and critically inte-

grating these perspectives. Teaching Bourdieu-it was my first time- was a

new challenge: I saw explosions of love and hatred, respect and rejection, all re- actions that the elegance and brilliance of Pierre Bourdieu's work can sustain. But am I going to organize another seminar on Bourdieu?

Really, the idea frightens me now that I know his mastery of the game. Well, what to say? If you would believe me, said the good old Simonides, we should not like our own unhappiness. To this masterful statement, one might add the

pronouncement of another ancient Greek, Hesiod: "We shouldn't torture ourselves

by setting our hearts on grievous unhappiness."


Documents

Teaching Bourdieu