Bourdieu

A critical introduction

Tony Schirato, Mary Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Throughout his career, French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu sought to interrogate what he described as the 'social unconscious', the means by which power is held and transmitted across generations. Bourdieu's work has been hugely influential in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities for decades, yet Schirato and Roberts argue that few scholars are using his work to its full potential.Bourdieu's work is so wide-ranging that commentary tends to focus on specific theoretical concepts he developed or his books on particular fields of inquiry. However he continued to develop these concepts in his work across his whole career, and much of the richness of his thinking is lost if this isn't taken into account. Drawing on recently released lectures, Schirato and Roberts offer a systematic account of Bourdieu's full body of work, from his early research in Algiers to his last lectures in Paris. They show how Bourdieu continued to develop his concepts of habitus, field, capital, power and socio-cultural reproduction well into his later years. They also offer a nuanced reading of Bourdieu's thinking about education, class, language, knowledge and culture beyond the individual books Bourdieu published on these topics.This critical introduction to Bourdieu is essential reading for all Bourdieu scholars, and for researchers and thinkers using Bourdieu's work in their own social and cultural analysis.'A terrific book, which sets out a comprehensive overview of Bourdieu's oeuvre in a way that no other text I know has done' - Professor John Frow, University of Sydney

1 Antecedents and trajectories

Introduction

In his obituary published on The Guardian website in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu was described as ‘for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France’ (Guardian Online 2002). In a postscript to that obituary, Stuart Jefferies wrote:

Last year a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu—Sociology is a Combat Sport—became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do. Bourdieu became ‘the intellectual reference’ for movements opposed to neo-liberalism and globalisation that developed in France and elsewhere during the 90s. ‘Ours is a Darwinian world of insecurity and stress,’ he wrote, ‘where the permanent threat of unemployment creates a permanent state of precariousness’ . . . Among those he actively supported was José Bové, the French small-farmers’ leader, who, in 1999, gained fame overnight by leading an attack on a McDonald’s outlet, regarded as a symbol of globalisation. ‘For him,’ Bové said about Bourdieu, ‘life itself was a commitment.’ Bourdieu’s death deprives France of one of its great post-war intellectuals, a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan. (Guardian Online 2002)

The focus in this and other accounts of Bourdieu’s life and career is predominantly on his role as an intellectual who, much like Foucault, used his position and status within the French academy to intervene on a range of topics and issues, but most particularly with regard to the rights of, and the injustices suffered by, groups who remained outside mainstream networks of power (the colonized, provincial peasants, urban workers, migrants and students). What is less visible in these public testimonies is an appreciation of the scope, breadth, influence and significance of Bourdieu’s scholarly and intellectual work: an argument could be made that, in terms of the extent to which his ideas have been taken up by and influenced academic and intellectual fields (education, anthropology, sociology, communication, critical and cultural theory, literature and art, to name the most obvious examples), again the only comparable contemporary figure is Foucault. As Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman (2000) write in their Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture, the aim of Bourdieu’s academic work was not limited to ‘the reinvigoration of the discipline of sociology in France’: his main objective was, in his own words, nothing less than a reappropriation of ‘the social unconscious’ (Bourdieu 2000: 10). To achieve this, he attempted

to produce a theory of social life drawn neither from the mental laboratories of philosophy, nor from the strict empiricism of much of what passes for sociological research, but from a highly theoretical mode of analysis that nevertheless pays careful attention to the complex dynamics of social life itself (Brown & Szeman 2000: 1).

As Bourdieu himself (2007), along with others (Grenfell 2012; Robbins 2000) notes, his familial and social background was unusual for a highly successful French academic of the mid-twentieth century. Born in 1930, he came from a relatively poor, rural background in the southwest of France. However, academic success in the French school system led him to one of the most prestigious institutions in France, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 1951 to study in one of the most academically prestigious fields: philosophy. He was an oblat miraculé, glossed by his translator Richard Nice as ‘Bourdieu’s term for a pupil who commits himself entirely to the scholastic success which gives him a “miraculous” social mobility’ (Bourdieu 2007: 5). This produced

a very strong discrepancy between high academic consecration and low social origin, in other words a cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions. This kind of ‘coincidence of contraries’ no doubt helped to institute, in a lasting way, an ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the academic institution, combining rebellion and submission, rupture and expectation, which is perhaps at the root of a relation to myself that is also ambivalent and contradictory—as if the self-certainty linked to the feeling of being consecrated were undermined in its very principle by the most radical uncertainty towards the consecrating institution, a kind of bad mother, vain and deceiving. (Bourdieu 2007: 100)

After successfully completing his university studies in 1955, he taught briefly in a provincial lycée before being conscripted into the French army in Algeria. As he describes in Sketch for a Self-Analysis, he stepped off the ‘very privileged route reserved for students of the École Normale’ (2007: 38) and instead of completing his military service in Versailles, he was sent to Algeria as a soldier (2007: 38). Towards the end of his military service there, he took up a clerical role in the military section of the French administrative system based in Algiers. During this time, he wrote Sociologie de l’Algérie, which was published in 1958. After completing his military service, he taught at the University of Algiers from 1958 to 1960 (Bourdieu 2007: 38).

On his return to Paris in 1960, Bourdieu attended lectures given by Claude Lévi-Strauss and worked as an assistant to Raymond Aron (Grenfell 2012: 13), who had founded the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (CSE). Bourdieu was appointed as Secretary (Robbins 2000: 33) and eventually became the Director of the Centre in 1968 (2000: 16). Jean-Claude Passeron was also assisting Aron, and together they ‘developed a research programme for the Centre which would explore the phenomenon of social mobility and analyse also the emergence of mass culture’ (2000: 34). After taking a position as lecturer at the University of Lille in 1961, Bourdieu returned to Paris in 1964 to take up the positions of Director of Studies at the École Practique des Hautes Études, and lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure, which he held until 2001 and 1984 respectively (Grenfell 2012: 229).

Bourdieu’s work with Passeron, which began under Aron’s aegis in the 1960s, highlights an aspect of academic research that Bourdieu regarded as vital: ‘his vision of research as a quintessentially collective activity whose true subject is not the individual scholar but the scientific field in toto’ (Wacquant 2013: 20). Bourdieu collaborated with a wide range of scholars, and he explains the importance of the group to his work and development in a passage in Sketch for a Self Analysis:

The group that I set up, based on elective affinity as much as intellectual convergence, played a decisive role in this enormous investment, with my own belief producing in others the belief capable of reinforcing and confirming my belief. Everything thus combined to favour an individual and collective self-certainty that induced a profound detachment from the external world, its judgments and its sanctions. (Bourdieu 2007: 69–70)

The CSE enabled Bourdieu to assemble a group of fellow researchers and ‘to participate in universes of thought, past or present, very distant from my own’ (2007: 66). As Robbins (2000: 112) points out, some of the ideas and fields in which Bourdieu was interested were in fact researched by colleagues such as Patrick Champagne and Monique de Saint Martin. Bourdieu took up the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France in 1982 (Bourdieu 2007), and in 1993 he accepted the ‘Gold Medal of the National Center for Scientific Research’ (CNRS), France’s highest prize for scientific achievement (Wacquant 2013).

Bourdieu’s role as a ‘public intellectual’ in France was accentuated when, with the 1981 election of the Socialist President Mitterand accompanied by a Socialist majority in parliament, he was asked to contribute to government policy-making. He sat on a Collège de France committee on educational reform in 1981, and later that decade chaired a government commission on education (Grenfell 2012: 230). In 1993, La misère du monde was published to widespread acclaim. From here, Bourdieu played an even more visible role in French public life (see Wacquant 2013), founding what was to become the association Raisons d’agir (Reasons to Act) in 1995, and the book series Liber-Raisons d’agir, launched in 1996 with the publication of On Television and Journalism (Bourdieu 1998b).

Bourdieu (2007: 100) referred to his ‘ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the academic institution, combining rebellion and submission, rupture and expectation’. Wacquant (2013: 18) notes that this attitude led him to consider turning down both the chair at the Collège de France and the Gold Medal. His abhorrence of ‘academic pomp’ and sense of the contradictions consequent upon his ‘cleft habitus’ made the necessary inaugural lecture and acceptance speech a matter of extreme stress and concern to him (Bourdieu 2007: 108–10; Wacquant 2013: 18–19). In both cases he resolved the tension caused by ‘the very fact of a social consecration which assaulted my self-image’ (Bourdieu 2007: 109) by delivering an address that treated the occasion as an event for sociological analysis and, in the case of the Gold Medal, breaking with protocol to make political points (Wacquant 2013: 22). Gisele Sapiro (2010: xx) writes that while Bourdieu ‘claimed the right to . . . speak freely on political issues . . . the autonomy of the expert is limited . . . Counterexpertise was a means of making a political use of scientific knowledge in an autonomous manner.’

In the preface to Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, a text written in the style and featuring a mode of address characteristic of his overtly interventionist later work, Bourdieu (2003: 11–12) states:

I have come to believe that those who have the good fortune to be able to devote their lives to the study of the social world cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake. These struggles are, for an essential part, theoretical struggles in which the dominant can count on innumerable complicities . . . Against such power, based on the concentration and mobilization of cultural capital, the only efficacious response is a critical force of contestation backed by a similar mobilization but directed towards entirely other ends.

Two points are worth noting here. The first is Bourdieu’s commitment (he ‘cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake’) to the imperative, derived from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, that philosophers should not just interpret the world, but should ‘change it’ (Marx 1969: 15). However, both a sociological refinement and an enhancement of Marx’s dictum exist and, typically for Bourdieu, these are presented—at least implicitly—as both the result of a process of reflection and duration (‘I have come to believe’) and as a form of work—a problem that has to be dealt with and solved in a practical manner (‘the only efficacious response’). The second point relates to the claim that the future of the social world ‘is at stake’, and the work of salvaging the social shall be decided by ‘theoretical struggles’: this is a significant claim primarily because it is made by someone who is influenced by and discursively committed to Wittgenstein’s (1983) meticulous care and reflexivity with regard to the use of language.

Bourdieu is not alone in claiming that the survival of the sociocultural field is threatened by the discursive regimes, logics, values, dispositions and technologies of contemporary capitalism. The visual theorist Jonathan Crary (2013), referring to the attempts of global capitalism to make inroads into, and eventually abolish, ‘the time of sleep’ as non-productive and incompatible with regard to the ‘allegedly irresistible forces of modernization’, writes (2013: 128), ‘Now there is actually only one dream, superseding all others: it is of a shared world whose fate is not terminal, a world without billionaires, which has a future other than barbarism or the post-human, and in which history can take on other forms than reified nightmares of catastrophe.’

The colonization of the social field by market economics, the catastrophic socio-cultural consequences that accompany it and the curious ideological and ethical distance that seems to separate or obfuscate the relation between its causes, actors and practices and their effects—as Maurice Blanchot (1986: 3) writes, ‘The disaster is related to forgetfulness’—is a motif that Bourdieu inherited from the social economist Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation (1957) Polanyi provides an historically situated account of the coming of fascism, interpreted as a consequence of the ideological rise, hegemony and fall—the ‘great transformation’ of the book’s title—of free market capitalism. Polanyi argues that market capitalism works to abolish the ‘between us’ out of which the social is constituted, facilitated and maintained; one result of this evacuation of social values and considerations in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was that the social effected a kind of return of the repressed, in the form of a negative communal identity predicated upon disaffection, alienation and a disposition towards socio-cultural and political fascism. Capitalist economics, Polyani (1957: 258) writes,

gave a false direction . . . No society is possible in . . . a market-view of society which equated economics with contractual relationships, and contractual relations with freedom . . . Vision was limited by the market which ‘fragmented’ life into the producers’ sector that ended when his product reached the market, and the sector of consumers for whom all goods sprang from the market . . . Society as a whole remained invisible . . . Neither voters, nor owners, neither producers, nor consumers could be held responsible for such brutal restrictions of freedom as were involved in the occurrence of unemployment and destitution . . . Any decent individual . . . was unentangled in the evil of power and economic value. His lack of responsibility for them seemed so evident that he denied their reality in the name of his freedom.

In the Algerian phase of Bourdieu’s work, capitalism is located, evaluated and treated as part of the French colonialist regime: the imposition of capitalist logics on Algeria is characterized as having a devastating effect on the integrity, coherence and stability of the local culture, predominantly because it replaces a way of life predicated on specific socio-cultural relations, forms of capital, identities, conventions, values and economies, and inscribed with and contextualized by local narratives, epistemological categories and meanings, with a form of market economics. While not nearly as directly interventionist as some of his later works, the anthropological writing and scholarship produced during or derived from Bourdieu’s time in Algeria is characterized by an analysis and critique of the abstraction (and, by extension, the destruction) of Algerian society, culture, relationships and forms of identity by the forces and logics of colonialism and capitalism. There is a concomitant awareness that the French intellectual field of the 1950s and 1960s, and the academic disciplines and bodies of theory that dominated it—Marxism, existentialism, literary theory, phenomenology, philosophy—were complicit in this process of abstraction (Bourdieu 2007). For Bourdieu, the euphemized and depoliticized Orientalism that served as an extension of right-wing political thought during the period of the Algerian War, and that was particularly influential in the fields of ethnography and anthropology, was accompanied by leftist thought that could only conceive of Algeria and the Algerians within Marxist-oriented revolutionary narratives. Goodman and Silverstein (2009b: 10) state:

Bourdieu sharply demarcated himself from other leading proponents of ‘Algerian Algeria’—most notably, Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. In Bourdieu’s view, Sartre, Fanon, and others aligned with the Communist left were blind to the socioeconomic realities of the Algerian population . . . the leftists sought to locate in the Algerian peasantry a nascent revolutionary consciousness . . . Bourdieu . . . found the left’s utopianism ‘misleading and dangerous’ . . . The left’s views were motivated, Bourdieu contended, by ‘Parisian ideas’ . . . that . . . paid little heed to the ‘objective situation’ of colonial Algeria.

According to Tassadit Yacine (2013: 7), Bourdieu’s experiences in Algeria produced ‘a profound biographical and intellectual conversion of the Paris philosopher into an anthropologist, ethnologist and sociologist’ who, for the ‘rest of his life’, would conceive of and use the social sciences and their methodologies as ‘a political weapon in the service of a social critique of forms of repression and domination’. The political and interventionist focus of Bourdieu’s work was conducted and discursively situated at the level of (predominantly) scientific procedures and methodologies—in other words, it involved ‘for an essential part, theoretical struggles’ (2013: 12).

References to, and an analysis of, capitalism are curiously absent from Bourdieu’s educational and early cultural texts that deal with more modern (and predominantly French) societies and contexts. The focus is on the role played by cultural sites, institutions, discourses and genres in the reproduction and naturalization of power differentials and class domination. In this early work, Bourdieu gradually develops and utilizes a theory of a general economy predicated upon field-specific regimes of value and the exchangeability of different forms of capital (including economic capital). What is missing from this theoretical development, according to Calhoun (1993), is an understanding and account of the role of capitalism in terms of its relations with and transformation of regimes of capital: in other words, he argues that ‘what Bourdieu’s approach to capital lacks . . . is an idea of capitalism’ (1993: 68)—or, more specifically, a theory of what John Guillory (2000: 23) refers to as ‘the union ...