Bourdieu's Theory of Social Fields

Concepts and Applications

Mathieu Hilgers, Eric Mangez, Mathieu Hilgers, Eric Mangez

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138777651
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bourdieu's theory of social fields is one of his key contributions to social sciences and humanities. However, it has never been subjected to genuine critical examination. This book fills that gap and offers a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the theory. It includes a critical discussion of its methodology and relevance in different subject areas in the social sciences and humanities.

Part I "theoretical investigations" offers a theoretical account of the theory, while also identifying some of its limitations and discussing several strategies to overcome them. Part II "Education, culture and organization" presents the theory at work and highlights its advantages and disadvantages. The focus in Part III devoted to "The State" is on the formation and evolution of the State and public policy in different contexts. The chapters show the usefulness of field theory in describing, explaining and understanding the functioning of the State at different stages in its historical trajectory including its recent redefinition with the advent of the neoliberal age. A last chapter outlines a postcolonial use of the theory of fields.

Part I

Theoretical investigations

1Was Bourdieu a field theorist?¹

John Levi Martin and Forest Gregg

Introduction

Field theory was introduced into the psychological social sciences in the mid-twentieth century by German psychologists and philosophers (after the war, mainly expatriates to the United States). Influenced by physics, these thinkers borrowed the distinctive features of physical field theories for application to the human realm. While this genealogy was largely extinguished within American social theory somewhere in the 1970s, as it was dying out in the United States, Pierre Bourdieu was resurrecting field theory in France, making it the heart of his own explanatory apparatus. His renown has led many current students of the social sciences to conflate field theory and Bourdieu’s own writings, making it impossible even to ask whether Bourdieu was indeed a rigorous field theorist, let alone to see in what directions his ideas have contributed to the project of field theory.

In this chapter, we first outline the fundamental characteristics of field theory in the natural sciences. We then briefly discuss how this was adapted by the Gestalt theorists for the case of human behaviour. We then argue that Bourdieu was indeed a rigorous field theorist. Assuming that the outlines of Bourdieu’s own work are familiar enough to our readers, we do not document Bourdieu’s use of core field theoretic principles, but instead concentrate on where we believe he made important advances that will be necessary for any similar field theoretic approach. We finally discuss what we believe are the potentially problematic or confusing aspects of Bourdieu’s own work considered in field theoretic terms. These are: 1 the relation between social space and particular fields; 2 the relation between capital and field position; and 3 the relation of vectors to extra-field positions or outcomes.

Essences of field theory

Some characteristics of field theory

Field theory, as an approach, developed first and most fully in the physical sciences through various attempts to comprehend how one thing could affect another without some substantive medium. While there are a number of different fields, and theories of each have varied over the course of their development, the best model of intellectually rigorous field theory would be classical (non-relativistic) electro-magnetism, though the important features here are found in similar systems. (Newtonian gravitation has much in common with field theory, but only Einstein’s general relativity actually technically gave it a field theoretic form; Hesse 1970: 226.)

Field theories really took the basic form of the fluid mechanics developed in the eighteenth century, in which equations linked a ‘flow’ or potential for transmitted force to spatial coordinates, but applied this form to situations where no fluid could be found; examples are motion induced by gravity, electricity, or magnetism (Hesse 1970: 181; Rummel 1975: 26; also cf. Köhler 1947: 127). An examination of classical electro-magnetism suggests that field theory may be said to have the following characteristics:

● It purports to explain changes in the states of some elements (e.g. a static field induces motion in a charged particle) but need not appeal to changes in states of other elements (that is, ‘causes’).

● These changes in state involve an interaction between the field and the existing states of the elements (e.g. a particle of positive charge moves one way and one of negative charge another) (see Maxwell 1954 [1891]: 68; Koffka 1935: 42; Köhler 1947: 300).

● The elements have particular attributes which make them susceptible to the field effect (particles differ in the degree and direction of charge).

● The field without the elements is only a potential for the creation of force, without any existent force (Hesse 1970: 196).

● The field itself is organized and differential (Koffka 1935: 117). At any position the field is a vector of potential force and these vectors are neither randomly nor discontinuously distributed.

It is worth pointing out how utterly at odds such a conception is with the conventional understanding of causality in the social sciences. According to this conception, elements have attributes, mutually exclusive attributes often being considered instances of a ‘variable’. Some of an element’s variables are imagined to be linked together mechanically, such that a change in one variable must produce a change in another. While the mechanism may yet be obscure, social scientists recognize causality when a change in state in one variable of an element produced by external manipulation impels a change in state in another variable of that element. Causality follows a mental image of external impulsion taken from classical mechanics (basically the conception of Hobbes, though more Rube Goldberg than Minnesota Fats), but recasts this in terms of variables, as opposed to substances (see Abbott 1988).

In contrast, a rigorous field theoretic approach allows for one element’s state to change without requiring that it be due to a change in state in another element (let alone a different change in the state in the same element). Such a field theoretic approach was introduced into the social and behavioural sciences by the Gestalt psychologists. We go on to review the central emphasis of the Gestalt school, and then how the members formulated field theory.

The development of field theory

The non-independence of percepts

The Gestalt idea is generally attributed to Christian Ehrenfels, who had studied with Alexius Meinong at Graz. Ehrenfels (1988 [1890]: 112) pointed out not only that there are qualities that can only exist as a whole (for example, a timbre or a melody), but that we are not aware of any conscious activity whereby we generate this quality through synthesis. While acknowledging Ehrenfels’s priority, the motive force in establishing an empirical school of psychology was really Max Wertheimer, who had attended lectures by Ehrenfels (Heider 1983: 44).

However, Wertheimer had also been influenced by Carl Stumpf, who had sketched the lines for the sort of phenomenology that was to turn into Gestalt psychology. Responding to the debate over the position of the ‘cultural sciences’ (Geisteswissenschaften; Dilthey 1988 [1883]: 78, 91, 97, 125, 131), Stumpf argued that more fundamental than either of the two commonly identified branches of sciences (natural and cultural) was phenomenology, a science of the structure of the phenomena with which each of these begin. (Stumpf’s student Husserl was later to emphasize one version of such a phenomenological study as a form of ‘pure psychology’.)² This phenomenology demonstrates that our world is not the world of the Cartesians. First, in contrast to the pure, isotropic and homogenous space of geometry, the space we live in has certain relations built into it (at any time, some things ‘are’ to the left, say), and it has unevenesses in it (and indeed, our vision has boundaries) (Stumpf 1907: 72, 9). These are characteristics of the objects we confront, not things we put into them.

Stumpf thus proposed not only an ideal phenomenology that retained the distinction between the pure visions of the natural sciences and our actual experienced world, but a version of psychology attuned to philosophical questions (as opposed to the narrower professionalism of the American model). Both these principles – an embracing of immediate experience and an engagement with philosophical questions – marked the approach of Stumpf’s students who were to found the Gestalt school: in addition to Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka (Smith 1988: 12, 45; Neisser 2002: 4; Ash 1998: 118, 120, 124).³

What Wertheimer did was to seize upon one key aspect of this idea as the basis for experimental research. Both Stumpf and Ehrenfels had pointed to the importance of our capacity to hear harmonics – relations – as unities. The way to understand our actual, empirical, phenomenological experience would be to investigate how we captured such whole forms (‘Gestalts’) as unified objects of experience (and not as aggregates or syntheses). In other words, Stumpf ‘s phenomenology was inseparable from two other pre-sciences that he proposed, a science of structure and a science-of-relations, for the objects that we perceive – or at least their character as quality-bearing objects – are themselves structures, and structures are sets of relations.

A phenomenology of relations

These planks were of great utility for psychologists attempting to account for the non-independence of perceptual elements, which did not square with the dominant mechanistic explanation of sight. According to this latter view, photons stimulate retinal cells which lead to neurons firing which lead to a copy of the visual field reproduced in some portion of the brain. This field is then processed according to some mental template, leading to a distinction between the psychology of perception and the psychology of judgement.

Wertheimer (1922: 48, v) called this the ‘mosaic or bundle thesis’ of perception and consciousness: that all higher-order elements were the sum of elemental contents constructed according to mere ‘and’ summation. Connections between elements were generally ascribed to ‘association’, a type of relation that was indifferent to the content of the elements (cf. Cassirer 1923 [1910]: 285). Those who began from this assumption had a difficult time explaining cases in which our perception of one thing (e.g. distance) is affected by something else in the visual field: they were forced to argue that these were illusions of judgement. Wertheimer, in contrast, began from an assumption that what we perceive is a totality of relations that far from being arbitrary expressed the nature of the concrete laws of their formal structure (Wertheimer 1922: 53). While the ‘mosaic thesis’ assumed that the unit percepts were primary, and the larger structures derivative of some act of mental formulation, Wertheimer argued that the whole was primary, and its structural principles as objective as anything else.

It is not, of course, invariably the case that there is such a complicity between mental and environmental structures; indeed, we can subjectively experience and scientifically study the transition whereby we bring our mental structure into alignment with the environment, a process which Köhler (1925 [1917]: 17, 99, 173ff, 190, 198; also Köhler 1938: 31) called ‘insight’, ‘a complete solution with reference to the whole lay-out of the field’. In contrast to behaviourist theories which predicted a continuous transition between random and useful behaviour, Köhler argued that it was easy to see the discontinuity in behaviour exactly at the point in which the subject (person or animal) manages to encompass the problem as a whole, and carries out actions with steps that, taken in isolation, contribute nothing to the solution.⁴ This was a reasonable and relatively rigorous extrapolation from Gestalt studies of perception. In contrast to the mosaic thesis which imagines the perceptual field is always composed of ‘parts’, a Gestalt exists when any sub-set of the overall field must be understood as a position in reference to the set of other positions (Metzger 1986 [1975]: 160). So, too, Köhler argued, when the animal ‘gets it’, we can understand any action only in terms of a position in a sequence that, as a whole and only then, provides a solution.

Gestalts and fields

Thus Gestalt theorists had argued that one could not understand how an organism sensed the environment without attention to the field of perception as a whole.⁵ Thus one reason for the transition to field theory was that the Gestalt psychologists were most interested in the field of perception (that is, the perceptual field), and they argued that there were tension relations between different parts of this field. Any one percept (bit of perception) was likely to have its meaning only in relation to others. Köhler recalled that his goal was to determine ‘why percepts at a distance have an effect on one another. This is only possible, we assumed (and we followed Faraday in doing so), if the individual percept has a field and if the “field”, which surrounds the percept, does not merely reveal the presence of this percept but also presents its specific properties’ (cited in Mey 1972: 13ff; for a discussion of the relation of Gestalt theory to field theory, see Mohr n.d., forthcoming).

The non-independence of parts, then, was the key insight that led Gestalt psychology to see the perceptual field as a field, as opposed to an indifferent Cartesian space. The visual field is organized into wholes from the earliest stages of our perceptual experience. As Köhler (1947: 118, cf. 259) wrote in his classic introduction to Gestalt psychology, ‘As to the statement that sensory experience is a mosaic of purely local facts in the sense that each point of a sensory field depends exclusively upon its local stimulus, I must repeat that no grounds have ever been given for this radical assumption. Rather it seems to be the expression of an a priori belief about what ought to be the nature of things, experience to the contrary notwithstanding’.

However, field theory was implied by three other considerations. One was an epistemological conviction of the importance of mutual self-organization of systems, the sorts of ideas that we would now associate with Luhmann (1995). We seem to take for granted, Köhler (1929: 107, 145) wrote, that ‘the processes of nature, if they are left to their own “blind” play, will never produce anything like order’. In contrast, Köhler (1929: 112, 121) proposed that seemingly independent elements are interdependent in ways that give rise to an overall set of dynamics. Thus the field emerges from the constant reciprocal adjustments of elements in relation to one another. This, Köhler argued, was in contrast to the dominant explanatory principles in which any form of change or regularity involved external impulsion, which he termed the ‘machine theory’. This machine theory with its emphasis on external constraint might be well and good for the case of water in a pipe, but consider a drop in the ocean, along with other drops: each one moves according to the resultant vector of forces coming from its interaction with...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields
• PART I Theoretical investigations
• Part II Education, culture and organization
• PART III The State and public policy
• Afterword: theory of fields in the postcolonial age
• Index