J.L. Lemke

Sociology Department
City University of New York
jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu

 

Bourdieu, Pierre and Lois J.D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

 

I. The Text

 

Invitation to Reflexive Sociology is a book that is not quite a text. Tiles in a genre mosaic abut one another: Fantasy Interview with the Great Man (Part Deux, a construction not a transcript), Fatherly Advice on Becoming a Sociologist (Part 3, from a seminar for Bourdieu’s students), several essays at a “How to Read Bourdieu” (Part 1, Appendices, Notes, from Wacquant). The unbounded border mosaic of intertexts, present and absent, draws down readers’ accumulated cultural capital toward indebtedness.

 

If you have read Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (1990), whose first half sets forth his most original theoretical ideas (elaborating and superseding the older Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977), and at least one of his major sociological studies Distinction, 1984; Homo Academicus, 1988; La Noblesse d’Etat, 1989), then Invitation may help you decide whether to read more from Bourdieu, and what. If you have only a vague sense that Bourdieu is a leading social theorist who engages the telling intellectual issues of the day, Invitation may convince you that, along with his near neighbors in social space (as he himself defines them in Homo Academicus, 276), Foucault and Derrida, Bourdieu sets the stage for our postmodernist play.

 

And if you have ever wondered what Bourdieu thinks of his actual and potential rivals: sociological, intellectual, and philosophical (except Derrida and Foucault), or simply enjoy stockpiling ammunition for use in future intellectual battles of your own, Invitation is a fully-stocked armamentarium.

 

But Invitation is also a voice, one that resonates with our own, speaking as we would like to speak (if not necessarily saying what we would like to say), about the construction of reality and society, experience and meaning, language and power, the social and the personal, time and the body, gender and domination, science and politics, academics and intellectuals. Perhaps it is only an illusion, but in this text as nowhere else, we seem to hear Bourdieu speaking, rather than writing. Bourdieu writes himself out of his writing in too many ways. However written his speaking may be here, however defensive, didactic, or undialogical, to a small degree at least it allows us to write him back in.

 

And if you are a student, or any sort of newcomer, to academic and intellectual discourse in what was once humanistic and social studies, I advise you to read and challenge this book.

 

II. Postmodernism, Si or No?

 

So, is he or isn’t he? The short answer, I think, is that Bourdieu writes as a chastened defender of the great modernist projects, a modernist for postmodern times. But while his desire is with the best of modernism, his method is shaped by the same rebellion against modernism and structuralism that characterizes his close contemporaries Foucault and Derrida.

 

Here, taken from Invitation, is my reading of Bourdieu’s project and consequent overt stance against postmodernism, to be followed by a counter-construction of Bourdieu as postmodern in spite of himself.

 

The project of Bourdieu’s desire is a grand sociology which realizes in part the modernist dream of a scientific objectivity hard won through its own reflexivity: “Sociology can escape to a degree [from its necessarily socially determined point of view on the social world] by drawing on its knowledge of the social universe in which social science is produced to control the effects of the determinisms that operate in this universe and, at the same time, bear on sociologists themselves” (67).

 

This is the motivation for Bourdieu’s many studies of the academic and educational systems of his native France, and generally for his studies of how the social system shapes our perceptions and desires. He constructs his notion of what scientific objectivity about such matters means following Marx’s criterion that social facts exist “independently of individual consciousness and will.” But what exist objectively for Bourdieu in the social world are pre-eminently relations, not positive entities, and with this he has already taken the first, structuralist step into postmodernism.

 

Still, he wants to draw a line against critiques of social science that see its/his writings as merely “poetics and politics,” opening the door to “nihilistic relativism” of the same sort found in the “strong program of the sociology of science” (Feyerabend? Bruno Latour?). He opposes “the false radicalism of the questioning of science” and “those who would reduce scientific discourse to rhetorical strategies about a world reduced to the state of a text” (246-7). How can I hope to rehabilitate the author of such reactionary sentiments?

 

By better understanding the terms of the debate as Bourdieu constructs it. When, just following this last point, he characterizes the goal of his own project as “to wrench scientific reason from the embrace of practical reason, to prevent the latter from contaminating the former,” we need to understand his critical distinction of the practical from the scientific, and his own critique of positivistic objectivity:

 

Against positivistic materialism, the theory of practice posits that objects of knowledge are constructed, and not passively recorded; against intellectual idealism, it reminds us that the principle of this construction is found in the socially constituted system of structured and struc- turing dispositions acquired in practice . . . and that all knowledge . . . presupposes a work of construction . . . that consists of an activity of practical construction, even of practical reflection, that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from thinking . . . . [This view aims] to escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away with the agent, as well as from the philosophy of the [social, semiotic] structure, but without forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and through the agent.(121)

 

III. Practice, Temporality, Embodiedness

 

For a systematic account of this Logic of Practice, we have to turn to that text. Its tour-de-force Introduction is mainly a critique of every form of objectivism, and more profoundly of the conditions of possibility of theoretical and scientific perspectives:

 

Social science must not only, as objectivism [vs. phenomenological subjectivisms] would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the "objective" observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object.... Knowledge does not only depend, as an elementary relativism would have it, on the particular viewpoint that at "situated and dated" observer takes us via-a-vis the object. A much more fundamental alteration ... is performed on practice by the sheer fact of taking up a "viewpoint" on it and so constituting it as an object ... this sovereign viewpoint is most easily adopted from elevated positions in the social space, where the social world presents itself as a spectacle seen from afar and from above, as a representation.(Logic of Practice, 27)

 

In The Logic of Practice Bourdieu inquires into those aspects of experience and social reality which look different precisely because we are in the midst of action and not theoretically and scientifically distancing ourselves from it: the contingency and anticipatability of events when they have yet to happen, the absence of synoptic order and structure from the logic of action, the construction of dynamic vs synoptic time, the role of the body in action without reflection (and in reflection itself), the importance of tempo, rhythm, pacing, duration, delay, and haste in the meaning of events-in-flow. This is the perspective from which Bourdieu originally criticized Levi-Straussian structuralism for its theoreticist blindness to whatever is elided from synoptic representations made from the sovereign viewpoint of a science outside of event-time and the pressures of the moment.

 

It also provides a counterpoint against which to examine both the conditions of possibility and the otherwise unthinkable biases of all theoretical and scientific discourses and perspectives, as such. Dialectically, it allows us to interrogate the practices of science as practice, and to see in them the role of the practical, embodied logics, the famous dispositions toward practice that Bourdieu calls “habitus”, and which derive from the trajectories of practice of individual social agents as they take up the lives available to them.

 

I have found this dynamic perspective on social practice, and its dialectical relations with the synoptic perspectives of theoretical representation, extremely useful in my own work on social semiotics, discourse analysis, and text semantics (Lemke 1984, 1990, 1991) and so have many others (e.g. Martin 1985, Thibault 1991) in these fields whose underlying disciplines and methods are quite distant from Bourdieu’s. The re-centering of the body in alternatives to mentalist accounts of subjectivity, cognition, and action; in deconstructing the idealist cheats of a natural science self-disembodied from its own practice; and in theorizing gender issues, domination relations, and the repressed role of bodily violence in constituting the social order are but some of the postmodernist projects that will eventually build on Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

 

IV. Gender, Habitus, and Us

 

For all that Bourdieu lays the foundations of a productive critical dialectic between the logics of theory and practice, of semiotic structures and bodies in action, social structures and personal trajectories, and for all the centrality of reflexivity in his notion of social science, there seems to be more preparing-the-way than radical self-critique in his work. There is no profound self-examination, for example, of masculinism, Eurocentrism, or even the essentially bourgeois perspectives in his own theoretical metaphors and paradigms.

 

Homo Academicus comes closest to being a self- analysis “by proxy,” as he says in the Preface. But it is a micro-analysis, situating Bourdieu in his generation, and in the academy, but not in his gender, social class (bourgeois, as such), or culture (European, as such). By proxy and indirection it suggests that various elements of his scientific and career trajectory are shaped, as his theory requires, by his own initial social position and the effects of the dispostions it engendered in him on his encounters with later opportunities. In Invitation he argues that he keeps the personal Bourdieu on the margins so as not to make facile argumenta ad hominem too easy for his rivals. In doing so, however, he may have kept himself from deploying the full power of sociological reflexivity toward his own theorizing. Enabling such self-critique is, after all, the point of his scientific project and the absence of such self-analysis the very point on which, in the Postscript to Distinction, he criticizes Derrida.

 

Who, Bourdieu included, can read his texts and not see that he models the whole social universe as a struggle and competition among agents for status, domination, profit, and accumulation in one guise or another? In every field of social action, whatever their habitus, agents deploy and convert their capital (economic, cultural, and social) in an effort to win the game as defined in that field. If the game, and especially the competitive game of sport, is Bourdieu’s favorite simile, his master trope is the agon, the struggle for dominance.

 

The field of fields, the master field, for Bourdieu is the field of power, in relation to which all others are defined, and power for Bourdieu is the power to win the game, to maximize one’s capital position, to overcome adversaries. Any such summary is caricature, of course, but with the truth of caricature, as well. When Bourdieu speaks, rarely, of what happens “in the family and in other relations of philia,” what he sees is “violence suspended in a kind of pact of symbolic non-aggression,” the pervasive potentiality of every utterance to function as an act of power “bracketed” (145).

 

The social relations of philia are defined as exceptions to the underlying principle of the agon. The institutions of philia are marginalized, those of the agon made central. Economic competition, cultural competition, personal competition, metaphoric competition among abstracted social positions and roles. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of masculinism. It survives as doxa for Bourdieu precisely for the reasons his theory offers: because the world as he sees it and lives it fits perfectly with the masculinist dispositions it has produced in him.

 

Power for Bourdieu is the power to dominate, to control, to win. It is not also the power to nurture, to befriend, to console, to inspire, to share, to yield, to cooperate. It is not the power, in general, to engage in, and so to engage with others in, every social practice that comprises the social reality of every agent–a social reality, therefore, remade from every perspective of practice, and not only from that of the specialized practice of the straight, male, bourgeois academic theorist.

 

Bourdieu began his career as an anthropologist, and all his theoretical work, and most of his insights, arise from and are illustrated by examples from his fieldwork among the berber Kabyle of Algeria. The view he offers is not meant to be restricted to European culture or to the social reality of the bourgeoisie. He offers brilliant analyses (in the Logic) of the differences between barter and monetary economies and the cultures that support them, but still he models all of social reality as an economics, he takes economic capital and the relations of the economic field to be primus inter pares among all forms of capital and all dimensions of the field of power. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of the bourgeoisie.

 

And what does Bourdieu add to economism, even as he transforms simplistic models of base and superstructure into something more dialectical and flexible? Cultural capital and social capital, the capital par excellence of the intellectual, the academic, and the cosmopolite. Know-what and Know-who compete with Have-bucks for power in every field of social practice for Bourdieu. This, too, is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of a successful academic and intellectual.

 

All of these dispositions and their theoretical effects are in need of correction according to Bourdieu’s desire for scientific objectivity. Or they are all in need of diversification and multiplication by the perspectives of feminist and gay alternatives to masculinism, working class and other non-bourgeois viewpoints about social reality, and cultural models of the social world that do not privilege agon over philia, or imagine the social world out of an experience of economism, according to we Others’ desire to make meanings troubling to us and ours.

 

V. Present and Absent Others

 

I have probably said too much already about some of the absent Others at Bourdieu’s banquet. I should say a little more about some of the theoretical absences here. Bourdieu is a marvelous describer of how things are. He announces, but does not labor at, a “genetic sociology,” an understanding of the historical trajectories by which not just individuals, but institutions and theoretical objects, came to be made as they are. This he seems to have left largely to the most present absence in his work, Michel Foucault. He does not deal well with matters of social and cultural change.

 

Invitation points to the final chapter of Homo Academicus for the kernel of a theory of change and revolution, but what we find there is much less, mainly a scheme for describing moments of crisis, turning points, the visible tips of the icebergs of long-term social dynamics. Bourdieu seems to have too profound an awe of the stability of social systems to be willing to see on what chaotic foundations of contingent self-organization they rest (cf. Lemke, in press). His emphasis on embodied habitus should point Bourdieu, and all of us, toward the potential of bodies in (inter-) action to find themselves acting as they should not, acted upon in ways their habitus cannot make canonical sense of, because the material relations into which bodies can enter cannot be exhausted by the semiotic relations of any culture, even an embodied one.

 

Among the present Others, there are many who help orient our reading of Bourdieu. There are the German philosophers, the first intellectual love of the younger Bourdieu, abandoned by him for social science in order to challenge the stranglehold of philosophy on the academic field of Bourdieu’s youth. There are the sociological and philosophical rivals of the phenomenological-hermeneutic school (especially Geertz and the ethnomethodologists) against whom he argues passsionately (and at least in the case of ethnomethodology, for me, rather persuasively). There are the methodological rivals, especially discourse analysis, which he quite properly resituates back in the sociological context (as do Bakhtin and the social functionalists). There are Sartre and Levi-Strauss, whose debate shaped Bourdieu’s choice between philosophy and social science, and the Algerian war, which defined the more difficult choice between politics and the meta-politics.

 

And always there is this presence-by-absence, Michel Foucault (and to a lesser degree Jacques Derrida), not simply as individual, but as proximate proxy in the academic social space Bourdieu himself defines Homo Academicus, 276). These three followed closely similar academic and social trajectories, and in Bourdieu’s rather convincing view, we should expect them to be critical keys to reading one another. But Bourdieu scrupulously avoids reading Foucault for us, almost as if he would be reading his mirror-self. The parallels of their projects are evident, and Bourdieu notes this himself, but only notes it, and no more. Perhaps self-reflexivity, like agon, meets its limit in philia.

 

Note

 

I have said next to nothing about Bourdieu’s discussions of education, particularly higher education, language and symbolic power, or the nature of science. I plan to address at least some of these areas, in which I have considerable personal interest, first in a separate review (of Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power for the journal Linguistics and Education) and then in a book in preparation Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Theory).

 

Works Cited

 

• Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. La Noblesse d’Etat: Grands Corps et Grandes Ecoles. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Lemke, J.L. Semiotics and Education. Monograph in Toronto Semiotic Circle Monographs Series, Victoria University, Toronto, 1984.
• Lemke, J.L. Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.
• Lemke, J.L. “Text Production and Dynamic Text Semantics.” Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses. Ed. E. Ventola. Berlin: Mouton/deGruyter (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 55), 1991.
• Lemke, J.L. “Discourse, Dynamics, and Social Change.” Language as Cultural Dynamic [Focus issue of Cultural Dynamics (Leiden: Brill), in press].
• Martin, James R. “Process and Text: Two Aspects of Human Semiosis.” Systemic Perspectives on Discourse. Ed. J.D. Benson and W.S. Greaves. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1985.
• Thibault, Paul. Social Semiotics as Praxis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.