Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, UniversityCollegeDublin, 7-10 September 2005

Bourdieusian Meditations

Michael Grenfell

University of Southampton, UK.

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Introduction

In January 2002, the French social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu died, thus bringing to an end an extraordinary academic trajectory. Born in a rural village in the South-west corner of France, Bourdieu rose to become its leading intellectual in the 1990s, rivalling the status of Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and de Beauvoir. Bourdieu’s output was enormous covering a vast range of theoretical and empirical studies. It is probably as a sociologist that Bourdieu is best known, and, in particular, for his work as a sociologist of education. In fact, he formed part of the ‘new’ sociology of education of the 1970s. (seeYoung 1971). Along with writers such as Basil Bernstein, this movement called for a change of emphasis away from educational outcome to the processes of pedagogical knowledge. Their work was highly philosophical in the way it dealt with educational discourses. Bourdieu himself was a philosophy graduate and only turned to sociology after undertaking ethnographic work in Algeria and the Béarn, France. This paper takes the philosophical aspects of Bourdieu’s work as its starting point and argues that the ‘Theory of Practice’ he developed – in theory and practice – represents a potential major contribution to philosophical issues in Education.

I Bourdieu and Philosophy

There is a traditional antipathy in France between philosophy and sociology. Bourdieu refers to it on several occasions, as well as explaining the necessity of his own ‘social philosophy’. In his most sustained discussion of the philosophical discourse, he opens by writing: ‘If I have resolved to ask some questions that I would rather left to philosophy, it is because it seemed to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not ask them’ (2000a/1997: 1). He goes on to explain that when asked (as he often was) about his relations with Marx, he would reply that if he had to affiliate himself, it would be more as a Pascalian. Why Pascal, from whom the title of this book –Pascalian Meditations was derived? Bourdieu states that what he admires most in Pascal is his ‘refusal of the ambition of foundation’, and continues: ‘But, above all, I had always been grateful to Pascal, as I understood him, for his concern, devoid of populist naivety, for ordinary people’, and the ‘sound opinions of the people’; and always his determination, inseparable from that concern, always to seek the ‘reasons of effects’, the raison d’être of the seemingly most illogical or derisory human behaviours – such as ‘spending a whole day chasing a hare’ – rather than condemning of mocking them, like the ‘half-learned’ who are always ready to ‘play the philosopher’ and to seek to astonish with their uncommon astonishments at the futility of common-sense opinions’ (ibid.: 2). We might also find between Bourdieu and Pascal a whole series of common philosophical concerns: the relationship between the body, the emotions and the mind; dispositions and habits; the wretchedness of everyday existence and how to deal with it; language; the nature of reason and its relationship to the senses; truth and falsehood. These issues come up throughout Pascalian Meditations.

The starting point for Bourdieu and Pascal might be see as whatI above called the ‘wretchedness of everyday existence’ - how to live with it? Both seem to be searching for a way of dealing with this situation; a whole raison d’être or, less an ‘art of living in a time of catastrophe’ as Becket wrote, as a ‘reason’ (a way of knowing). The first step towards this practical knowing for Pascal is to acknowledge the wretched state and what constitutes it: ‘Man knows that he is wretched. He is therefore wretched because he is so; but he is really great because he knows it’ (Pensées 416)[i] . Or: ‘The weakness of man is far more evident in those who know it not than in those who know it’ (Pensées 376). Man is confronted with the enormity of the world: ‘By space the universe comprehends and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world’ (Pensées 348). This point gives rise to a second step in practical reason: the question of subjectivity and objectivity. Bourdieu sees in Pascal’s thought an observation which goes beyond the traditional dilemma: ‘The world encompasses me, comprehends me as a thing among things, but I, as a thing for which there are things, comprehend this world. And, (must it be added?) because it encompasses and comprehends me; it is through this material inclusion – often unnoticed or repressed – and what follows from it, the incorporation of social structures in the form of dispositional structures, of objective chances in the form of expectations or anticipations, that I acquire practical knowledge and control of the encompassing space…But I cannot comprehend this practical comprehension unless I comprehend both what distinctively defines it, as opposed to conscious, intellectual comprehension, and also the conditions (linked to positions in social space) of these two forms of comprehension’ (ibid.: 130). Bourdieu is referring to a form of understanding – practical knowledge - which ‘understands the limits of understanding’. In effect, this connects with issues of reflexivity I shall discuss later on in this paper. Knowledge for Bourdieu also implicitly contains an interestof both individual and group. On the one hand, ‘our passions impel us outside our selves…external objects tempt us’ (Pensées 464). But, there is also deception and our thoughts can lead us astray. What we are told by external authority disguises a greater truth: ‘since the people cannot be made to understand the liberatory truth about the social order (veritatem qua liberator), because that truth could only threaten or ruin that order, the people must be ‘deceived’, not allowed to see ‘the fact of usurpation’, the inaugural violence in which law is rooted, by ‘making it appear as authoritative, eternal’’ (PM: 168 and Pensées 294). There is then an implicit promise of liberation, if not escape, through reason from the wretchedness of the world for both Bourdieu and Pascal. Although their means of acquiring the wherewithal for such liberation differ, they are both committed to offering the means to this end. The third step of practical knowledge is to see ‘truth’ as something that is contested. It is a form of symbolic power by means of which those with authority impose their interests. The fact that we are compliant and implicated in its construction is not because we are servile but rather complicity is not a conscious, deliberate act. There is a kind of ‘misrecognition’, a philosophical mauvaise-foi or blindness brought on by up-bringing and education which leads to a set of dispositions or habits attuned to acting and thinking in certain ways and not others. For Bourdieu, this situation applies to ‘scholastic reason’ as much as everyday knowledge (common sense).How to move beyond it?

II Theory of Practice (1)

Bourdieu referred to his approach as constructivist structuralism or structural consructivism (1989: 14). It is a way of examining the relationship between the individual and the situation in which they find themselves. Key terms in this theory of practice are habitus and field.Habitus is defined as: ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures…principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representation which can be objectively regulated’ (1977a/72: 72). Individuals are ‘predisposed’ to act in certain ways, which show regular patterns of occurrence. The extent to which these patterns are actualised depends on the social location any one finds themselves in at any one time. For Bourdieu, such locations are also structured – both physically and organisationally – and should be understood as fields: ‘a network… a configuration of objective relations between positions’ (1992: 73). Human activity hence proceeds through an engagement between habitus and fields and the homologies this sets up. There can be instances of convergence through affinity, and divergence as a result of mismatches. Bourdieu saw such mismatches in the systems of scholastic inculcation, which favoured those from cultural backgrounds congruent with that of schools. These mismatches might be expressed through language content or form, but should be understood as representing the same structures as those found in the social divisions of society. Thought could therefore shape society and the social world but it was formed by the very same structures.

A discussion of the full sense of habitus and field has been attempted in Grenfell and James (1998). In the present context, it is worth noting that habitus, in particular, has been fiercely debated over the years and its usefulness questioned (see Nash 1999). Paradoxically, near the end of his life Bourdieu commented to me that habitus was rarely mentioned within his own team of researchers. Moreover, his later public lectures were publicised under the banner of ‘explorations in Field Theory’; putting the focus on social space rather than the individual. Nevertheless, Bourdieu himself wrote a great deal about habitus; antecedents of which he acknowledges across philosophy. Bourdieu’s own philosophical background was heavily influenced by an interpretative, hermeneutic paradigm as well as an incorporation of the history of the philosophy of science. Phenomenology, the study of things in themselves, was central to this tradition and Bourdieu encountered it principally through the work of fellow Frenchman Merleau-Ponty, as well as Husserl and Schütz. For phenomenologists, individual experience exists differentially as it is always shifting. We interpret this experience by mapping the past (what we ‘know’) onto the present (what we are presently experiencing). However, this process does not take place in a free realm of signification but implies orthodox and heterodox interpretation. Bourdieu socialises this process, so the orthodox becomes the dominant conventions of thought and action of a particular society against which any one individual may conform or deviate. Moreover, their social origins and the constituent habitus (linking with Husserlian phenomenology) which expresses this doxa as individual habitualität, determine which of these applies.

In effect, what we have here is a theory of knowledge and an epistemological paradigm. It is not possible, therefore, to take habitus and field as simple re-expressions of agency and context. Rather, Bourdieu’s terms need to be understood as highly charged epistemological matrices involving a dynamic philosophy of human praxis. Bourdieu refers to the relationship between habitus and field as one of ‘ontologic complicity’ (1982a: 47) and, indeed, in his theory of practice epistemology and ontology become one and the same thing. This relationship is mutually constituted through thought and action:

The relationship between habitus and field operates in two ways. On the one side, it is a relation of conditioning: the field structures the habitus, which is the product of the embodiment of immanent necessity of a field (or a hierarchically intersecting set of fields). On the other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction: habitus contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world, a world endowed with sense and with value, in which it is worth investing one’s practice.

(1989: 44)

Field and habitus therefore exist in a world, which values and is valued differentially. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that Bourdieu should term its products symbolic capital: symbolic, because it is based on a cultural arbitrary; capital, because it is useful in ‘buying’ into orthodoxy which is differentially rewarded according to current ‘exchange rates’. These are the terms which Bourdieu brings to his analysis of the discipline of philosophy.

II Scholastic Reason

Above, I wrote that Bourdieu claimed that philosophy seemed to him to ask questions which are not essential, while ignoring those which were. What questions? In effect, what are the causes of their questioning? Bourdieu had examples to hand from with his own experience. On the one hand, he was against orthodox philosophy for the way those involved in it were unable to 'tear themselves away…from the enchanted circle of pure reading of texts purified of any historical attachment' (1996/92: 308). On the other hand, he was against developments in philosophy since the 1970s; most noticeably, post-modernism and, by implication, those who purport to engage in a philosophy of the history of philosophy. Using his theory of field analysis, Bourdieu saw changes in the philosophical field in France as symptomatic of particular socio-historical conditions. For example, the fact that philosophy was still taught in French High Schools meant that it was particularly prone to 'subversion' in the post-68 period with its 'anti-institutional mood. In this sense, the centralisation of the French scholastic system offered ripe conditions for a focused anti-institutional attack. However, Bourdieu argued that this spirit of revolt was combined by the new philosophers of the 1970s with a 'conservative reaction' against the menace posed by the growth in social sciences; especially linguistics and anthropology (2001: 201ff). In the Preface to the English edition of HomoAcademicus(1988/84), Bourdieu described this field background as the context for his study of the shifting sands of French academic generations. He makes the point, as an aside, that once he had to explain to a young American visitor that all their intellectual heroes - Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault - were marginal within the French university system, and even disqualified from officially directing research as they themselves did not hold a doctorate (p.xviii). Bourdieu saw in this situation the effects of institutional instability on the young of the 1970s who sought to assert their authority through 'a historicist critique of truth (and the sciences)' (ibid.). For Bourdieu, this evolution in the 1970s was the cause of overturning of the dominant philosophical trends. Formal logic based on mathematics, analytical empiricism, and phenomenology were sidelined in such a way that 'attachment to formal and universal truths appeared old fashioned and even a little reactionary compared with the analysis of cultural historic situations' (2001: 204). Bourdieu cites the example of Foucault's Power/Knowledge, but makes it clear he is targeting philosophers such as Derrida and Deleuze and those post-modernists who use social sciences to 'reduce and destroy them' (p.205).

Behind these arguments lie questions not simply about the representation and provenance of knowledge but of knowledge itself; apparently the very stuff of philosophy. What is 'true' for Bourdieu and what significance does it have?

Twentieth-century theories of scientific knowledge were heavily influenced by the philosophy of Karl Popper. Popper denounced 'historicism' and argued for the founding of 'objectivity' based on falsification in the pursuit of so-called 'objective knowledge without a knowing subject'. Paradoxically, Bourdieu noted, the same trend to pronounce the death of the 'subject' was discernible in the Marxist structuralism of Althusser and his 'subjectless processes' (1984/79: 228), as well as in later post-modernist philosophies. However, for Popper, a key notion in this foundation of 'objective knowledge' was the 'critical community': those with the specialist knowledge to test and subject to falsification claims to objectivity held within the discipline. For Durkheim too, the subject of science was a product of an 'integrated collective'. In many ways, this notion implies the systems of censure, authentication and specification that Bourdieu himself saw as central to the operations of scientific groups. However, Bourdieu sought to overwrite such notions with his more general concept of field. Field brings with it a whole set of operational consequences. For example, it follows that by applying field theory to a scientific field, those within it need to be understood as acting according to their own norms (nomos) which define what is 'thinkable and unthinkable', and thus also articulated or not. This process operates through knowledge (connaissance) and recognition (reconnaissance). Those who know the rules (regularities) can use them and, at the limit, are allowed to invent new ones. All those active within the field share a resonant habitus; in fact, the field chooses the habitus as much as the habitus chooses the field. Bourdieu summed up: 'Science (knowledge) is an immense apparatus of collective construction, collectively organised' (2001: 139). He also makes the point (p.36) that this perspective on science, knowledge and scientific groups is not dissimilar to that of Thomas Kuhn, who, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(1962), argued that such communities need to be understood in terms of the paradigm which governed them. Paradigms expressed knowledge in a commonly agreed language and clearly defined limits of discourse. However, although Bourdieu shared Kuhn's view of change as coming through breaks and revolutions from within and without the paradigm, he argued that it was too attached to the Durkheiimian view of a community governed by a 'central norm' and did not explain the nature of change. Change, for Bourdieu was defined by the nature of fields themselves in that they are made up of individuals and groups competing for the dominant positions within the field and, in fact, between fields. Everything else follows from this principle.

Scientific fields, Bourdieu argued, operate with two types of resources: scientific and financial (2001: 115). Scientific resources amount to the knowledge base of the field. Microcosms within it possess varying forms and quantities according to the esteem, etc. endowed on them by the scientific community. Financial resources are simply money capital. In fact, these two notions relate closely to Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital, and can be expressed in terms of the configurations of cultural, economic and social capital. These forms are never independent and, within and across disciplines, scientific activity is more of less dependent on economic resources. This dependency is, according to Bourdieu, weak in areas such as History and Maths, but strong in Physics and Sociology. Moreover, the different forms of resource are cut across by other structures within disciplines: scientific and temporal. The latter refer to institutional principles of differentiation and thus organisation.There is the risk that scientific knowledge is subordinated to temporal principles and economic resources. In fact, Bourdieu argued that in much discipline knowledge, it is precisely such misrecognitons which are hidden; in other words, knowledge based on a particular financial and organisational structure of the academic field in place and time rather that on 'truth' itself. The logical extension of this argument is that scientific (knowledge) fields need to be as independent as possible (p.114). Paradoxically, and consequently, Bourdieu was critical of areas such as philosophy. For him, these did have autonomy but they then misused it by cutting themselves off and operating according to their own internal logic of self-interests.