Pierre Bourdieu: A Heroic Structuralism 9789004442610, 9782021290325, 2020043012, 2020043013, 9789004426542

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Pierre Bourdieu: A Heroic Structuralism

Jean-Louis Fabiani - 978-90-04-44261-0 Downloaded from Brill.com03/10/2023 11:46:19PM via Western University

Youth in a Globalizing World Series Editors Vincenzo Cicchelli (Ceped, Université Paris Descartes/ird) Sylvie Octobre (gemass, Université Paris- Sorbonne/ cnrs and la deps au Ministère de la Culture, France) Editorial Board Valentina Cuzzocrea (University of Cagliari, Italy) Ratiba Hadj- Moussa (York University, Canada) Claudia Jacinto (prejet- Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social, Argentina) Jeylan Mortimer (University of Minnesota, United States of America) Andrea Pirni (Unversità di Genova, Italy) Dan Woodman (University of Melbourne, Australia) Chin- Chin Yi (Academic Sinica, Taiwan)

volume 12

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ygw

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Pierre Bourdieu: A Heroic Structuralism By

Jean-Louis Fabiani

leiden | boston

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Originally published as Pierre Bourdieu : Un structuralisme héroïque by Editions du Seuil, S.A. under ISBN 9782021290325. © Copyright French edition 2016, Editions du Seuil. Cover illustration: Pierre Bourdieu, [1982]. © Ulf Andersen. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fabiani, Jean-Louis, author. Title: Pierre Bourdieu : A heroic structuralism / Jean-Louis Fabiani. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Youth in a globalizing world, 2212-9383 ; Volume12 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043012 (print) | LCCN 2020043013 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004426542 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004442610 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002. | Structuralism. Classification: LCC HM479.B68 F3213 2020 (print) | LCC HM479.B68 (ebook) | DDC 301.092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043012 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043013

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2212-9383 ISBN 978-90-04-42654-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44261-0 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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To my parents, Dominique Biagini and Jean Fabiani

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Contents Acknowledgements  ix Introduction  1 1 The Impossible Theory of Fields  10 2 The Habitus at the Risk of Cleavage  34 3 Capital and Its Species  56 4 The Methodological Inventiveness  77 5 Event, Structure and History  95 6 A Narrative for Two Audiences  114 7 From the Public Service to the Redefinition of Public Interest  130 8 From Suffering to Love  149 9 A Hero’s Life  167 Conclusion  183 Bibliography  187 Index of Names  194

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Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of forty years of discussions with many friends. I first thank Randall Collins, who invited me to present-in broken English-Pierre Bourdieu’s work in one of his classes at UC San Diego in 1975. I remember Michel de Certeau, softly contesting my vision of Bourdieu in the kitchen on Neptune Road in La Jolla while I was preparing breakfast in Spring 1976. I express my gratitude to Stéphane Beaud and Bruno Auerbach, who invited me to put back on the job a project that I was very fond of but that discouraged me due to its difficulty. I pay my respects to my friends of the Bourdieu seminar at EHESS, Francesco Callegaro, Bruno Karsenti and Cyril Lemieux, witty and generous. I owe much to my contribution to the Bourdieu Dictionary, directed by Gisèle Sapiro. I started the discussion with Pierre Bourdieu in 1972: it was often difficult, but always invigorating. I never stopped it. I must thank too, for their constant support, even if they seldom agree with me, Andrew Abbott, Stéphane Baciocchi, Sophie Biass, Stéphane Dorin, Emmanuel Ethis, Elie Fabiani, Nasser Suleiman Gabryel, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Laurent Jeanpierre, Rose-Marie Lagrave, Damien Malinas, Frédérique Matonti, Raymonde Moulin, Vlad Naumescu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Christophe Prochasson, Jacques Revel, Thomas Rooney, Irène Théry and Hervé Touboul.

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Introduction “To quote, the Kabyles say, is to bring back to life” “Pierre Bourdieu” “A Lecture on Lecture” In Other Words (1990b: 196)

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Can one speak dispassionately today about Pierre Bourdieu? The question is less simple than it looks. He conceived his oeuvre as an attempt to objectify intellectual work, as it appears strongly in his last great book, Pascalian Meditations, devoted to the analysis of scholastic reason and to the constraints that it bears on the exercise of thinking. By using his own social trajectory to build a socio-analysis, aiming to break away from the complacencies of autobiography, he seemed to exhaust the topic beforehand or, perhaps, to prevent any research that could be different from his own. Obviously, Bourdieu wanted to remain the master of the game, even when he confessed a huge flaw, long after his consecration by the Collège de France in 1981: the deep and tangible anxiety born from a feeling of estrangement in the social world, translated into scholarly terms as cleft habitus. Bourdieu proposed a general theory when the endeavor tended to be anachronistic: as the decline of big narratives and the wear of great paradigms became central in the academic world, he strove to impose a construction that claimed to account for the whole society by using only three basic concepts firmly articulated –field, habitus and capital. The current constraints of the intellectual market have contributed to hide the exceptional dimension of Bourdieu’s position. One can see in his work a particular conceptual “brand” among others, which was, not always smartly, connected to constructivism or post-structuralism. As his growing international reputation provided him with the status of a classic that was very far from what he thought was his own place in the intellectual field, he became an object for scholastic reason: his own work was reformatted into the dominant categories of professorial mind, a notion that he had constructed in order to analyze the unconscious modalities of pedagogical judgment. Today, American universities rule the social sciences: there, Bourdieu is constantly re-qualified in diverse ways, which are not necessarily bothered by the close reading of his texts or by an attention to the historical genesis of his concepts. The term of field has been used in infinity of ways that gradually freed themselves from the necessary link to habitus and

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004442610_002 Jean-Louis

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capital, although theory stipulated that one concept could not be used independently from the two others. Clearly, sociologists often spare themselves from the trials that they impose on other disciplines when they try to objectify their ways of doing and their styles of thought. When they write their own history, they are most of the time satisfied with a parade of doctrines that would no longer be accepted by historians of philosophy, yet for century unconditional supporters of internal reading of great texts. This book is an attempt to hold together the acute analysis of the central concepts of Bourdieu’s theory, which its strength and ambition deserve, and the necessary inscription of notional trajectories in a field of struggles, according to his own approach. One must reintegrate the sociologist in the analytical frame that he built, without any mechanistic use of it, but by putting it in on trial and by assessing its limitations. One of the best books ever published about him is undoubtedly Deborah Reed-Danahay’s Locating Bourdieu (ReedDanahay 2004) She develops an analysis of his conceptual trajectory grounded on the sinuosity of his life course in order to shed light on elements that the “systematicity” of the system has often overshadowed. This is particularly the case of emotions, one of the first topics approached by Bourdieu as a young philosophy student. This book can be situated in that “locating” perspective while giving more weight to conceptual trajectories than to biographical frame. Bourdieu’s life is well known and it is worth focusing attention on the various uses of his work more than on mere facts. However, the analysis is never merely conceptual. The proposed reading is fully embedded in a contextualizing and reflective approach. Central notions are always the object of a situated analysis and of tests intended to measure their robustness. Bourdieu described himself as an agent located in a field. He thought of himself, mostly toward the end of his life, as one of the individuals who configured a whole field, such as Baudelaire, Manet or even Heidegger. Those individuals redistribute positions in the field after performing a “symbolic revolution”. The investigation will let us know whether one can see in that demiurgic figure the manifestation of an incorrigible hubris or the sketch of an innovative theory of cultural history. Let us start by the position “against slope” that Bourdieu developed from the beginning of his career. His first texts often display an ironic and somewhat mocking attitude toward the intellectual weaknesses of intellectuals and the illusions that their position in the social world generates. Either in the group portrait devoted to the death and resurrection of the philosophy of the subject in a Social Research article in 1967 (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967) or in the cannonade against his Althusserian rivals in his own journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975 (Bourdieu 1975), Bourdieu, alone or in co-authorship, was never bothered by academic politeness. He always loved to portray

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himself as a bad boy, the one who is never satisfied by ordinary intellectual production and who vigorously blows on the house of cards that constitutes grand theory. In his autobiographical remarks, he acknowledged his estrangement, or even his disgust, with respect to some characteristic features of the Paris avant-garde. He evoked bluntly the “rather deep repulsion inspired by the cult of Sade, for a time in fashion, or for the vision of sexual things à la Bataille or Klossowski”. One of the most salient features of Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism, largely overlooked by commentators, is its fierce resistance to the post-modern ­Zeitgeist, particularly in the last years of his life. He did not adhere to the re-­ location of social objects, to the linguistic turn, to neo-pragmatism and, more broadly to the new ways opened by what was called with some vagueness the decline of great paradigms. Bourdieu offered a reassuring, albeit uneasy, alternative to the increasing discontents with grand theory. He continued to strive, particularly after Distinction, first published in 1979, for constructing a system that contrasted sharply with the wearing out of integrating models and the general patterns of sociological intelligibility, a theme that was becoming dominant. The mature Bourdieu can be situated as out of time with regard to the major transformations of the social sciences that appeared in the two last decades of the 20th century. He remained very far from the “critical turn” of the Annales journal triggered by a manifesto-issue in 1989. He criticized science studies relentlessly and judged negatively the various emergences of neo-­ pragmatism, quite often developed by deviant disciples. His last lectures at the Collège de France, published as Science of science and reflexivity in 2001, are a striking example (Bourdieu 2004). He paid tribute to Merton and Popper in order to cross swords with Bruno Latour and other scholars in science studies. One can easily recognize in Bourdieu’s work an ability to resist against its intellectual environment; this resistance adds even more strength to a very powerful construction. Bourdieu built a system, erasing by degrees the elements that could have questioned it from within. This appears in his repetitive and somewhat unfair reading of what he called the subjectivist mode of knowledge, which he attributed to the legacy of phenomenology, as well as in the growing centrality of the notion of “generative formula of practice” at the expense of the notion of play. However, he was interested in the attempts made by phenomenologists and pragmatists to account for the complexity of social practice. The famed San Diego lecture (1986) revealed an almost constructivist Bourdieu, knowing that the term was mainly used to translate the word “genetic”, not extremely clear for his English-speaking audience (Bourdieu 1990b). There he gave a new version of the theory of practice presented in The Logic of Practice, published in

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France in 1980 (Bourdieu 1990a), through the notion of dual structuration, but opened his talk with some references that were not present in previous lectures: Bennett Berger and Aaron Cicourel were quoted, but also, on the philosophical side, John Dewey and Nelson Goodman. One should not see in this opening a mere form of intellectual diplomacy adapted to circumstances. Bourdieu sought to refine his model and make more room for the relative uncertainty of symbolic struggles, in which he referred to Goodman’s concept of world making. However, he did not leave aside the coherence of his program: he ended his constructivist lecture by a quote from Gaston Bachelard, the main reference of his early epistemological manifesto, The Craft of Sociology. His book, Practical Reasons, originally published in 1994 (Bourdieu 1998a), which reused offhandedly the title of a French journal founded in 1990by a neo-pragmatist Parisian group, shows even more clearly the effort to integrate, without saying it, a part of the objections that were addressed to his own brand of structuralism. More precisely, the subtitle “On the theory of action”, expressed an attempt to make things more palatable for the new generation of sociologists: action was a word that Bourdieu did not like very much, since it seemed to stand for an empty and disembodied vision of social practice, as it appeared in Talcott Parsons’ sociology, one of the main targets in his early work. Obviously, the dialogue with other forms of sociology never went very far; most of the time, it ended up in a soliloquy. However, those attempts, albeit somewhat awkward, are a good indicator of Bourdieu’s will to make some room for the concept of action at the heart of his theory. One can situate oneself in two ways with respect to a general social theory as Bourdieu developed it. One can try to show that the ways in which he envisaged his theory revealed a latecomer, a researcher who would not come to grips with the theoretical stakes of the time. Speaking like Bourdieu, one could say that this is a manifestation of the “hysteresis of the habitus”, a reaction to events that is not adapted to the current situation. There is another, and gentler way, of accounting for his claim about the strength of structuralism in the era of post-structuralism. Bourdieu was able to resist the postmodernist weathering of a proper epistemological space for the social sciences, because the certainty of objective social facts, the Durkheimian things, had lost traction. In this respect, Bourdieu remained very close to Durkheim, contrary to his former partner Jean-Claude Passeron, who dug the Weberian epistemological ground to question the very possibility of universal assertions about the social world. It is undoubtedly too early to make a choice between those two positions; one of the goals of this book is precisely to test the promises of general theory. Answering the question now would amount to conclude in the introduction.

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Bourdieu was, as most of his French predecessors, self-taught in sociology and anthropology. This fact comes as a surprise for foreigners who raise questions about his training. They have a hard time acknowledging that the man who was to become one of the main theorists in the Twentieth century sociology never received a Ph.D. and that his curriculum vitae only mentions an agrégation, a competitive exam to be allowed to teach in high schools. He trained on the job, under exceptional conditions, during the Algerian War of Liberation. As the men of his generation, he was sent to Algeria, but there he benefited from a special status, as he was posted to the office of the General Governor, where he wrote notes and reports. His beginnings as a researcher appear less as a form of calling or a philosopher’s conversion to empirical knowledge than as the answer to an emergency: how to account for the colonial situation during the war of liberation. Among his young fellow academics, he was from being the most outspoken. The first part of Bourdieu’s career has nothing to do with the figure of the public intellectual. On the contrary, he was far from the center of attention. This is also true for the aftermath of May 68. During the Algerian war, he was far from Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who denounced the use of torture by French troops in his book The Audin Affair. They were to be colleagues at the University of Lille and later at the Ecole pratique des hautes études. He did not share the publisher Jérome Lindon’s strong commitment either, although he would publish in the 1960s Bourdieu’s most cutting edge works in his Editions de Minuit. The young Bourdieu was still an “aspiring philosopher” as he defined himself. His ethnographic work on Algeria rather expressed a young man’s reaction to a situation that was obviously historically decisive and anthropologically fascinating. He did not abandon his huge philosophical ambition during his stay in Algeria, as it clearly appears in the first fifty pages of his posthumous Sketch for a Self-Analysis: While telling myself that I was moving into ethnology and sociology in the early stages, only provisionally, and when I had finished the work of political pedagogy, I would return to philosophy (indeed, during the whole time that I was writing Sociologie de l’Algérie and conducting my first ethnological fieldwork, I continued to write each evening on the structure of temporal experience according to Husserl), I flung myself totally, oblivious of fatigue and danger, into an undertaking whose stake was not only intellectual (Bourdieu 2008: 40). Although Bourdieu never ceased to associate his commitment to social sciences with a constant critique of the arrogant status of philosophers that his own social condition allowed him to experience concretely, he always returned

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to philosophical questions. In this respect, his trajectory is close to Durkheim’s, a philosopher who was also self-taught in sociology and made a large part of his career in higher education as pedagogy professor, first in Bordeaux then at the Sorbonne. Both never gave up their philosophical ambition and could never imagine that their formative discipline would disappear for the benefit of a mere empirical science. While they steadily apply their critical analysis to the trivial uses of philosophy, their great mature books, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Pascalian Meditations (1997) bear witness of their will to continue to do philosophy by other means. Bourdieu is inscribed in a long lineage that sees professionally trained philosophers engage with social sciences while largely remaining in the institutional and epistemological space of their original discipline. That attitude is undoubtedly a consequence of the delayed institutionalization of French sociology: an autonomous bachelor’s degree was only created in 1958 and the first elements of professionalization, such as the creation of the Revue francaise de sociologie, appeared only in the early 1960s. Bourdieu never committed himself to the professional mobilizations that successfully imposed a sociology curriculum in high schools. His Ph.D. students were a little bit worried when he said: “Thèse égale foutaise”(thesis equals bullshit). He wrote in his Sketch that he asked Raymond Aron to use a set of works devoted to Algeria to validate a doctoral dissertation. Aron refused, answering with no nuance: “This would wreck your dignity”. Rather early in his career, behaving as some of his schoolmates such as Jacques Derrida, Bourdieu chose to stay in the margins of the academic institution, avoiding the seduction of temporal power and the constraints linked to the reproduction of the professoriate. His frequent negative statements on the status of sociology, regularly defined as a “shelter discipline” as well of the obvious lack of consideration shown to many of his colleagues bear witness to his refusal to play the academic game by the rules. On a late evening, as we stayed in his office after hours, he called one of the greatest names of French sociology as “an asshole, who failed four times his exams for the Bachelor of Philosophy”. The information he gave me was not necessarily accurate, but it showed his usual annoyance toward colleagues whose conceptual and methodological limitations he could easily assess. The first edition of The Craft of Sociology, co-written with Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron in 1968 addressed sociologists as well as philosophers (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron 1991). Many sociologists found it hard to read as it did not deliver any tricks of the trade. The main target of the book was the Althusserian group of philosophers at the Ecole normale superieure. It aimed to discredit their theoretical epistemocentrism. The fight needed some heavy theoretical weapons, of course. The

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weak crystallization of the sociological discipline was a chance for Bourdieu. The institutions where he made most of his career, the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Collège de France, allowed him to remain exterior to the academic apparatus. This attitude was close to his mentor Raymond Aron’s positioning. Aron welcomed him as his assistant at the Sorbonne and suggested him to read Max Weber, largely unknown in France at the time. Bourdieu’ self-portrait as a “consecrated heretic”, an oxymoron that he associated with the notion of “symbolic revolution” in his last work, might be misleading. B ­ ourdieu lodged himself in a kind of high-status marginality that is far from being exceptional in the French academic system, characterized by a dual structure between Universities and Grandes Ecoles. Disciples’ veneration amplified the master’s tendency to inflate the exceptional dimension of his own trajectory and to portray himself as a rebel or an outsider. His posthumous self-analysis allows a more nuanced vision, particularly when he evoked the intense relationship that he developed, in spite of episodic quarrels, with Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Aron. The Algerian years were extraordinarily productive and constitute the elaborative moment, both quick and intense, of Bourdieu’s style, but also of his investigative practice and his ambition to deliver a “general economy of practice”. He mobilized competencies that he acquired along his training in the humanities, particularly his mastery of phenomenology. He combined them with his acute reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whom Sartre praised for his essential contribution in his journal Les temps modernes, right after the publication of The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. Bourdieu developed empirical research at a quick pace and framed it through his recent discovery of Max Weber’s theory of domination. He exchanged a lot with young leftist statisticians who were posted in Algiers and, contrary to most of his schoolmates, discovered the importance of quantitative research. He used all opportunities to develop a research program that would be one of the most original in the 20th century. Algeria is an unexpected place to conduct a conceptual and political experiment. Bourdieu exploits it with an unbelievable energy: Sociology of Algeria (1958), Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963), Le Déracinement (1964), the studies in Kabyle ethnology, collected in the Outline of a theory of practice, issued in 1972, Algérie 60 (1977) and the posthumous Esquisses algériennes (2008). The harvest is rich, especially if one considers that Bourdieu constructed then a system that will not change much along his career. Reconstructions after the fact tend to subordinate Bourdieu’s endeavor to a mere political preoccupation. Thus, Tassadit Yacine can write that “the social sciences were for him a political “weapon” at the service of a social critique of  the forms of repression and domination” (Bourdieu 2013: 13). This book

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­ roposes a more nuanced point of view. The first Bourdieu is a reformist atp tached to the modernization of France, as the collective book titled Le partage des benefices clearly shows (Darras 1966). This orientation can be retrieved in the famous Report of the Collège de France on Education in 1985 that Bourdieu sent to the President Mitterrand in the first years of his presidency. This is also true of his steady relationship with the socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard. In his later years, the sociologist committed himself more to the radical left and wore, without some reluctance and uneasiness, the suit of the “total intellectual” as himself name Sartre. His late disciples have insisted on his radical turn: this shift can’t be denied. However, the lectures on the state bear witness to the persistence of a social-democratic Bourdieu, which no interpretative coup could reduce. The state has a left hand that is in no way Leninist. This book is devoted to account for Bourdieu’s political ambivalences, not to blame him for them but in order to show their depth and value. During all his life, he strongly defended the autonomy of science: the theme was almost obsessive in his last lectures at the Collège de France. The de-autonomization of the literary field deeply anguished him and manifested in an almost pathetic way in The Rules of Art (Bourdieu 1996). Looking at any cost for subordinating his scientific project to a political imperative is far from paying one’s duties to the richness of his oeuvre and to the promises that it continues to offer. I had the occasion, perhaps before some others, to analyze the limitations and the contradictions of Bourdieu’s work. Nevertheless, I have never thought that it was obsolete. Staying this course is not an easy task in a world where paying respect to great intellectuals gives instant rewards and where oversimplification offers significant happy returns. Acknowledging the complexities of a conceptual system is far riskier. Raymond Aron objected to Bourdieu, albeit in a friendly way, that he had developed his conceptual system “too early”. This is one of the central issues raised by this book. Can one write the history of the successive re-elaborations of Bourdieu’s concepts, or were they frozen at a quite early stage? Does reflexivity, a notion directly inherited from phenomenology, allow the sociologist to experience a full mastery of her operative chains, or does it create blind spots? Is a general theory possible in the historical sciences? Is it a heuristic tool or an epistemological obstacle? Bourdieu developed a rather harsh critique of the “total intellectual” incarnated by Sartre, and his argument was not very far from what Deleuze and Foucault could say at the same time when they claimed the position of the “specific intellectual”. However, he ended up as the perfect representative of the French public intellectual. Heavily concerned by the autonomy of science, he reproduced Durkheim’s attitude who demanded that science take an “esoteric turn” to be fully scientific. In the meantime, he looked very early to reach

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out to audiences located far from the circle of peers. He was a remarkable inventor of writing and graphic devices that deeply changed our ways of presenting the social sciences. In his editorial practice, which should not be underestimated, he tried also to enlarge his public and write books that could make sense for wider audiences: On Television (1996) and Masculine Domination (1998), whose style is completely different from his main theoretical work, are the most widely read in the world. The subtle play between esoterism and exoterism, between the systematic use of Latin and Greek vocabulary and an iconography that is not far from commercial advertisement, is a powerful feature of the work which should be analyzed. In order to answer that set of questions, we must come back to an inquiry on central concepts. However, my work is not philosophical. Claude Gautier has proposed a very convincing construction in La force du social (Gautier 2012). Here, I try to do what Bourdieu recommended to do with the concepts of philosophy: historicize them, analyze how they circulate and test them through their empirical uses. The book is divided in three sections. The first is devoted to the three basic concepts, field, habitus and capital, to their reconstructions and to the difficulties triggered by their synchronized use. The second is an attempt to describe the methodological and narrative innovations, which generate as many conceptual pleasures as interpretative ambiguities. The last section envisages the figure of the sociologist, through political commitment, suffering and love. The portrait of a new type of intellectual hero is thus sketched.

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Chapter 1

The Impossible Theory of Fields When The Outline of a Theory of Practice came out in the Fall of 1972, the first readers thought they had missed a stage: the back cover evoked Bourdieu’s “ethnographic and sociological research” presented in The Love of Art, Reproduction and The Theory of Fields. Although the first two titles were actual books, the first published in 1966 with Alain Darbel and the second with Jean-Claude Passeron in 1970, The Theory of Fields was not in his bibliography, and it is still not. One could think that this title was a way of pointing to the first attempt to propose a unified theory of the social world in the Outline, precisely as the author wished to bring a “decisive contribution to the unification of the human science by wiping out the false alternatives, which since the origins, delay it or even ban it, such as the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism”. However, the theoretical unification did not imply then the notion of field, as the term did not even appear in the index, while the concept of capital, including its different species, is mentioned 34 times and the concept of habitus 33 times, in the theoretical as well as in the ethnographic part. On the contrary, the field is present in the largely rewritten version of the book that Bourdieu published in 1980 as The Logic of Practice, albeit with less weight than habitus and capital. It is possible to account for the absence, or at least the scarcity, of the concept of field in the young Bourdieu’s great anthropological texts by saying that it does not seem to apply to traditional societies, where competition struggles between individuals and groups cannot be figured through the representation of a positional space. The autonomization of a literary field that occurred in the 19th century has “no precedent” in history, as Bourdieu wrote quite often in the Rules of Art. However the conception of field that is used in the book is not reserved to literature, The author notes that “he has tried to draw the general properties of field, by transferring the produced analyses to a higher level of formalization, in the lectures he gave at the Collège de France from 1983 to 1986, which were still to be published”. In 1987, he already made the promise of a “more advanced theory” in an interview with Axel Honneth, Hermann Kocyba and Bernd Schwibbs: “This acute feeling for what Weber called the Vielseitigkeit, the manysidedness, of social reality, its resistance to the venture of knowledge, was doubtless the basis of the thinking that I have been constantly engaged in on the limits of scientific knowledge. And the work I am preparing on the theory of fields-and which would be called “the plurality of

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worlds”-will end with a consideration of the plurality of logics corresponding to different worlds, that is, to different fields as places in which different kinds of common sense, different commonplace ideas and different systems of topic, all irreducible to each other, are constructed” (Bourdieu 1990: 21). Here, the plurality of fields is conceived of as the plurality of worlds: this promising opening will not be pursued. The multiplication of relatively autonomous fields cannot be dissociated from the process of differentiation of the activity spheres, which Durkheim called the division of social labor. In the Rules of Art, Bourdieu identified the emergence and the stabilization of the literary field as a distinctive feature of modernity: the autonomization of a social space presupposes very precise conditions of production, which must include an accumulation of capital inscribed in the long run and the rise of exceptional individuals around whom a system of relations is configured in a novel way. The first systematic presentation of the literary field appeared in a 1966 article published in Les temps modernes, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project” (Bourdieu 1969). The article was a great success and it was one of the first pieces by Bourdieu to be translated into English. However, the author developed later harsh criticisms against it, not only because the notion of a conscious “project” stood against his theory of practical sense and habitus, which presupposed the spontaneous adjustment to the conditions of the game, making rational calculation both superfluous and misleading, but because he knew that the very notion of positional space should be re-elaborated. The question is quite simple, but its answer is extremely complicated. Is what one calls “field” a particular historical form of social nexus, appearing under peculiar conditions in specific societies, but also subject to disappearance? Or, on the contrary, is it an archetypal and universal form of social nexus, characterized by inter-individual struggles for domination within a given arena and by the reproduction of a specific symbolic order? It is not certain that Bourdieu gave us all the keys to answer the question in a non-equivocal way. The concepts of habitus and capital apply to all types of historical and social configurations. They are widely used to describe Kabyle society in the author’s first texts, although they are not yet the elements of a system. On the contrary, the concept of field is the fruit of a slow elaboration and remains subject to changes in its definition. Obviously, while the two first concepts have a very long history, mainly in philosophy and political economy, the field seems to bear more directly Bourdieu’ signature. At any rate, it constitutes the most quoted, and sometimes the most distorted one by the users of Bourdieuan sociology. One could easily object to the deeply original character of the notion of field the fact that Bourdieu, as for habitus and capital, did not invent the term, and that, like his fellow sociologists, reused and recycled older concepts. Bernard

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Lahire is perfectly right to say that “Pierre Bourdieu, like any researcher in the social sciences, astutely pottered with his concept by associating multiple theoretical schemes pertaining to different theoretical universes” (Lahire 1999: 27). There is no doubt: the author of Distinction does not escape the common fate of the producer in historical sciences. He recycles, re-elaborates and re-­ configures conceptual schemes that existed before the construction he proposes to his peers and the lay public. He never hid the fact that his work could be read as an original assemblage of central propositions by Marx, Durkheim and Weber, with each oeuvre allowed to shed light on the blind spots of the others. Thus, it does not seem very fruitful to engage with the genealogy of the notion of field in order to show what debt Bourdieu’s construction owes to prior forms of representations of a positional space. Minds who would like to appear as sharp often cited the fact that Bourdieu had imported his notion from the one developed in social psychology by Kurt Lewin. As almost nobody read Lewin in France, people were all the more tempted to use the reference. The Gestaltist-inspired psychology developed by Lewin took seriously the metaphor of electro-magnetic fields; it made use of vectorial spaces and topology to solve a precise problem: how to account for the forces that drive individuals toward a goal? Lewin’s theory was largely conceived of as a contribution to group dynamics, which the forms of struggles analyzed by Bourdieu never referred to. Although Bourdieu often used the notion of “field of forces”, his theory is never transposed from physics. It is never translated into terms of topology. The sociologist managed to control the metaphorical background of the notion and never illustrated it by images imported from other disciplines: the positional space is thoroughly a social space. The Durkheimian and Weberian sources evoked by Bernard Lahire in his article are of limited scope too; Bourdieu inscribes himself in that dual legacy, but this does not mean that the social differentiation of functions analyzed in The Division of Social Labor amounts to “an implicit theory of fields” or that the Weberian notion of relative autonomy of different spheres of activity is the matrix of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. He consciously distorted the main concepts of classical sociology; however, the twists are not always easily noticeable. With respect to the field, the very close re-reading that he proposed of Weber’s sociology of religion will allow me to shed light on the reconfiguration generated by the structuralist frame that orients his reading. Let me start by a tentative representation of what could be a theory of fields, keeping in mind that Bourdieu evoked it without offering a theoretical formulation that would consist of applying laws or a single explanatory principle valid for a given segment of reality. The concept bears a massive uncertainty due to the extension of its domain of validity. What can the field describe? Is it

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valid for any form of social organization, whatever its degree of complexity or autonomy? Or, the opposite, is it only relevant to specific configurations that can be identified by a long genetic process? Two scholars raise the question in very strong terms, Alain Viala, who specializes in classical French literature, and Denis Saint-Jacques, historical sociologist of Quebecois literature (SaintJacques and Viala 1994). The subtitle of the Rules of Art is “Genesis and structure of the literary field”. The assertion has thus a general dimension: one could think that the literary field covers a homogeneous structural configuration that allows it to subsume diverse forms of historical or geographic reality. If the concept applied to any form of literature, it could be used to study the Serbian or the Argentinian field as well as the French one. This is how many disciples proceeded: they exported to different countries both the genetic and structural schemes that Bourdieu developed for the French case in the 19th century. Viala and Saint-Jacques convincingly show that Bourdieu refers simultaneously to two types of historical depth. In the first part of the Rules of Art, the short time is taken into account: the literary Bohemia of the Eighteenth Century, as Robert Darnton analyzed it, cannot be considered as an inchoative form of literary field because the Nineteenth Century is an absolute beginning. One can talk of a radical historical discontinuity. In the second part of the book, which corresponds to an earlier moment of writing by Bourdieu, as Viala and Saint-Jacques note, the long run is taken into greater account, and we get closer to a continuous narrative, particularly when Bourdieu evoked the Italian Baroque or the Republic of Letters. Although Bourdieu continuously recommended the historicization of concepts as well as social forms, he did not seem to be seriously preoccupied by the conditions of felicity of a historical sociology. The coexistence of two levels of temporality in the Rules of Art was never investigated. As a consequence, the field always presents two faces. The first makes it the product of a slow genesis in time that makes it resemble the processes analyzed by Durkheim (division of labor, individualism), Weber (rationalization, bureaucracy), and Elias (civilization). The seconds is more of a sudden appearance and of a symbolic coup de force. It presupposes ostensive forms of break from the past as well as the acute consciousness that the agents developed about the originality and the novelty of the field they are in. In the Rules of Art, like in later texts, particularly the lectures on Manet, the short temporality prevails and is embodied in the radical dimension of symbolic revolutions. That choice leads me to think that Bourdieu is less interested than he claims, or believes, in the discovery of genetic processes, which imply a slow accumulation of capital in a long temporality. Moreover, as he refuses to envisage the possible articulation between those two temporalities, in the ways proposed by Fernand Braudel in The

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Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Philip the Second (Braudel 1996), Bourdieu shows that he is not really interested in the construction of a historical sociology: he simply uses particulars historical moments to legitimize his theoretical point of view. One could say that the notion of field is insufficiently historicized: it cannot be totally de-indexed from a particular historical case-the French Nineteenth century. Simultaneously, it may be transported to other historical situations. Bourdieu never gives the keys to the transposabilty of the concept or, to speak like Viala and Saint-Jacques, its “translatability”. The concept is doomed to oscillate between the deictic status, in the sense that Jean-Claude Passeron gave to the term in order to qualify the cognitive operations of historical sciences, and the nomologic status, closer to Bourdieu’s epistemic position. In a totally different context, Bourdieu had to justify the universal character of his sociology of taste although it was based on a local survey. One of the major charms of Distinction for foreigners is undoubtedly what it shows about France; the fat bean eater, the elegant Air France female flight-attendant and the mustachioed butcher who carves meat wearing a Basque beret remind us of a peculiar culture that the learned visitor recognizes at once. Bourdieu did not overlook the anchoring of the distinction theory in a kind of “terroir” characterized by a robust typicality. Presenting the English-speaking audience with his book in 1984, which was to be the point of departure of the world-wide fame of the man and his theory, he dealt in his astounding foreword with the difficulty related to the national grounding of sociological reasoning as it appeared in the book. The justification he offered was dual. The first answer to objections was strictly logical: “it is possible to enter into the singularity of an object without giving up the ambition of drawing out general propositions” (Bourdieu 1984: xi). One must not forget here that Bourdieu was not always preoccupied by the operations that allowed him to generalize assertions, as the book never raised the major issue of the comparison of contexts and remained silent about the status of peculiar examples. Bourdieu gave a second answer to the objection related to the territorial grounding of his theoretical construction: it was no longer logical, but historical. The French cultural model, inherited from the Court Society ended up by imposing itself to the whole world and its exemplarity, generated by its international reputation, and constitutes the empirical guarantee of a general theory. To be clear, the object may serve to support a conceptualization of taste de-­indexed from local contexts were preferences are made because it is universally known. This does mean necessarily that all the people share the same experience of the social world, but that the cultural model is famous enough to exert a continuous fascination, although the explanation of that huge success

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is never accounted for. Bourdieu wrote: “The Parisian version of the art of living has never ceased to exert a sort of fascination in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, even beyond the circle of snobs and socialites, thereby attaining a kind of universality” (Bourdieu 1984: xi). Here he draws explicitly on a conversation with Erving Goffman about France: his colleague’s authority is sufficient to exonerate Bourdieu from looking for the causes of the efficacy of the Parisian model. One could say the same thing about the great French writer or painter of the Nineteenth Century: their local exemplarity makes them universal without discussion. The concept of field is the key to this move from particular to general. An efficient way to shed light on its constructing principle is to consider the use made by Bourdieu of the notion of literary field. The case is simultaneously particular and paradigmatic. In spite of its grounding in a very local situation, and probably unique, the Parisian cultural space in the middle of the Nineteenth century, it allows us to envisage a logic of action that can be applied to an infinity of other situations. The analysis of that peculiar form gives Bourdieu the occasion to come back to theory and method issues in the Rules of Art. After he deplored, in almost feverish terms, the theoretical misery of most of his colleagues, he took pains to clarify the ways by which he used the concept of field. Why is the sociological analysis of cultural goods so weak? This is due to its import of characteristic values of the literary, artistic and philosophical fields, as if its autonomization were particularly difficult. Bourdieu’s reflection on the concept of field is inaugurated by the statement, very often made since the first edition of The Craft of Sociology in 1968, about the huge obstacles that threaten the constitution of a full-fledged field of the social sciences. Bourdieu rarely gives all the keys to understanding why the domain that he tries to develop is so vulnerable. The main explanation lies in the resilience of a scholastic model: its objectification will get a central place in the maturity writings. In the Rules of Art, he sees the cult of scholarly originality, which Durkheim already denounced in his works on education, as the main source of the theoretical confusion that rules the social sciences: “The social sciences are in a situation that is hardly favorable to the establishment to (such) a realist relation to the theoretical heritage: judgements continue to be guided by the values of originality, which are those of the literary, artistic or the philosophical fields. Discrediting as servile or merely fashionable the desire to acquire the specific instruments of production by inscribing oneself within a tradition and thereby within a collective enterprise, the social sciences favor those short lived bluffs, used by small entrepreneurs without capital to try to associate their names with a hallmark” (Bourdieu 1996: 180).

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Note that Bourdieu will not integrate in his theory what we may call its pathology; a close reading reveals that the field can be disrupted by the possibility for individuals who do not hold the necessary capital to enter the field in order to take action and to make moves that can be winning, at least in short temporalities. Overwhelmed by his polemic spirit, the sociologist misses the fact that the notion of “bluff” could be extremely fruitful if it were integrated to the system. At first sight, it threatens the spontaneous adjustment between field, habitus and capital, but in fact, it could strengthen its robustness by making room for fool play, lies and cynicism, so present in social life and so absent from sociology books. According to Bourdieu, the field is a principle of construction for objects. The qualification of a set of relations as “field” presupposes an empirical dimension. Contrary to a large part of current American sociology, he never believed that theory can constitute an autonomous universe. The theory of fields is worthy if only it can be tested in an empirical space. In order to answer the question “what is a field?”, Bourdieu starts with an example, the system of higher education. Each institution can reveal its singular “truth”, paradoxically, only if it is relocated in the system of objective relations that constitute the competitive space which is formed by the whole set of institutions. Two words ­matter here: system and competition. The first refers to the relational mode of thought that shapes Bourdieu’s whole analytical endeavor. The field is essentially a set of structural relations, which must be highlighted before one comes to units. Contrary to many of contemporaries, he never abandoned his affiliation with structuralism. The notion of field remains its clearest implementation, as a social space is a system of relations that can be modulated in varying forms of acquired dispositions-either habitus or the uneven level of mobilized resources (capital). The second term is perhaps more interesting, since it qualifies structure as a competitive space between agents and institutions. Here, the field is conceived in market terms. One could easily envisage social structures where competition struggles would play no role at all or would be contingent elements. Thus, in the Durkheimian model of society, the interindividual or the inter-institutional competition is never put forward. According to Bourdieu, the sense of competition guarantees the common space figured by the field. No one would contest that artistic and intellectual worlds, including precapitalist economies, are characterized by a high level of competition. Intellectual are defined by Randall Collins as “highly argumentative people”, whether they live in Ancient Greece or on a Californian campus. Dispute is foundational in all intellectual collectives (Collins 1998). When Bourdieu asserts, in his attempt to develop a structural sociology of scientific activities,

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that “if there is a truth, it is the fact that truth is a stake of struggles”, he institutes the symbolic confrontation as the unique norm in the history of knowledge. Having rightly fought the previously dominant representations of scientific consensus does not immunize against the opposite excess that forbids by construction any respite to competitors. The analysis of scientific controversies must take this fact into account. Bourdieu’s social world is a world of warriors. The field is a kind of Kampfplatz, a fighting arena. The question now is whether one can account for all social fields in using only a competitive scheme. It is difficult to make room for cooperative games when using the model presented in The Rules of Art. The field is essentially characterized by the permanent existence of universal struggle. The purpose of struggle is always to win over a competitor. Bourdieu situates himself in the legacy of Max Weber and Raymond Aron, but also, less directly Marx and Engels, and he puts violence at the heart of history. Consequently, the vision of the field as a pure competitive space does not encompass the whole set of inter-individual relations, unless one presupposes that competition governs the totality of social interactions. There is no need to plead for an irenic vision of the social world that history denies absolutely. However, we need to make room for the numerous situations of cooperation and association that organize collective life. The analogy between field and market brought in by the universal use of a competitive scheme creates many problems, particularly when it comes to social worlds that refuse to be defined in market terms, as it is the case, at least until recent times, for universities. The most “theoretical” definitions of the field proposed by Bourdieu along time always insist on the ontological dimension of the concept. One of the first, which will be reused without any substantive change, is presented in the short text, rather strangely titled “Some properties of field” (Bourdieu 1993: 72–77). There, we learn that there are “general laws of field”. Bourdieu is addressing a group of philologists and historians of literature. The concept allows him to account for very diverse social forms since it is illustrated by fashion in haute couture, medieval religion and philosophy in the Nineteenth century. Here the concept is clearly disconnected from its original historical site, Midnineteenth century French literature; it becomes a universal principle of social organization. Two sets of phenomena constitute the field. First, the different positions are structured within a space that confers them properties susceptible to be analyzed independently from the personal characteristics of their occupiers: such a property guarantees the structural strength of the defined space. Bourdieu also speaks of “posts”, a word that could lead us to apply the notion of field to bureaucracy, or to think that Bourdieu’s conception is contaminated by the

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powerful representation of the French public service as an archetypal form of sociality. The frequency of references to the academic world is striking. This is not only because Bourdieu seeks to make palpable the dynamic aspect of the structure, as he aims to convince a bunch of philologists in his short lecture. Second, the general model of interactions, which can take different forms in concrete historical settings, is the “struggle between challengers and established dominant actors”. Any field is organized on the basis of a single principle of competition: challengers tend to subvert the rules that guarantee the reproduction of the conditions maintaining the domination of the established. “We know that in every field we shall find a struggle, the specific form of which are to be looked for each time, between the newcomer who tries to break through the entry barrier and the dominant agent who will try to defend the monopoly and keep out competition” (Bourdieu 1993: 72). As we have seen earlier, if the analogy with the physical world is quite limited, the notion of force is central in the definition of the field: its structure is the result of a power relation between agents or institutions. This relation can always be brought back into play. Many opponents of Bourdieu have insisted on his reproductive vision of the social world, founded on the continuous reiteration of a principle of domination. One can see here that, at least at the theoretical level, there is a clear privilege given to structural dynamics. The structure is conceived of as a system of transformations and the stake of struggle is simultaneously the conservation and the change of structure. The field is a structure of power in which agent have uneven resources that they use to defend or contest a legitimate authority, defined in Weberian terms as “the monopoly of legitimate violence”. Authority, legitimacy, monopoly: Bourdieu’s vocabulary borrows from Weber’s lexicon to such an extent that one may wonder whether the field is the translation of domination in structural terms. One can understand the efficiency of force, particularly in its symbolic dimension, only if one displays its effects in a social space made of positions that are as such particular points of view on the power structure. In fact, the field exerts a force on the whole set of positions that compose it, whatever the level of power that a position may hold. One can say that the dominant position is in turn dominated by the sheer strength of the field. The field effect is the point through which force is exerted. This is very different from the force of the social that Durkheim identified as the universality of an external constraint imposed upon individuals by society. What matters here is the force of the field. “When I talk of the intellectual field”, Bourdieu said to Loïc Wacquant in 1992, “I know very well that in this field I will find “particles” (let me pretend for a moment that we are dealing with a physical field) that are under the sway of forces of attraction, or repulsion, and so on, as in a magnetic field. Having said

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this, as soon as I speak of a field, my attention fastens on the primacy of this system of objective relations over the particles themselves” (Bourdieu 1992: 106–107). That gives the form and the force of a structure to a positional space: it explains the fact that topography and ecology are never sufficient to define a field. If the analogy with gravitational force is clear, it does not diminish the dark side of the force of the field. At this point, Bourdieu’s structuralism is an integral one, which led many readers to think that Bourdieu never envisaged individual agency. A lot of users of the concept of field are content with the description of a positional space, characterized most of the time by polar oppositions. They usually forget to include in their analysis the proper effect of the field exerted on the individuals who are positioned in it. The distinction between a positional space and a Bourdieuan field appears clearly in the critique addressed by Andrew Abbott to the French sociologist. After having acknowledged that his notion of linked ecology had many common features with the field, particularly through the fact of thinking relationally about social agents, the sociologist from Chicago stresses the differences between conceptualizations. Contrary to appearances, Abbott does not insist on the weight of the analogy with physics, but on the omnipresence of the economic metaphor: capital, legacy and the economy of symbolic goods are here the main indicators. Abbott, in his own model, gives a privilege to biological analogies (competition and coexistence of different species while combining them with strategic analyses associating the spheres of law and politics), but does not base his reasoning on a single set of analogies: “My metaphoric universe, he concludes, is much broader than Bourdieu’s and I have not allowed any single metaphor to take a central position in my thinking” (Abbott undated). His concept of ecology owes much to the first Chicago school, which took the city as the main space of analysis and he likes to oppose the static dimension of the concept of field, entirely constructed on domination and the dynamics of ecology, which allows him to account for processes, emergences as well as decompositions and re-compositions. He sees in his opposition to Bourdieu the persistence of two quite different intellectual traditions, the European one, based on Hegelian-Marxism and the American one, based on pragmatism. In order to go further into the analysis of the reworking of Weber’s concepts when it comes to the exercise of force in the social world, one must re-read one of Bourdieu’s most striking articles, written at the highest of the structuralist tide, Published in the Revue francaise de sociologie in 1971 (Bourdieu 1971), the text shows all the characteristics of a scholarly tour de force aiming to impress colleagues. He will move away from that format in the second part of his career, when he would privilege the transgressive dimension of his discourse.

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The article is all the more interesting in that it was published just before the Outline of a Theory of Practice, where the field does not play a major role. The title of the article “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field” is an implicit reference to a famous book by the philosopher Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, published in 1946, a must read for all aspiring philosophers in the 1950s. Bourdieu sketches what will later be his “genetic structuralism” allowing his theoretical construction to account for processual dynamics; the analysis of the religious field is clearly located in this perspective. Drawing largely on Weber’ sociology of religion, Bourdieu sees the constitution of the religious field as the outcome of a process of monopolization of the management of salvation goods by a group of specialists. The growth of the division of labor in that domain is grounded on the restricted access to a specific competence, correlated to the dispossession that affects all those who are defined as profane by the monopolistic affirmation. As the author of Confucianism and Taoism had already noticed, the worldview offered by great religions is produced by groups who occupy a particular position in society (such as Confucean scholars or Indian Brahmins) and cannot be dissociated from the issue of knowing who formulates it and who assimilates it. This is the very object of the sociology of religion; it amounts to the reconstitution of the process by which a particular form of sacred installs its legitimacy in a given society. There is always a disjunction between social representations and religious representations, the latter never merely reflecting the former. Nevertheless, the purely intellectualist vision of myths developed by Claude Levi-Strauss, tending to sever all the links that supernatural beliefs have with social practice, is not acceptable since it ignores the historical process that leads to the distinction between sacred and profane. One can find in the article on religious field a concentrated version of Bourdieu’s conceptual weaponry. The field is defined as a structure of objective properties and is not drawn using a realistic typology. The concept cannot be severed from cultural arbitrariness: the recognition of any symbolic authority presupposes the acceptance of languages and signs that make sense only in the specific social space they establish. This implies that priests as well as prophets are fully convinced by their gesture and discourse, most of the time aiming to create demarcation between sacred and profane, between pure and impure. There is an additional condition: all the consumers of religion, who are simultaneously totally disposed from any promise of direct access to divinity and invited to use the efficient services of professional intercessors, must adhere without any restriction to the proposed spiritual offer. Thus, the religious field is grounded on a sort of covenant that will re-appear under different aspects in other fields throughout history.

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Using a language common to Durkheim and Weber, the field can be referred to a sphere of activity born from the progress of the division of labor across history. The relative autonomization of a determined social space is the consequence of a process of differentiation: Durkheim showed it with respect to the educational system in The Evolution of Educational Thought in France (Durkheim 2005). The Medieval University slowly detached itself from the Catholic Church, from which it grew out of and that once strictly controlled it. The specialization of functions made that control less efficient as pure forms of scholarly authority developed. Bourdieu significantly enriches the notion of sphere of activity in making it partly independent from the constraints of functional differentiation. What makes the field is never a pure function, although the production and certification of a certain type of good of service, material or symbolic, is always at stake. At the very root of a field, there is always some degree of cultural arbitrariness. For instance, things could have been said differently by priests; the division in scholarly disciplines that we take now for granted could have organized knowledge differently. The authority attached to functions and institutions lies to a large extent on an arbitrary foundation. Bourdieu de-naturalizes domination by recomposing it in the language of symbolic efficacy; it owes its power to its capacity to associate an arbitrary injunction and the necessary obedience that follows it without any discussion. In the religious field, the needlessness of the justification of authority is particularly important. Bourdieu, by using the tool of transposition that plays a major role in his theory of fields as well as in habitus, imports cultural arbitrariness in all social fields and makes it one of the main tools of domination. The matrix dimension of the religious field appears not only in the logic of its historical genesis or in the spreading of a monopolistic authority. One can also acknowledge its contribution to the preservation of social order through its symbolic efficacy and its ability to delineate demarcation: if religions are the main providers of that type of form, they exist also in all types of field where what is at stake is the manipulation of pictures or words, such as in education or political communication. Every field situates itself in a specific relationship to the field of power. Although the religious field ordinarily contributes to the reproduction of temporal power insofar as it manifests the necessity to obey at its highest, one must always take seriously the relative autonomy of any field as a basic condition of its existence. The relationship with the field of power constitutes a kind of reality test for any field, as Bourdieu will show later in his work on academia or journalism. The principle is perfectly asserted in the article on religion. All the forms of authority efficient in a field, determined by an historical accumulation of resources, encounter at some point the most

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concentrated form of power and experience the relative dimension of their autonomy. Other elements, also clearly drawn from the Weberian frame, will be exported from religion to other social objects. This is the case with the canonic opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, which has a precise meaning in religions as it is the principle of their historical dynamics, made of schisms and marked by the regular emergence of new orthodoxies. In Bourdieu’s work, this pair is rivalled by another, this time thoroughly secularized, dominant and challengers, but it continues to be used to described situation that are purely profane, particularly in the academic and artistic worlds. Besides, the prophetic or charismatic form analyzed by Weber can be re-employed, particularly to contribute to the history of art. His posthumous book on Manet is a perfect illustration of the Weberian lexicon. In his article on religious field, Bourdieu uses for the first time the notion of “symbolic revolution”, which will become central later on. Erwan Dianteill appositely remarks that, although Bourdieu did not write much on religion, his work is almost a “generalized sociology of religion”, religion presenting, in a paradigmatic way, properties “common to all the spheres of symbolic activity” (Dianteill 2003: 529). The recurrence of a religious vocabulary in Bourdieu’s oeuvre raises the question of the status of religious institutions in the history of societies. Should we see in them an archetypical form of field, of which the ulterior and secularized forms would merely be weakened copies? In religion, arbitrariness and authority are manifested as such; symbolic force is the unique principle of the exercise of power and of the casting of different roles. Bourdieu never gave an absolute clear explanation of his recourse to religious metaphors. Sometimes he gave a sort of ironic version, as he did in his presentation of his survey on museums in The Love of Art. The book opens on an amusing description of art and culture zealots: “The religion of art also has its fundamentalists and its modernists, yet these factions unite in raising the question of cultural salvation in the language of grace” (Bourdieu and Darbel 1991c). The sociology of art presupposes an agnostic attitude aiming to objectify the zeal of believers and their inability to impose their dogma to those who keep ignoring it. However, beyond the desacralizing irony, the abundance of religious analogies is somewhat troubling. To some extent, it seems to be borrowed from the legitimate vision of cultural policy. When The Love of Art came out, André Malraux’s Gaullist policy was triumphant. The Maisons de la Culture were designed to be the contemporary cathedrals and the political power viewed culture as a way of linking French people in a time of quick secularization. Nevertheless, the lectures on Manet are invaded by references to the sacred, under the respective species of sacred aesthetics and sacred ethic-sexual. The aesthetic

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transgression is viewed by the sociologist as analogous to religious transgression. Bourdieu is far from the first to make use of religious language in sociological analysis: Durkheim and Weber were active predecessors in this direction. Both justified their practice by a theory of religion that could not be found in their successor’s work. One can only conclude at this point that the religious field is like an archi-field, insofar as it concentrates the organizing principle of all field: the process of relative autonomization, the relationship to power, the universal character of the struggle between dominant and dominated, and something that could be called the primacy of symbolic efficacy. One could stop here, as the model strikes by its simplicity and efficiency, but one would be wrong. In order to function, the components that I have just defined are not sufficient, Another element is needed, that is not easy to objectify, and that undoubtedly contains a little bit of mystery. Although Bourdieu never makes full use of the metaphor of play, he regularly uses it to illustrate the functioning of a field. The condition of felicity of the field is lodged in the identification of stakes by the participant, stakes that will “move them”. Bourdieu writes: “In order for a field to function, there have to be stakes and people prepared to play the game, endowed with the habitus that implies knowledge and recognition of the immanent laws of the field, the stakes, and so on” (Bourdieu 1993: 72). Bourdieu names that propensity to play the game illusio, keeping the Latin word in a peculiar meaning, by drawing on the etymology of the verb illudere (to play in) and extending the reflection of Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (Huizinga 1938). Although illusio has been less elaborated than Bourdieu’s three main concepts analyzed in my book, it plays a growing role in Bourdieu’s later work, and becomes central in Pascalian Meditations. Illusio is the main mediating agent between habitus and field. It contains, as always with Bourdieu, a strong component of pre-reflexive and automatic adjustment. Entering the game is not the consequence of a deliberation: it manifests itself in the encounter between a habitus and a positional space. Illusio is defined by “the sense of investment in the game and the outcome, interest in the game, commitments to the presuppositions-doxa-of the game” (Bourdieu 1990a: 66). The critique of theoretical reason as it is developed in The Logic of Practice is grounded on the notion of “logic of field” as a way of ending the artificial opposition between subjectivism and objectivism, central in the social sciences. In the case of anthropology, the notion of field, which was almost absent in the first works, is mobilized to account for the nature of practical logics that cannot be reduced the rationality of economy, were practice is defined by the encounter of rational intentions and external constraints. The general economy of practice proposed by Bourdieu rejects mere calculation but maintains the

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notion of interest redefined within the frame of practical sense through illusio or commitment, which is to say a form of pre-reflexive investment. This space of investment is the archetypal form of the field logic. The particular economic worlds are “fields of struggles differing both in the stakes and scarcities that are generated within them and in the forms of capital deployed in them” (Bourdieu 1990a: 51). The partial rewriting of The Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1980 integrates the concept of field in general anthropology. Conceived at this level of generality, it is more a space for play than a proper positional space. Play as seen by Bourdieu is never conscious and can never be expressed in terms of calculation. The notion is totally captured in the nets of the logic of practice. What makes illusio possible is the agreement between players and the structures of the social world, which is a pre-condition to the competition between players. Such an agreement can never be formalized and remains in the realm of the taken for granted or of the tacit knowledge of ethnomethodology. Here there is here a form of filiation with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. We perceive the things that surround us as obvious or self-evident. A non-written agreement is the first condition of the reproduction of the belief in the value of stakes. The idea according to which disagreement is conditioned by a preliminary agreement can be inserted in a long philosophical tradition, which opens with Heraclitus’ unity of opposites and finds a clear definition in the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicolas de Cues, a neo-platonician philosopher whom Ernst Cassirer considered as the perfect representative of the Renaissance thought. The theory of field is thus supported by a rich philosophical background that Bourdieu, in spite of occasional references, rarely refers to. The theme of the objective complicity of people fighting each other (collusio) is one of the most complex elements of the theory. Although it is a necessary condition of the existence and persistence of a positional space, it is never defined in a thorough and stable way. On the one hand, illusion and tacit agreement are completely located on the side of doxa: “It tends to be forgotten that a fight presupposes agreement between the antagonists about what it is that is worth fighting about; those points of agreement are held at the level of what “goes without saying”, they are left in the state of doxa, in other words everything that makes the field itself, the game, the stakes, all the presuppositions that one tacitly and even unwittingly accepts by the mere fact of playing, by entering to the game” (Bourdieu 1993: 73–74). Here we are in the realm of practical sense, of doxa, of the implicit and the undiscussed. On the other hand, Bourdieu defines the situation of the people joining the game in a quite different way, when he uses the terms of conscious

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calculation and reflexive acknowledgement of stakes: “The new players have to pay an entry fee which consists in recognition which consists in recognition of the value of the game (selection and co-option always pay great attention to the indices of commitment to the game, investment in it) and in (practical) knowledge of the principles of the functioning of the game” (Bourdieu 1993: 74). The assertion is however modulated by the bracketing of the adjective “practical”. Bourdieu adds in the following pages that this practical knowledge is tacit, although it is never something implicit nor undiscussed: it is a matter of codifications and objectified shaping. Bourdieu expresses this set of notions in terms of “functioning principles of the game” and places a great importance on the “entrance fees” that deny the purely doxic character of the adhesion to the game. One can find here, in a nutshell, all the difficulties inherent to Bourdieu’s theory of practical sense. They will be examined in detail in the next chapter. Now, it is sufficient to be aware of the tensions that mark the very process of field construction. If the unconscious relationship between a habitus and a field is precisely what holds together the protagonists within a positional space, how can one make room for the neatly strategic dimension of the moves that are played and the constant reference to the principles of field construction? In this text, Bourdieu sketches what could be a principle of variation between fields: the protagonists contribute, “more or less completely depending on fields”, to the production of belief in the value of stakes. There would be thus field and field, and some fields could be characterized by an incomplete level of belief: this would open up a more complex definition of the concept, by modulating the levels of adhesion. However, the text ends at a half-way, since the unifying ambition of theory forbids by principle the plurality of field shapes. At the level of generality reached by Bourdieu in his most ambitious attempts, the field is the central concept in social theory. Positional spaces command the understanding of all models of action, in whatever domain they take place. Although the demonstration of the universality of field remains to be made and is regularly referred to as a corroboration space that is still under construction, it is nevertheless the key to the system. The field is the place where dispositions come to adjust to positions in a competitive struggle the rules of which are always identical. In the Rules of Art, Bourdieu presents his project in a way less abstract than before: “As I hope to be able one day to demonstrate, everything leads us to suppose that, far from being the founding model, the economic theory of the field is a particular case of a general theory of fields which is gradually constructed by a sort of a theoretical induction that is empirically validated, and which, while allowing us to understand the fecundity and the limits of the validity of transfers such as Weber effected, obliges us

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to rethink the presuppositions of economic theory, especially in the light of what is learned from the analysis of fields of cultural production” (Bourdieu 1996a: 183). To the matrix dimension of the religious field, he adds, or perhaps substitutes, the cultural field, since things are not absolutely clear. Bourdieu draws from it a majority of his examples when he intends to propose a general theoretical model. He deduces the properties of all fields from fields of cultural production. The centrality of culture is never made explicit in the oeuvre. However, nobody could contest the paradigmatic character of the literary field, not only because he devoted so much of his work to it, a rarity among sociologists. Bourdieu is undoubtedly the sociologist who has allowed culture to be considered as important as religion or economy that were privileged by the founding fathers. There is something that could be named the primacy of symbolism in his oeuvre, which is the condition to distance himself from Marx without even so completely breaking away in his general theory. The general economy of practice for which the economy in a strict sense would be only a particular case, one field among others, was never formally discussed. It constitutes nevertheless the horizon of Bourdieu’s theoretical effort. The general economy can be expressed in terms of field: positional space is the universal frame of all interactions. At this level, the concept of field is historically amorphous, and its genesis tends to remain in the background. General theory implies that all goes here as everywhere else. The diversity of objects that the concept can encompass shows that it subsumes extremely diverse historical situations and modes of construction that may have few things in common. The reference to general theory, even when it appears in a mere programmatic way, implies that all social and historical objects can be analyzed in the same terms, although the cases chosen to valid theory are most of the time taken from Western modernity, and most frequently in its cultural dimension. However, this fact is never a limitation. The general economy of practice standing as a promise of a general theory of fields coexists with a more restricted definition of the field that has been analyzed in this chapter: this was made possible by the analysis of symbolic goods. The study of particular fields with respect to their relationship to the concept is extremely precise in The Rules of Art. He seems at times to remember his student work on Leibniz for whom worlds express each other: “By virtue of the particularities of its functions and of its functioning (or, more simply, the sources of information concerning it), each field delivers more or less clearly the properties it shares with all the others” (Bourdieu 1996a: 182). Some fields apparently are very peculiar, but where the level of censorship is weaker, they reveal general properties better than others. Bourdieu develops here the

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idea of a differential propensity of fields to objectification: “The field of high fashion introduced me more directly than any other universe to one of the most fundamental properties of all fields of all fields of cultural production, namely the essentially magical logic of the production of the producer and the product as fetishes” (Ibid). Pushed to its extreme, the theory of fields can become the theory of the field. All fields, notwithstanding the singular configurations that make them hold, either national tradition or the degree of social development, can be treated by the same conceptual frame. This is the reason why cultural production that feeds the most fecund analyses tends to impose itself as a paradigm. According to Bourdieu, the history of artworks holds a particular status; it has only one explanatory principle, the logic of field, understood as the space for competition struggles between producers defined through a network of objective relations. As in the model, each position is defined by its relationship to other positions. The structuration of the field is always commanded by the distribution of different species of capital. There is strictly no other possible history, even if other factors can be taken into account through the mediation created by the field. What permits the explanation in terms of field is the existence of a mode of symbolic activation that depends only on the “strategies” of agents. The meaning of artworks is exhausted in the expression of conflicts of interest shaped by the structure of the field. The nerve of the argument entirely holds in a homology between the space of artworks and the space defined by the population of producers. Thus, one can say that a type of work always corresponds to a certain type of producers. For example: “Free verse defines itself as against the alexandrine and everything it implies aesthetically, but also socially and even politically” (Bourdieu 1996a: 205). The different genres, forms and manners are to each other what are the corresponding authors to each other. The homology of both structures is the necessary condition for a science of artworks, but the price to pay is high: works are reduced to the expressive “hanger” of an author’s position. The sociologist’s task consists in going back and forth between both spaces in which identical information are proposed under different forms. The principle of transposability, universal key to the theory, is central here. In this perspective, literary history is always and everywhere the struggle between the challengers and the dominant, the outsiders and the established, the orthodox and the heretics. Every change in the structure must be accounted for by a single process, that is to say the interplay between routinization and de-­ routinization. Note here how the reinterpretation of Weberian concepts in a structuralist frame remains the prime mover of the conceptualization. The impression is made stronger by reading the lectures on Manet. The simplicity of the model allows him to shed light on general properties of cultural ­production

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fields. As those fields occupy a dominated position with respect to the field of power, one can say that they are constantly penetrated by economic and political determination. The effect of domination is mainly exerted through the tension between a principle of heteronomy-the economic or political logic expresses itself through the triumph of “bourgeois art”- and a principle of autonomy, which finds its best expression in the “art for art’s sake”. The metaphor of refraction supplants the reflect, without being much more operational to account for the specific forms that re-translate all external constraints in a given field. How can one measure the degree of autonomy reached by a field? It is expressed in the symbolic power relation between internal and external. This is the outcome of the volume of symbolic capital accumulated by the action of successive generations. At this point, one might believe that Bourdieu describes with his own lexicon, field, habitus and species of capital, a long run process that characterized Western history in which the figure of the artist slowly emerged, opposed to the artisan, due to the relative alleviation of external constraint. Norbert Elias, among others, sketched an analysis of that process, which does not exclude of course discontinuities and temporary regressions. As a matter of fact, Bourdieu clearly distances himself from such an explanatory frame. He refuses a unilinear model of development of the literary field. How is the change of literary forms accounted for? It is first related to mere structural effects: it is the outcome of the endless struggle between dominant and dominated, old and young, orthodox and heretics, etc. Most of the time, change is the consequence of the challengers’ initiative as they must be recognized by a sudden coup or by a great feat. Along time, as a result of the autonomizing process implying that artworks owe increasingly their formal properties to the pure history of field, change in literary production is less and less deducible from overall change in society. Nevertheless, maximal change, expressed in terms of aesthetic revolution, can only occur if two processes, one internal and on external to the field, and relatively independent, cumulate their effects. How then can on think the specific efficacy of external factors? The newcomers in the field can one be recognized only if they make use, as an additional resource, of external change. For instance, this is the case of revolutionary crises or to the surge of new categories of consumers. Thus, literary revolutions in Nineteenth Century France are possible only when they are supported by external changes, mainly the extension of the potential public due to the increase of schooling. But this macro-factor is so difficult to articulate with the micro-processes that constitute the confrontation between literary schools that it is quite difficult to give it a true explanatory function. Aesthetic innovation appears simultaneously as the effect of

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­ orphological change within the population (the increase of educational ofm fer leads to the mobilization of more and more young people aiming to be artists) and the consequence of a founding gesture by a charismatic personality. A field is sometimes created by an individual. This is the case with Baudelaire who “effects for the first time the break between commercial and avant-garde publishing, thereby contributing to the upsurge of a field of publishers homologous with that of writers; at a stroke, he achieves a structural liaison between the publisher and the writer at the front line” (Bourdieu 1996a: 67). However, Bourdieu never gives us the means to hierarchize between the two as there is nothing about anything about how they articulate to each other. Genetic structuralism is a heroic structuralism. This is clearly shown in his book on Heidegger, one of the rare occasions when Bourdieu manages to think jointly the mental structure of the philosopher and the structure of the German philosophical field (Bourdieu 1996b). He proposes a dual reading of the oeuvre, taking into account the duality of social spaces within which the philosopher acts. Reading must be in the meantime philosophical and political, grounding itself on the author’s ambiguities and his play with words that make them constantly migrate from one space to another. Bourdieu wants to account for the effects of “the imposition of form that is effected by philosophical discourse” (Bourdieu 1996b: 3). The textual effect, which is proper to philosophical writing, is inscribed in the dual position of all Heidegger’s assertions: thus, “the most specific characteristics and effects of his thought are rooted in this dual reference, and in order to understand it adequately, we must ourselves regenerate, consciously and methodically, the reciprocal connections that Heidegger’s political ontology sets up in practice, as it creates a political stance but gives it a purely philosophical expression” (Bourdieu 1991: 5–6). What is at stake here is the ability to reproduce the Heideggerian operation with the theoretical weapons of objectification. Bourdieu speaks of a “literal” method: “We should take him at his word, as we should when he talks of the ‘tought-provoking’ (das Bedenkliche) orthe most thoughtprovoking (das Bedenklichste)” (Bourdieu 1996b: 7). The difference lies on the level of consciousness of the sociologist and the philosopher. The former constructs in a conscious and methodic way what the latter spontaneously practices according to the relationship between his habitus and the field. The relative indetermination of discourse commands its  ideological efficiency, since the plasticity of schemes allows mutual re-­ inforcements and thematic trajectories that are susceptible to move from one field to another. Why is Heidegger a master? All his philosophical positions are located in an already constituted space: the philosophical field is a space where political

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statements can be “transfigured” into another type of discourse. Heidegger develops a masterful art of translating one idiom into another that is the sign of his mastery of the field. Like other characters in Bourdieu’s analyses, particularly Baudelaire and Manet, the holder of a great mastery of the relationships between different positions and also between different fields can operate real coups de force. They can even reconfigure a field. Thus Heidegger creates a new position in the field “in relation to which all the other positions would have to be redefined” (Bourdieu 1996b: 46). This coup has social causes according to Bourdieu. Heidegger’s ascending trajectory allows him to traverse social spaces and mental spaces with ease. Can Heidegger’s unbelievable facility to move his peasant’s body in intellectual circles be entirely explained by the habitus theory? One can be dubious about the notion of “aristocratic populism” proposed by Bourdieu. The case reveals the difficulties linked to the treatment of the exceptional by sociological frames that are usually grounded on regularities and serialization. In his lectures on Manet, the basis of Bourdieu’s analysis is undoubtedly Canvasses and careers, by Cynthia and Harrison White (White and White 1964), as wells as Albert Boime’s work, particularly The Academy and French painting in the Nineteenth Century (Boime 1971). The tension between the effects of morphological change on the one hand and the concentration of symbolic force in an individual able to break the field structure on the other sometimes reaches unsuspected heights: “I am telling you this right away because it pains me that I have not done this yet … to show you that these factors are all interconnected that what explains the transition from one system to another system that is a odds with the previous one is the connectedness of all factors of change. There is a whole cumulative process which leads to the emergence of a system. This word “emergence” is very important and should not be glossed over because it refers precisely to the passage from one system to another. This does not happen through a process of addition or aggregation. It is not a case of 1+1+1+ … =10. This passage involves a transition from one system of interconnected factors to a system of factors that are interconnected in a different way” (Bourdieu 2017: 248). The rest of the book will not say much about that inter-connection. The coup de force is amplified into a symbolic revolution, notion that Bourdieu tells us that it is “very difficult to understand” because “its accomplishment upsets our cognitive structures”. Here, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, by Michael Baxandall (Baxandall 1972) is cited as a justification, albeit in a very abstract way, since he never gives any factual account of the announced symbolic revolution. If the revolution was to be a success, one could not understand why a large part of the educated public would

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find interest, or even aesthetic pleasure, in the work of academic painters such as Delaroche and Cabanel, as blockbuster exhibitions recently showed in France. Bourdieu constantly vilified what he called the falsely historicist choice of the Musée d’Orsay. Reading the interesting book by Philippe Mary on the French new wave in the movies, defined as an artistic revolution, arouses similar difficulties: how can one account for the fact that even the protagonists of the so called revolution go on producing after the success of their collective action movies in which narrative structures are not different from the tradition (like Truffaut and Chabrol) or continue to celebrate surviving reactionary forms, as Jean-Luc Godard shows in his repeated tributes to Clint Eastwood? (Mary 2005). The symbolic revolution presented in Manet is simply considered as the birth of Modern Art. It is beyond any doubt the effect of substantive morphological changes. Bourdieu situates himself in the Durkheimian legacy. However, it cannot be conceived of without an extraordinary accumulation of capital in a single individual’s body. Bourdieu never gives us the key to the passage from macro-level to micro-level. He identifies the fact as an interesting paradox: “When this universe is what I call a “field”, in my terminology-revolutionaries are often privileged, well-heeled people. Manet was an example of this phenomenon, and his revolutionary disposition certainly had something to do with the fact that he was born into privilege, and even more importantly, perhaps, that the success of the revolution he started-this is one of the arguments I am going to develop-would have been inconceivable if his considerable capital had consisted merely of the requisite academic and academically certified skills, and he had not also had social capital, connections and therefore a certain amount of symbolic capital linked to his friends, etc.” (Bourdieu 2017: 6). The showing of a revolutionary disposition is most of the time grounded on transgression. In the Lunch on Grass, Manet “commits a series of transgressions and aesthetic barbarisms”, Transgressions are divided into two categories: first of the aesthetic sacred, second of the ethic-sexual sacred. The analogy with religion saturates the text and makes it the taken for granted element par excellence. Concerning aesthetics, barbarism means the blurring of the distinction between genres. Bourdieu neglects the fact that Manet can be situated in a deeper movement that put in relation art and common culture, as shown by Thomas Crow in his classic Modern Art in the Common Culture (Crow 1996), which does not appear in the bibliography. There was a continuing involvement between modern art and the materials of popular culture. Manet is quite present in Crow’s book but he is integrated in a network of references that allows us to consider the amplitude of a change of cultural paradigm beyond a simple individual venture. Mallarmé’s text on Manet, read in a very reductive

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way by Bourdieu, is one of the main resources of the art historian in his quest for the identification of cultural change. Paradoxically, there is more sociological matter, at least thought as raw material, in Crow’s work than in Bourdieu’s. The inscription of the logic of fields in history constitutes one of the weakest points of the whole argument. This is often the price to pay for a general theory. There is more. The constitution of a literary field in the Nineteenth Century is inseparable of a certain amount of mystery. When it comes to the critical phase of field emergence, which means the rise of a specific social space from which Flaubert’s worldview developed, Bourdieu, who has always held scientific rationalism in high respect, firmly asserts that “the ways of autonomy are complex, if not penetrable”. Nevertheless, we are left in without an explanation of the process by which artists rip out resources from people in power due to their own legitimacy. The functions of Princess Mathilde’s salon, central in the described process since writers can draw fresh resources from it, is not a convincing illustration. Mathilde’s generosity is the mere consequence of her rivalry with Eugenie within the field of power. A close reading of the Rules of Art reveals three principles governing the process of field autonomization: First, this is a disposition inherent to any intellectual production, which constitutes itself in a contentious relationship to power. This makes vain the quest for a datable point of departure that would be the birth certificate of a field. Conversely, it is possible to recognize the historical moment of its full development. The literary field reaches its full accomplishment at the end of the Nineteenth Century, but no one could come up with a precise origin. While fully historicizing the concept of field to make it a singular reality, Alain Viala suppresses, perhaps creating others, the difficulties triggered by Bourdieu’s position (Viala 1985). He distinguishes two states of the field that differ in structure: the first literary field (1630–1830) and the modern one (from 1830 to nowadays). He divides the whole into seven phases. In order to do so, he does not use, properly speaking, the notion of field effect or the gravitational force, but limits his investigation to a mere positional space. The process is thus inscribed in a process that can be periodized. Bourdieu adopts in his book a more restrictive vision of the concept of field, by making a distinction between the emergence of an apparatus of consecration, characteristic of the classical age, and the actual appearance of the autonomous writer, which occurs much later, and more decisively, of a different nature. As a matter of fact, the apparatuses of consecration provide writers with fresh resources but institutionalize their dependency on sponsors, in total contradiction with the autonomy of the field.

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Second, the process is the consequence of a morphological change in the population, as it was shown before: the quick progress of schooling in the mid-century led to a growing population of angry young people who want to make art for living. Third, it can be the consequence of an individual action, as we have seen in the case of Baudelaire and Manet. The main difficulty lies in the fact that Bourdieu never gives us a key to combine those levels or those factors and does not allow us to view the articulation between the hyper micro-level and the hyper macro-level, although their interplay is the driving force of emergences, stabilizations and decompositions. There is a discrepancy between the ambition of a general theory of fields that will encompass all forms of social interaction and restrictive uses made by the sociologist when he wants to capture actual historical forms. Above all, the examples put forward seldom aggregate all the constructive principles contained in the concept. The specific force of the field is more evoked than analyzed and Bourdieu does not hesitate to call for the notion of mystery when analytical resources become scarce. One can understand more easily at the end of this “field trip” why a general theory of fields was never published. The gap was too big between the nomological ambition and the analytic capacities. Perhaps, the choice of artistic and literary worlds as empirical objects, which Bourdieu saw as quite specific due to their autonomizing tendency, was not the best in this respect. The promise of a homology between the mental structures of individual habitus and the objective structures of the social world might have been a manifestation of sociological hubris. It is now necessary to turn to habitus in order to move forward.

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The Habitus at the Risk of Cleavage Pierre Bourdieu did not invent the concept of habitus. He is the inheritor of a great tradition that inaugurated with Ancient philosophy. However, he widely renewed the uses of the notion and made it more complex along time so that it would account for the individuals’ ambivalence in their relationship to the world. The notion of cleft habitus, which appeared in the mature works, aimed to express the possible considerable gap between the primitive relationship to the social world and the complete trajectory of individuals. He portrays himself as the outcome of this type of habitus: “To avoid overburdening analysis ad infinitum, I would like to move rapidly to what seems to me now, in the present state of my effort at reflexivity, to be the essential point: the fact that the contradictory coincidence of election into the intellectual aristocracy with lower class and provincial (I would like to say: very provincial) origins underlay the constitution of a cleft habitus, generating all kinds of contradictions ad tensions (…)This ambivalence is a source of a double distance with respect to the opposing positions, dominant and dominated, within the field” (Bourdieu 2008: 111). What did Bourdieu call habitus? This is what classical sociology defined as socialization, distinguishing in it several forms, mainly the first (primary socialization) and later forms of inculcation (secondary socialization). The French sociologist never used the established vocabulary, neither in its Durkheimian formulation-the Moral Education’s author spoke of the “methodic socialization of the younger generation”-, viewing it at the manifestation of the strength of moral forces-nor in the functionalist function proposed by Parsons, centered on the construction of personality and the adaptation to the environment. It is highly significant that Bourdieu never used the classical lexicon of sociology, which had progressively emerged along with the institutionalization of sociology. He substituted to it a personal lexicon, widely borrowed from ancient Latin and Greek: the erudite and complex use of it was in full contradiction with his late years combat against the scholastic illusion. The choice of this vocabulary has much to do with his ostensive rejection of American functionalist sociology that had been imported in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War while Durkheimian sociology was slowly dying. As it came at the time of the delayed institutionalization of French sociology, the functionalist

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version offered nothing to a young philosopher who had not ­abandoned his conceptual ambitions while joining the camp of empirical sciences. Let us try to understand Bourdieu’s lexical choices, since they contributed to his international reputation as they identified his thought as first sight. In order to do so, it is necessary, by re-using the tools that he constructed, to reconstitute the space of possibilities within which his own trajectory developed. The sociologist gave many descriptions of his conversion to anthropology and sociology, long before the publication of his posthumous Sketch for a Self-Analysis. One of the most interesting among those is undoubtedly Aspiring Philosopher, transcription of an oral presentation made at the Paris Pompidou Center on the occasion of the art exhibition, The 1950s (Bourdieu 1989). “The choice of philosophy”, he recalled then, “was not really different, in its principle, from what determines the highest on the merit list in the great competitive examinations to enter the French state service, to choose the Corps des Mines, or the Inspection of Finances. One became “philosopher” because one had been consecrated and one consecrated oneself in securing the prestigious identity of philosophy” (Bourdieu 1989: 17). As an aspiring philosopher, Bourdieu was thus pre-consecrated by the institution through the mere fact of the hierarchy of disciplines, which he analyzed so beautifully in his work on education. The level of his ambitions was modeled after the evaluations that he got during his career of “khâgneux”. He was part of those who could legitimately think that they would be elected by the educational system. Bourdieu never insisted on a very important point in the diverse accounts he gave of his scholarly trajectory: the high level of legitimate ambition-a notion that he himself constructed- inherent to philosophy, is on a par with a higher risk of failure, whatever the qualities consecrated by the system. Just when Bourdieu was hard working to get his agrégation in philosophy, Georges Canguilhem, whom he was to acknowledge later as one of his mentors, wrote a report on the situation of the discipline, stressing the peculiarities of the competitive examinations that allow to access it. In the text De la philosophie comme débouché, published in an official journal of the Ministry of National Education in 1954, he analyzed what he called a national phenomenon: there was a huge interest for a philosophical career, which led to a massive discrepancy between the institutional needs and the number of applicants to recruiting competitive examinations. Where did the attraction come from? First teaching philosophy meant teaching only in the last year of senior high schools. This year “put the final touch to the hierarchy of disciplines”, he wrote (Canguilhem 1954: 601–619). Second, the Bachelor of Philosophy is easier to get to an astute student:

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““For many students, philosophical culture has something of an artificial paradise, of a drunken meditation excited by a few readings. One makes philosophy while smoking cigarettes on a couch”. Third, although many examiners show many scruples when it comes to value some kind of orthodoxy, it is difficult to make the difference between a serious candidate and another less solid (Canguilhem 1954: 603). Canguilhem concluded his analysis by referring to the intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s, when “pathos mattered more than demonstration”. He based his comments on a precise account of the morphology of the philosophy teaching body: the Inspector General showed with precise figures that the very limited needs of the discipline, due to its peculiar status, were perfectly covered by the recruitment procedures. Thus, there were very few aspiring teachers to be selected. In 1950 as well as in 1935, one passed over thirteen applicants, women and men together. In 1935, nine were recruited over 119 having taken part in the competitive examination and 154 having registered. In 1950, 23 were admitted over 297 having taken part and 342 having registered. Canguilhem answered, in an administrative prose enriched by some sociological notes, an opinion campaign asking for more job opening due to the high quality of applicants. Acceding to philosophy remained particularly difficult, even for the students at the Ecole normale supérieure, who, as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron failed the first year when they applied. There is one contradictory element to the statutory arrogance born out of the pre-consecration often signaled by Bourdieu. He never evoked the high uncertainty of the philosophical game, properly speaking. One must associate the illusio that gives to challengers a high level of self-certainty (certitudo sui) with a form of calculation: what are my chances to access to philosophical fame, how am I going to survive in the inescapable time, of which will be the length of my stay in provincial high schools, somewhat undecidable? Those questions are uppermost in the mind of each aspiring philosopher; they already allow us to revise Bourdieu’s model, based on the pre-reflexive adhesion to the rules that prevail in a given field. Constructing a “space of possibilities”, a notion that he borrowed from phenomenological philosophy while translating it into sociological terms, is undoubtedly a necessity. One knows that Husserl wrote that imagination figures different possible states, albeit virtual. Possible states “are always in the horizon of any actual data”, Annabelle Dufourcq notes (Dufourcq 2010: 130). Thus, a possible state may be considered as more original than an actual one. Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 51) set himself in Husserl’s legacy when he evoked in turn the “field of possibilities” (champ des possibles).

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Bourdieu started from that phenomenological toolbox to elaborate his own notion of space of possibilities while he never gave a technical definition to it. The perception of a space of diverse possibilities depends firstly on the agent’s position in a given social space: what does she perceives? What are the limits of perception? Can she imagine, as in the case of the cube for Husserl, what are its hidden faces? For some aspiring philosophers, there is nothing such as an external space to their discipline. All possibilities are included in the disciplinary horizon. Another world than philosophy is properly speaking unthinkable. Accepting to fall in an outer world would be a waive. That radical perception of philosophical singularity may be modified along time, when exerting the job in a provincial high school leads to envisage a different trajectory, joining the Inspection of Finances or even Che Guevara in the Bolivian maquis. Across history, the evasion rate from philosophy to other disciplines has widely varied: one can just say that it is indexed on the relative value of the teaching condition in the social space at a given moment of history. The figure of a young philosopher distancing himself from her discipline to devote herself to the social sciences is far from being novel when Bourdieu constructs his first anthropological objects. The conversion of philosophers constitutes a genuine cultural feature in French intellectual history since Alfred Espinas, agrégé in philosophy and Durkheim’s predecessor at the University of Bordeaux, wrote a dissertation on animal societies in 1878. The process goes until the anthropologist Philippe Descola and the sociologist Pierre-­ Michel Menger, both professors at the Collège de France, but involves Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss too, the biggest names. One could add Marcel Mauss, François Simiand, Raymond Aron, Jean-Claude Passeron and Raymond Boudon. This means that the passage is not a transgression all the more than, since Durkheim, the move toward sociology, even for a founding father, has not excluded maintaining one’s membership to the philosophical community. In 1913, when he presented the Société Française de Philosophie with his new book on the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim was celebrated by most on his colleagues, with the notable exception of Jules Lachelier, who objected that he was not dealing with true religion, but only with the “god of crossways” (Fabiani 1993). In the same vein, Pierre Bourdieu never ceased to keep active connections with his fellow philosophers before his own theoretical contribution was considered as genuinely philosophical, as the special issue devoted to him by the journal Critique in 1995 (Critique 1995) or Claude Gautier’s book La force du social (Gautier 2012), which studies his conceptual construction as a form of philosophy, clearly show. In order to complete the sketch of the space of possibilities where Bourdieu would be moving in, one must question the exit cost from philosophy at different moments of history.

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When he reoriented himself, the price of transgression was rather limited, as it is evident from the number and quality of the men who crossed the border at the same time: this is the case of Jean-Claude Passeron, Robert Castel and Roger Establet, among others, who owed their access to university jobs to their change of disciplinary affiliation, just like Bourdieu. When he evoked the space of possibilities that was his own in the mid-­ fifties, Bourdieu mostly limited himself to philosophy. If one wants to get a more complex view of that type of space, one must include neighboring disciplines that, while not having its institutional prestige, nevertheless occupy an increasing part of the intellectual space and are more visible from a philosophical point of view. One of those observation sites is Sartre’s journal Les temps modernes. Braudel’s Mediterranean as well as Levi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship were reviewed in long and positive articles. Sartre signed the former and his partner Simone de Beauvoir the latter, a clear demonstration of the importance given to both books. The 1950s are characterized by a substantive progress of history viewed as a social science. The 6th section of the Ecole pratique des hautes études was created in 1947, and Fernand Braudel was elected at the Collège de France in 1949. During the 1950s decade, historians did not cease accumulating resources. Braudel had long negotiations with the Ford Foundation that led to the creation of the Maison des sciences de l’homme in 1959. In the early part of his career, Bourdieu will largely benefit from the impulsion given to original research in the social sciences permitted by that type of funding. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Braudel made explicit the ambitions of French history, called to conquer the whole world as well as the benefits of team working. Collective research was totally ignored by philosophy, based on solitary reflection generated by the close reading of texts. While Sartre’s magisterium started to silently decline before its collapse in the early 1960s due to the advent of structuralism, a new style of intellectual labor emerged, associating the quest for empirical evidence with conceptual ambition, strongly attracted young people who were not excited at all by the prospect of smoking cigarettes on a couch, according to Canguilhem’s own words. Bourdieu, as we know, was a non-smoker. The existentialist version of philosophy tended to downgrade any technical constraint on thinking while it promoted a social orientation. The paradox of the queen of disciplines was obvious: in spite of its high position in the hierarchy of disciplines, it did not set barriers to entry. “It requires neither the learning of a linguistic or philological technique as in languages or in classics nor a long archival work and the mastery of erudition as in history. For many students, philosophical culture has to do with an artificial paradise, a drunk meditation excited by some readings”,

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Canguilhem added (Canguilhem 1954: 603). Bourdieu moved from the start to another intellectual space. Besides Canguilhem, whom he perceived instantly as an “inspired prophet”, he acknowledged the authority of two philosophers who were apparently very far from the social sciences, Jules Vuillemin, and even more surprisingly if one considers his later interest for a social history of philosophy, Martial Gueroult. In 2001, he dedicated his last lectures at the Collège de France, Science of science and reflexivity, to the Jules Vuillemin’s memory; he had just died (Bourdieu 2004). He talked of him as a “greatest model” who permitted him, when he had serious doubts about his own calling, to pursue his endeavor associating scientific ambition and philosophical rigor. In the Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Bourdieu quoted Vuillemin’s Kantian Physics and Metaphysics as one of the two main references of his training years. Vuillemin inscribed himself in the posterity of Kantian critical tradition, the analysis of which he deeply renewed. He contributed decisively, at a time that was not particularly favorable in France, to the introduction of some elements of analytical philosophy, commenting for instance works by Russell, Carnap and Quine. Gueroult appeared in the Sketch as one of the authors, very rare, who permitted him to resist the strong grip, both scholarly and social, of existentialism as embodied by Sartre. He situated him in “a set of dominated currents”, characterized both by a more technical approach to philosophical questions and a permanent interest for scientific issues, as a reference and as an object of investigation. Bourdieu there evoked a “history of philosophy strongly linked to the history of sciences”, whose Gueroult’s book, Leibnizian Dynamics and Metaphysics (1935) appeared to him as a “prototype”. These counter-models will allow Bourdieu to strengthen his exit strategy from his first discipline by arguing that sociology is the continuation of philosophy by other means and that the science that he imagines radically differs from the routinized sociology practiced at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in the wake of American sociology. Another figure is kept at a distance, but it cannot be ignored. In 1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship revealed a new way of doing anthropology, partly grounded on the use of mathematical models. The book was an occasion to pay tribute to the great French tradition, to Marcel Mauss in particular while moving the discipline to a new scientific configuration. In 1955 Tristes tropiques confirmed Levi-Strauss’ s eminence in a more literary genre. He justified his exit from philosophy, his first commitment, by the fact that its teaching was repetitive gymnastics, at the very moment when Bourdieu started his career as a philosophy teacher at the Lycée of Moulins. While Durkheim had the occasion to develop criticisms about the main ways of teaching philosophy at the end of the Nineteenth ­Century,

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he never considered his founding gesture as an abandonment of philosophy. He could not certainly act differently, since sociology was not institutionalized and was still included in the philosophical frame. Levi-Strauss gave leave to the queen of disciplines almost on a light foot, opening a new space of possibilities. The following generation will see in Levi-Strauss both a model and a monument: its audacious critique allowed challengers to construct their own reputation. Thus Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida openly challenged structuralist anthropology in their early works. The author of Mythologiques imposed a new way of doing anthropology, using another method and another lexicon, which allowed him to dialog with the highest forms of intellectual production, like mathematics. While his endeavor was inscribed in a an partly configured space, as the strong reference to Marcel Mauss clearly shows-he edited his works and made them better known-­LeviStrauss developed his research in an autonomous way with respect to the ordinary functioning of academia. Laurent Jeanpierre remarkably analyzed the structural opposition between Georges Gurvitch, who reigned at the Sorbonne, offering sociological treatises both theoretical and dull, and Claude LéviStrauss, provided with structuralist prestige and crowned by his fieldwork in Amazonia (Jeanpierre 2004). Their opposition prolonged the rivalry born at the time of their common exile in New York City during the Second World War. That opposition configures the space of possibilities offered to the young Bourdieu. Lévi-Strauss is both a great scientist, a writer whose autobiographical account is an instant best-seller and an entrepreneur of knowledge who receives, thanks to Fernand Braudel’s support, in his Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France where he is elected in 1959, the only European copy of the Human Area Files, the most important ethnographic data in the world. Bourdieu will recombine all those elements: great (re) founder of science, writer (albeit in a subdued and ambiguous way), intellectual and editorial entrepreneur. In order to do so, it is necessary to create a lexicon allowing to re-qualify the fundamental notions of sociology. Bourdieu mainly borrowed from philosophical tradition. In the first chapter, the importance of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms for the development of the sociologist’s thought was acknowledged. Another reference imposes itself, linked to the former, since Erwin Panofsky developed a long dialogue with the author of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), whose interpretative model he applied to the notion of perspective. The sociologist’s commentary on the art historian’s work will firmly anchor the concept of habitus and reserve it to a particularly intensive form of inculcation: Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought, published in 1951 by Panofsky was translated into French in 1967 thanks to Bourdieu, who

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added to the book a substantive afterword that constitutes the first formal presentation of the concept of habitus. The word appeared in some previous texts, such as Le Déracinement, published with Abdelmalek Sayad in 1964, and even earlier, in association with the Aristotelian concept of hexis in the article titled “Celibacy and Peasant Condition” where the notion referred to its use made by Marcel Mauss in his article on bodily techniques. Bourdieu perceived in Panofsky’s text a unique occasion to make clearer what he would call in later texts the “generative formula of practice”, a productive scheme that can be found in seemingly quite different areas (Déotte 2010). Panofsky transformed what could be taken as a view of the mind into an analytical principle that allows the historian to transpose the same forms from theology to architecture: “Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism is undoubtedly one of these books that most effectively challenges positivism. To claim that the Summa and the cathedral can be compared, as intelligible bodies built according to identical rules including, among other traits, a strict separation between the parts, a strict and explicit clarity of formal hierarchies, and a harmonious reconciliation of contraries, is indeed to run the risk of accepting, at best, the respectful and cautious tribute that a “fascinating, yet purely theoretical, view rightly deserves” (Bourdieu 2005: 221). Panofsky sought to avoid the use of the notion of influence in art history. In order to do so, he had to expose the strength of a structural homology that would be active without any operation of translation or replication. Habitus understood as a habit-forming force, a force able to shape habits, was the conceptual translation of that capacity. The force of the scholastic habitus does not need any direct contact since it draws its power from the constant application of a single principle of inculcation. One can relate a cultural period to a generating principle. Bourdieu transposed Panofsky’ reasoning, largely immersed in the German philosophical history of cultural forms, toward the frame proposed by the French classic anthropology when he tried to think the social genesis of classificatory schemes. Thus he could write: One must first observe that the schemes that organize the toughts of cultured men in the societies endowed with a scholastic institution (for example, the organizing principles of speech that the treatises of rhetoric called figures of words and figures of thought) probably fullfil the same purpose as the unconscious schemes the ethnologist discovers, through the analysis of creations such as rites or myths, in the individuals living in societies devoid of such institutions, the same purpose as these “primitive forms of classification” to speak the language of Durkheim and Mauss, which could not be the object of conscious understanding and of

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an explicit and methodical transcription. However, in addition to this, by using the scholastic concept of habitus to designate the culture instilled by school, Panofsky shows that culture is not only a common code, or even a common repertoire of answers to common problems, or a set of particular and particularized forms of thought, but rather a whole body of fundamental schemes, assimilated beforehand, that generate, according to an art of invention similar to that of musical writing, an infinite number of particular schemes, directly applied to particular situations. This habitus could be defined, by analogy with Noam Chomsky’s ‘generative grammar’, as a system of internalized schemes that have the capacity to generate all the toughts, perceptions and actions characteristic of a culture, and nothing else (Bourdieu 2005: 233). The homology proposed by Bourdieu between cultural forms transmitted by the ways of a scholarly institution and primitive forms of classification is rather difficult to understand. The scholastic universe is wholly organized around inculcation, through a bodily discipline and the repetition of verbal exercises. Can one consider that a power of the same magnitude can be efficient in societies without writing where habits are passed on by other vectors, such as initiation rites? The generative scheme of symbolic forms would be universal  and the history of the forms and techniques of socialization, the spatial-­temporal variability of which is considerable, would not influence the formation of habits. Here Bourdieu was looking for a universal principle based on the following points of support. The first one postulates the homogeneous and constant strength of the inculcating power as it applies on individuals. No one can escape it: there is never any failure of socialization. The second is based on the unconscious: the process presupposes that agents do not perceive the inculcation process as such, even when they are plunged in a scholarly world. The third is the generative capacity of internalized schemes, as the rapprochement with Chomsky’s generative grammar shows. Habitus is not a repertoire and it cannot be reduced to a stock of references or to a cloakroom, as the analogy between habitus and “habit” (clothes in French) invites us. Habitus is a generative scheme that allow to produce, out of a single pattern, an indefinite number of outfits. As one can see it, this definition can be contested, at least in two ways. One can first question the regularity of inculcating power. It may vary due to changes in the historical conjuncture: history is full of scholarly institutions that vacillate during their socializing mission. Agents’ individual trajectories may lead them to different capacities to be impregnated by habits. Measuring the inculcating force becomes useless in the model, as it is constantly presupposed.

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S­ econd, asserting the unconscious character of the process forbids any form of reflexivity in it. The example borrowed from Panofsky is extreme. It is based on a scholarly institution provided with an exceptional inculcating power, grounded on a very cohesive bedrock, Thomism. Against his own will to historicize concepts, Bourdieu is rather looking here for the universal dimension of a generative scheme. The mode of learning in the medieval scholarly institution is based on exclusivity. There is no external competition to the produced socialization, as it is frequently the case in contemporary schooling. Exerting discipline has no intermittence. Although the sociologist claims its plasticity as it can engender an infinity of practices, the habitus defined as habit-forming force is rigid. It constitutes a spectacular and probative example of structural homology, but its range of application is necessarily limited. It cannot be exported under any circumstance. However, the extreme form of inculcating power constitutes the bedrock of the formal presentation of the concept as it appears in The Logic of Practice: again, one can find here the opposition between deterministic and interactionist models, or the confrontation between the primacy of socialization and the primacy of calculating strategy. The logic of practice elaborated by Bourdieu remains today the most powerful synthesis of a theory of action grounded on the early internalization of a dispositional system: its efficacy is sustainable to account for all ranges of social practice. One must come back to the founding theoretical formulation of the dispositional conceptualization: The conditionings associated with particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor (Bourdieu 1990a: 53). What can be concluded from this hyper-theoretical presentation that does not make room for any space of empirical verification? The habitus is simultaneously produced and producer. It is produced by historical conditions of existence (everything leads to think that they are collective conditions) and is in turn, by transposition, producer of history. The habitus is a system, which

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means that it expresses the cohesiveness of a set of dispositions that all refer to their original site. The historicity of the conditions of existence is internalized once for all, which presupposes two things: the absolute power of conditioning and the coherence of all its contents. As a matter of fact, the habitus offers two characteristics. The first is sustainability: once they have been acquired, dispositions present a permanent character. There is a sort of lock of early learnings: in other terms, the dispositional system is sealed. The second is transposability. The system, due to the powerful and univocal dimension of first conditioning, is valid for all ranges of social practice. It will be retrieved, simply transposed, in very different social fields. One will encounter it in the scholarly investment as well as in the relationship to nature. A very important feature of the habitus theory is the constant affirmation of the pre-reflexive, even pre-conscious, character of action. Presupposing the intentionality of action is not necessary to account for the adjustment to goals. That adjustment is explained by the fact that any stimulus can play its triggering function if only it encounters an agent “pre-disposed to recognized it”. The theory of the orchestration without conductor supposes the homology between objective structures and subjective dispositions. It finds a way of corroboration in the very strong correlation between objective probabilities (for instance, the chances to access any type of good) and the subjective hopes (motivations, needs). The homology leads us to a logic of pre-adaptation: “In reality, the dispositions durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions, inscribed in the objective conditions (which science apprehends through statistical regularities such as the probabilities objectively attached to group or class) generate dispositions objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense preadapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable” (Bourdieu 1990a: 54). There is not any clearer and more constraining definition of amor fati, the acceptation of a fate inscribed in objective structures and embodied as such by a system of subjective dispositions. History is however rich with gaps between subjective hopes and objective probabilities. One can even say that the de-­ adjustment is one of its more powerful engines. Bourdieu was conscious of the fact and tried to conceptualize it in the form of hysteresis, a notion borrowed from physics to describe the persistence of a phenomenon when the cause that produced it is extinct. One must add that the observation of habitus is grounded in statistics: dispositions are made manifest by the regularities found

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in collective entities, while the effective process of internalization remains always out of the analysis. Habitus theory is thus opposed in all terms to rational action theory, which appears, albeit at various intensities, in rational choice theory and methodological individualism. To sum up roughly the differences between both constructions, one can say that action can be conceived either as the primacy of present, rationality being put at work in interaction as it appears here and now, or as the primacy of past, dispositions acquired during the primitive relation to the social world being translated into positions or statements without any need to presuppose a reflective consciousness. A set of oppositions arise between almost automatic action and conscious intentionality, between pre-­ reflexive adjustment and strategy or calculation. The scholarly success of this couple is due to its simplicity and its appearing efficiency. The exchanged counterarguments are well stabilized too: when one criticizes the model of rational actor, one classically associates the privileged recourse to the fictitious abstraction of a rational subject detached from any social determination. On the contrary, the model of the socialized agent is viewed as excessively sociological, which is considered as making individuals simple puppets moved by structures and institutions. No one raises really the question of the empirical validity of both models. The first is very often justified in terms of introspection and thus allows itself a great freedom to maneuver. The second asserts the indefinite transposability of internalized schemes without any obligation to look for evidence. Only one of the two definitions of social action is truly “sociological”, the latter, while the former may avoid any sociological postulate. The primacy of early socialization, simply radicalized in the habitus theory, cannot be severed from the development of sociology as a discipline, as its equal importance for Durkheim and Parsons clearly shows. Bourdieu sets himself, without saying it explicitly, in this tradition, which gives also the promise of a general theory specific to the discipline. Reducing habitus to the internalization of norms would be unfair, as his author carefully avoided the language of normativity. He tried also to solve the antinomy between the agents’ individual relation to the world and the weight of objective structures. The internalization of dispositions constitutes the proper site of sociology in the realm of the social sciences, through the securitization of a territory that will not be disputed by other disciplines. On the contrary, the atomistic theory of rational actor often takes the shape of an anti-sociology, as it is shown in the frequent desire of its promoters to take lessons from economics and to condemn the ideological drifts inherent to discourse grounded on the assumption of a collective consciousness-or to put it more simply, of an entity that would be more than the

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mere addition of individual consciousness. The most important thing does not lie in those quarrels fueling the everyday of academic routine. The theory of atomism as well as the internalization of dispositions concentrated in a single configuration share a common point: their conceptualizations are not vulnerable to empirical testing. Habitus, as all other theories of socialization, remains a black box to a large extent. Opening it would necessitate to make use of nonsociological knowledge, such as cognitive sciences, and would amount to question the very territory of the discipline. However, habitus theory allows us to get out of what Dennis Wrong, in a famous article that was the first to toll the bell for structuro-functionalism, called the over-socialized conception of man in modern sociology (Wrong 1961). The author started with reminding us that the central question of the discipline remained identical over time: how can the individual obedience to a collective order be possible? Durkheim’s answer proclaimed the exteriority of the constraint exerted on agents whose spontaneous attitude is thought as the nonlimitation of desire. It is only because society exists objectively, out of individuals, sui generis, that the strength of the social, as Claude Gautier puts it, can be exerted. Individuals collide constantly with objective reality and end up limiting their desire by feeling the power of constraint. Sanction acts as the principle of reality in Durkheim’s construction: this is why the strength of the law is central in his work, as shown by the tendency to equate “moral facts and juridical facts”: “Moral facts and juridical facts-we would say more briefly moral facts tout court”. In his theory of homo duplex, inherited from the philosophical tradition and more directly from Rousseau, Durkheim asserts the coexistence of two forms of individuality (Durkheim 1958). The first is native, natural and pre-social: it does not disappear entirely under the effects of collective constraint, while the second, which involves the self-limitation of desire as the individual expression of the strength of the social, may be weakened in cases that can only be defined as a pathological state or anomy, characterized by the weakening of the strength of the social. All theories of socialization share the same difficulty, since they need to think together the exteriority of constraint and the internal disposition that leads to action. According to Talcott Parsons, Durkheim was not insensitive to the problem, and changed his mind about it across time. In a chapter of his theoretical treatise The Structure of Social Action, the American sociologist claimed that the Suicide’s author realized that the social was not reducible to the obstacles met on the road by individuals (Parsons 1949: 378–390). Inspired by the reading of Freud’s work in his chapter “The Changing Nature of Constraint”, Parsons proposed to broaden the notion of socialization by associating the regulatory dimension as it appears in a system of sanctions with

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a ­psychological side grounded on the import of the concept of superego in the sociological lexicon. The internalization depended then on a self-imposition of norms. Wrong noted that the sociological superego ended up as the outcome of early learning or by habit formation in the ordinary meaning of the term. Consequently, the violent dimension of the process as analyzed by Freud totally disappeared and the reference to psychoanalysis became counter-­productive. In fact, according to the Viennese, the more the superego is present within the individual, the more she suffers from guilt and anxiety. The contrary occurs in the functionalist theory of socialization. The individual would feel guilty if she did not conform to the internalized norm, and the process leads to a sort of joy of conformity. Parsons imported the superego while forgetting there was also the id, the level of instinctual life and drives. Undoubtedly, Durkheim, who had not read Freud, envisaged more clearly the question of constraint than Parsons, in spite of his modernized, albeit sweetened, vocabulary. The dominating sociology in the Post War West was totally pacified due to the acceptance of social norms. Walt Disney’s screenplays were much blacker than sociological treatises, totally severed from the sound and fury of the world. Sketching analogies between Parsons and Bourdieu would be hazardous. The French sociologist never ceased to attack functionalism, and his project acknowledges the central dimension of symbolic violence in the production of the social world as well as the constant presence of suffering as a modality of existence. Having the project of creating an integrated system is not sufficient to assert a form of kinship between both authors. However, one could say that something in the notion of amor fati and in the pre-reflexive adjustment of agents to their objective conditions is close to the functionalist socialization denounced by Dennis Wrong in his conclusion when he notes that it gives too much to stability and social integration, and to build a disembodied humanity. The question must remain opened, but it concerns all sociologists: are not we inclined, although we have broken up with the consensual vision of our discipline, to overestimate the socializing power of inculcating frameworks? Durkheim is often blamed for having given a crushing power to society over individuals, while the close reading of his work leads to a much more complex assessment. His successors, whatever their vision of the social world, often have an uncritical approach to the notion of socialization. It is both their point of honor and their totem. Habitus constitutes its most elaborated form, but it is not immune from the difficulties inherent to the notion. For instance, is it possible to account for a terrorist’s behavior in terms of habitus? Can the extermination of the European Jews be explained in terms of long-standing dispositions? One could object that we have forgotten to assess the conditions of

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v­ alidity of the strength of the social and that it does not apply in an unchanging way along history. Few sociologists have been bold enough to apply a dispositional explanatory grid to this type of events while mass violence has never ceased to exert its effects since the advent of modernity, as if the social world was entirely composed of normal forms of adhesion to an imposed order. When he published, with Jean-Claude Passeron, his works on the educational system, Bourdieu was regularly accused of fatalism: the reference to Nietzsche’s amor fati, which he never abandoned along his career, seemed to make extremely difficult to think of a possible social change born from collective action. This was a bone of contention between the sociologist and his activist readers in the 1970s. Hervé Touboul, a French philosopher, investigated the possible philosophical sources of the habitus theory (Touboul 1992). The origin of amor fati should not be looked for in Nietzsche’s Ja-sagen. He proposed a very convincing answer, since we know that Bourdieu was, partly thanks to Martial Gueroult, an ardent reader of Leibniz. Touboul is not at pains to show the frequent references to the German philosopher in Bourdieu’s theoretical statements. The sociologist, as well as the philosopher, must give a reasonable account of the world, even if the former is not as enthusiastic about the nature of the world as the latter. Bourdieu attempts to solve the question of the social order, but he does not do it in Hobbesian terms, as many sociologists do, but in Leibnizian terms. He is particularly clear about that in his San Diego Lecture, the starting point of his American career: It is true that the correspondence established, via habitus, disposition and taste, between positions and practices, preferences demonstrated, opinions, expressed, etc., means that the social world is not presented as a pure chaos, totally devoid of necessity and capable of being constructed in any odd way (Bourdieu 1990b: 132). On the contrary, the social world appears as strongly structured and reflecting an order that is the outcome of its different elements through the interplay of habitus. Habitus is a principle of order and a tool for adjustment. When he tries to think the order of the world, Bourdieu resorts to a network of metaphors that he borrows partly from Leibniz. The best known is the clock, which he uses both in the Outline and in the Logic of Practice: “Imagine, Leibniz suggests, two clocks or watches in perfect agreement as to the time. This may occur in one of three ways. The first consists in mutual influence; the second is to appoint a skillful workman to correct them and synchronize constantly; the

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third is to construct these two clocks with such art and precision that one can be assured of their subsequent agreement” (Bourdieu 1990a: 59). One should add to the metaphor of the clock the orchestration without a conductor, which says the same out of another imagery. The self-organization made possible by the habitus adjustment makes the very idea of an organizer superfluous. The social order is thus auto-produced by the correspondence between different habitus. The rapprochement made by Touboul between the habitus and the monad is fruitful. It allows us to think the social world as a world where communication is not needed for the accord between units. Monads are without door nor window, which does not prevent them from expressing each other. The union of habitus is never the effect of perfect identity between individuals but it is grounded on a homology between the individual systems of dispositions, “each individual system of dispositions is a structural variant of the others, expressing the singularity of its position within the class and its trajectory” (Bourdieu 1990a: 60). The presentation of habitus in The Logic of Practice is undoubtedly the most complete and the most theoretical: it gives a privilege to a vision of an ordered and structured world, in which the popular red wine and pastis can be the object of a structural opposition with the bourgeois Scotch whisky. Here Bourdieu’s determinism matches with the principle of sufficient reason stated by Leibniz to account for the unity of the world. There is something rather than nothing, and that something is not here by chance. “Like every science, Bourdieu says in an interview, sociology accepts the principle of determinism understood as a form of the principle of sufficient reason. The science which must give the reasons for that which is postulates that nothing is without a reason for being. The sociologist adds: “social reason”-nothing is without a specifically social reason for being” (Bourdieu 1993: 24–25). However one cannot conclude that Distinction would be a social theodicy where each element of the universe of taste, pastis and Scotch, meat and fish, asparagus and leek, would stand at its place in a pre-established and immutable harmony. Bourdieu knows well that, among his colleagues, some drink simultaneously pastis and whisky. While reading the theoretical exposé often gives the impression that he has the project of a “sociodicy” and that he expresses a preference for a world neatly ordered by structures, he offers the smart reader the means of breaking from the image of an automated society where individuals play moves without even realizing it. A first remark bears on the persistence of the term of strategy in the whole oeuvre. One will not offend Bourdieu by saying that he does not know that “unconscious strategy” is an oxymoron. The recurrence of the notion can be

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read as a way of avoiding the fact that the rigor of the structuralism he wants to construct turns individuals into automata. The Leibnizian metaphor can be misleading: individuals can look like clocks, but they are not clocking. Let us remind that if strategy is mainly referred to the deployment of the logic of practice, and thus independently from calculation, it is not necessarily unconscious. Distinction is clear about this point: “Reproduction strategies, the set of outwardly very different practices whereby or families ten, unconsciously or consciously, to maintain or increase their assets and consequently to maintain or improve their position in the class structure, constitute a system which, being the product of a single unifying, generative principle, tend to function and change in a systematic way” (Bourdieu 1984: 125). If all kinds of strategy continue to be referred to the unity of an organizing principle, habitus, they are nevertheless characterized by their heterogeneity and multiplicity, notwithstanding varying degrees of consciousness. Reproduction strategies may integrate some degree of intentionality, albeit the chosen vocabulary, such as “tend to”-too often privileged by Bourdieu to avoid too bland assertions- are not equivalent of “seek to”, which would be awaited in a strategic language. The sociologist is cautious while using the term of strategy, as the historian Alain Dewerpe reminded us in a seminal article (Dewerpe 1996). Why, if the use of the notion “encourages a fundamental paralogism, which consists in giving the model that accounts for reality as constituting the described reality, forgetting the “all occurs as if”, which defines the proper status of scientific discourse”, Bourdieu wanted to maintain the use of the notion? According to Dewerpe, “strategy is a hollow concept, a notion in suspense, as on the razor edge”. Strategy is the object of a neither-nor strategy: neither rational calculation nor elimination of the individual and its reduction, as among his Althusserian rivals, as a mere “support of structures”. Talking about strategy avoids reducing the individual to a status of a “hanger”. Speaking in this way is dangerous, though, since one could silently bring back forms of intentionality, or even calculation. In social life, the most successful strategies are those that do not appear as strategies. The quest for distinction is all the more efficient than it does not look as an effort and it expresses through the spontaneity of preferences. On the contrary, the petit-bourgeois, who vaguely perceives what could be a strategy of distinction, attempts by conscious and visible efforts to look like a bourgeois and misses her target, as she is condemned to an existence in “Fac-simile”, as the cruel language of the sociologist puts it. Whatever the petit bourgeois does, she does it wrongly, in a crooked way; she does not stop elaborating losing plans. The bourgeois, in turn, does not make calculation: he multiplies winning moves. He is a strategist who does not need to make effort to success. At this point, the non-conscience of the winner is

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­ appy, and the conscience of the loser is unhappy. Rereading the sociology of h taste allows us to draw a dividing line. This is not always the case. Bourdieu usually refuses to make a clear distinction between conscious and unconscious in order to use the habitus as a selector switch from the passive past to the active present of the game. In doing so, he leaves the reader in uncertainty, and even more the sociologist who would like to use his conceptual system. The second element that should be taken into account in making the habitus more complex is the differential quality of individual game. One knows that any individual is always qualified by her investment in the game. If game is everywhere in the social world, it means that it is no longer a game in the playful meaning of the word, since real play presupposes anticipation, simulation and cunning too as well as it draws on automatisms conferred by the sense of placing oneself in a game field. Bourdieu was familiar enough with sports to know that the quality of play is not entirely indexed on the player’s habitus or the structure of her capital: if it were the case, there would be no game and the referee could give the results before the kick-off. Conscious of that fact, Bourdieu accepts the idea of the unevenness of the quality of play in spite of high qualification, which is obvious for the rugby fan he was, but it is much more difficult to conceive it by the sociologist. This excerpt from In Other Words shows an openness that will not be always perceptible in the author’s great monographs: “The good player, who is so to speak the game incarnated, does at every moment what the game requires. That presupposes a permanent capacity for invention, indispensable if one is to be able to adapt to indefinitely varied and never completely identical situations. This is not ensured by mechanical obedience to the explicit, codified rules (when it exists). For example, I described the double game strategies which consist of playing in conformity with the rules, making sure right is on your side, acting in accordance with your interest while all the time seeming to obey the rules. One’s feel for the game is not infallible; it is shared out unequally between players, in a society as in a team” (Bourdieu 1990b: 63). Here, the important notion is the “permanent capacity for invention” that gives back its true meaning to the game, grounded on the uncertainty of the result, as long as are presupposed the relative equilibrium of players as well as the indefinite diversity of the circumstances of the game. The fallibility of the player is the very condition of the game: Bourdieu, in a flash of lightning, realizes it, but neglects to draw sustainable consequences for his conceptual system. In The Logic of Practice, a third particular clause modifies the undifferentiated force of habitus. Evoking a rather uncommon topic in his work, collective action, the sociologist is led to mention a “dialectics of dispositions and

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o­ ccasions that takes place in every agent” (Bourdieu 1990a: 59). Having dispositions is not a sufficient condition to actualize them. The dynamics of occasion comes to de-automatize habitus. One can miss an occasion, more often than one can grasp it. The interplay of habitus and conjuncture is most of the time thought in terms of hysteresis, a notion that we will analyze in detail later. Anchoring habitus in the past, of which it presents a frozen form, gives the principle of the lag, or to speak in terms of mechanics, of the ignition delay that the inability to understand the present to grasp what it contains. This lag is less the sign of the weakening of habitus than the expression of its overwhelming force: because it is entirely conditioned by past experience, it is doomed to think the present and the future in the categories of the past. In the theoretical construction, there is no other example of the distance between dispositions and occasions that would allow strategies that grasp occasions and break up with the past. Bourdieu voluntarily ignores what the sociologists of collective action call opportunity structures, which allow those who have perceived them to accentuate social change in their favor. In this respect, habitus theory is better adapted to account for social reproduction than for innovation and disruption. The fourth and last modification to the habitus theory is undoubtedly the most important. In a system that gives a privilege to the deepening, or even the repetition of a small number of interwoven notions, introducing a new concept is a true rarity. The cleft habitus is one of them. It gives an idea of the difficulty to account for non-rectilinear trajectories in which the effects of primary socialization are in competition with the later crossing of distant social worlds. In his later texts, notably in the Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu put himself at some distance from the most rigid forms of his system. The pre-established harmony between habitus and field, which remains a key to the articulation of the elements of the system, was questioned. Habitus, he wrote, is not an “infallible instinct”. The predetermined adjustment between acquired dispositions and objective conditions is only a particular case of their relation. Being statistically the most frequent does not make it universal as such. Habitus is neither necessarily adapted to the situation nor necessarily coherent. Here, we are very far from the systematic presentation in The Logic of Practice and one can sense all what the author could draw from this inflexion in order to rebuild the system. To account for its evolution, he uses a notion that is not the object of a footnote but that all his early readers have recognized at first sight: status crystallization. It was elaborated in 1954 by Gerhard Lenski to analyze the limitations of the Weberian theory of status (Lenski 1954). Status as such is not sufficient to account for the effective position of an individual in the social

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world. It must be decomposed in different attributes: their heterogeneity, or even more their non-congruence generates status ambiguities that may cause tensions. While the reference to a notion that will be very successful in American functionalist sociology has something ironical, one must acknowledge that the definition of habitus is considerably renewed by the plasticity added to it. In other words, habitus is no longer made of one element; it may be composite. If pieces spontaneously adjust, the individual will adjust her disposition to the practical logic of the field. On the contrary, if contradictions arise between various elements, following the heterogeneity of a trajectory, a situation of double bind will develop and generate suffering. As often, Bourdieu tends to consider only the negative elements of the cleft habitus: social suffering and difficulty to find one’s position in social space are its inevitable consequences. He does not mention individuals whose exceptional trajectory in the positional space does not seem to lead them to uneasiness, but to self-expansion. This is the case of Martin Heidegger, to whom Bourdieu devoted a superb analysis, without commenting the fact that the German philosopher had made of his peasant hexis a philosophical asset of the first magnitude. In a few extraordinary pages of Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu seems to bring back in all that he had excluded in the dogmatic presentation of The Logic of Practice: the discordances of learnings, the dissonance of preferences and the erratic character of adjustments. Social agents appear under a new light: cleft to the point of being torn, but also able of a reflection that The Logic of Practice seemed to exclude by principle. Thus, musical improvisation contains reflective moments. The critical moments of the habitus and its failures are also the occasion of a practical reflexivity, which goes on to be felt through the commitment of the body. There is no reason to hide the fact that this version of habitus is much more satisfactory than the previous ones. While it goes on to be grounded on the primacy of the past, it opens to the permanent re-workings generated by social interaction. The tennis player must fail with his service and reflects on her inadequate move through a bodily gesture. Habitus constantly changes with respect to the circumstances. It is no longer a congealed pack of the past that is an obstacle to the present. It is now opened to interactional dynamics. That revision leads Bourdieu to come back to his original reference, Leibniz, but in a way somewhat different from pre-established harmony. “We are empirical in the three-quarters of our action”, Leibniz said. Those three-quarters are precisely characterized by the automatic adjustment that the original version of habitus could account for very simply. But what can one say about the last quarter of our actions? Those are reflective actions, which presuppose the

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a­ bility to correct oneself, to re-adjust one’s move, not from an acquired automatism but by the aptitude to come back on oneself in a reflected gesture and build anticipations with respect to the future. At the end of his life, in what appears retrospectively as his theoretical will, Bourdieu opens afresh the space of possibilities. We are now quite far from the Abbott Suger of Saint-Denis and from Panofsky’s “habit-forming force”, which appears at the end as a particular case of inculcation. Bourdieu does not need any longer to use a supernatural metaphor to account for the adjustment between habitus and field. Opening the chapter on “Belief and the body” in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu saw in the sport definition of the “feel for the game a fairly accurate idea of the almost miraculous encounter between the habitus and a field, between incorporated history and objectified history” (Bourdieu 1990a: 66). At the end of his life he did no longer believe in miracles or in the mirage of the perfect adjustment between habitus and field. His theory gains some plasticity, but the explanatory force of a unified habitus vacillates. However, can one speak of the explanatory force of habitus? In a seminal article, which Bourdieu did not like at all since it seemed an aggression against the originality of his theoretical construction, François Héran produced an analysis of the genealogy of habitus that has no equivalent (Héran 1987). Drawing on Eugen Fink’s distinction between thematic concepts and operative concepts, Héran strives to precise the status of habitus in Bourdieu’s sense, at least in the initial version of his theory. The first concepts constitute the themes of the theory. The second concepts, which are not properly speaking the object of definitions, operate within the theory and play a decisive role in the articulation of the system. Habitus enters in that category, but also interest and strategy that are attached to it, as we have seen it. Héran draws on a carefully researched inquiry to show that “the recurrent structure of the uses of the concept is grounded on what can be called a scheme of mediation and communication”. Habitus is included in the legacy of those intermediary concepts that many thinkers have tried to impose between the subjectivity and objectivity, between the individual and the institutional: for instance, “alienation”, “attitude” and “ethos”. The habitus is an operator of the turning of the deposit of past experiences into dispositions for the present. One passes from passive to active: in inculcation, one is passive; in social life, one is active. Habitus is a product turned into a producer due to the effect of commutation. Bourdieu made many canonic presentations of the commutative force of habitus between 1972 and 1980. Héran was the first to assert that the repetition of the canonic formula of habitus does not say anything about the ways by which it switches passive into active. Héran was a pioneer, since all Bourdieu’s readers were charmed by a rhetoric both strange since it applied for the first time to

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the social world and familiar since it remained entirely dependent on the traditional forms of academic philosophy. In order to account for the habitus, one should be able to describe the processes by which the deposits of experience are activated. One can suppose that all deposits are not permanently mobilized and that a principle of selectivity is at work. If Bourdieu had been given more time, he might have started from the reshuffled version of habitus as it can be read in the Pascalian Meditations to analyze the failures of habitus as well as the break-downs of commutation: its mechanisms could thus appear. In its consecrated definition, habitus is a pure black box. Following Héran, its explanatory power is non- existent. Durkheim’s rustic construction about the exteriority of the social perceived as a system of sanctions may have more to say on the articulation between individuals and society, a central issue in sociology. Héran’s work, while being well informed with respect to the history of philosophy, can be read as a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, in two ways: first, what is at stake is to know to what extent Bourdieu’s definition depends on the history of the word and its uses in philosophy and elsewhere (particularly in medicine) and is related to phenomenology. Second, the issue is to assess the inter-relation between the scholarly meaning of words and its commonsense meaning, and to see how the reception of sociology, always in a fragile balance between esoterism and exoterism, is formatted by this ambivalence. In this respect, a retrospective analysis is an entry point to sketch an analysis of Bourdieu’s habitus, complex combination of a form of commutation and of a properly strategic disposition. The thick deposit left in Bourdieu’s mind by the intensity of the inculcation process that he was submitted to in the khâgnes, preparatory classes in the mid-Twentieth century was commutated into classical forms firmly grounded on the force of an incorporated tradition, where one can retrieve usual schemes, such as the care for solving antinomies or to get rid of false oppositions that tradition itself generates, or such as the ambition to build a general theory susceptible to supersede forever the limitations of previous systems. With respect to the strategic disposition, which makes great players, it is obvious in the capacity to integrate a part of the objections raised against Bourdieu’s theory, in a mostly rhetoric way, like in the San Diego lecture, or, more substantively, in Pascalian Meditations. If the habitus can be considered as a set of resources more or less adapted to the management of social occasions, we must now question the third pillar of the system: capital under its different species.

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Capital and Its Species A popularization magazine presents the uses of the concept of capital developed by Bourdieu’s inheritors in this way: More recently, new types of capital have flourished. Bourdieu did not foresee them. Thus were proposed: “the militant capital” (…), “the popular social capital” (resources held by popular classes based on the fact to be located somewhere and to belong to a society of mutual recognition) or even the “warrior capital” (in poor areas, resources that can be mobilized in violent situations: physical strength, intimidation ability, social capital…) (Molenat 2015). If one reads the works that refer to those types of capital, one sees immediately that the term could be replaced appositely by resources, properties, competencies acquired in an institutional environment or on the job, inherited goods. It seems that every type of competence could be qualified in the same way: a good cook could be defined by a high level of “culinary capital”, which she could convert into economic capital by opening a restaurant or into symbolic capital, by hosting a television show. The dissemination of capital into different species can be indefinite, since, after all, warrior capital may differ from a military officer to a young immigrant. Bourdieu holds no responsibility in that inflationist fever, and his legacy cannot be read as a true orthodoxy, contrary to what his detractors claim. His inheritors valorize more a lexicon than a method on the market of ideas, something like a bourdieuan capital, if one may say. Contrary to the master’s recommendations, the uses of field, habitus and capital are regularly disconnected from each other and do not present any systemic dimension. Those forms of capital are not susceptible of being measured, as economic capital can be. Consequently, the warrior capital of poor areas can’t be indexed on the number of Kalachnikov guns owned by the young people, not only since the figures are hard to obtain. This is a composite indicator, but never constructed as such, holding different forms of resources (relational network, physical strength, occupation of public space). The capital understood in that way remains a vague notion, largely depending on the local context of the inquiry. In order to see more clearly, one has to go back to the different justifications of the uses of the notion through the development of the oeuvre. The idea that

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capital can be divided into different species is a central element in Bourdieu’s theory. He is not the first to make an analogical use of the term. The notion of human capital is anterior to his endeavor. It appears in 1961 in Theodor Schultz writings and is developed by Gary Becker in 1964. Social capital is the object of a simultaneous analysis by Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, though under radically different theoretical perspectives (Coleman 1988). In his first works on Algeria, which constitute preparatory exercises, the sociologist encounters the economy mainly through the extraordinary degree of uneven development and the obvious absence of economic capital in Algerian society. It is highly significant that Marx is not present in the Index nominum of the precious Algerian Sketches (Bourdieu 2013), while Durkheim and Weber are often quoted. When he wants to talk about economics, Bourdieu refers more to François Perroux. It would be risky to jump directly to conclusion: the absence of Marx is undoubtedly less linked to the author’s ignorance than to the nature of the texts produced in a war context and written for mainly administrative readers. However, those sketches allow to draw the contour lines of the young philosopher’s mental equipment trying to grasp an unexpected object of study, the Algerian society: one can have an idea of his culture at that time, as he was a young elite student not much affected by the doctrine of historical materialism. If one can find a few references to Marx in Outline of a Theory of Practice, they do not intervene in the theoretical construction that is already presented as a general economy of practice, although he may evoke sometimes the notion of mode of production. Contrary to what conservative critique claims, Bourdieu was never a Marxist and never hid the fact. In the first part of his oeuvre, Durkheim and Weber constitute much more active references in the development of his conceptual system. The analysis of the concept of capital nevertheless allows us to get a more precise view of his relationship to Marx and to raise the question of knowing whether there is an evolution along time as the political preoccupation becomes more central and seems to be overwhelming in the last ten years of his life. Moreover, the construction of a non-economic capital, which is quite often defined as symbolic capital, must be the object of a fresh analysis. The symbolic, which can be defined simply as what is neither material nor physical, cannot be taken for granted. Before coming to grips with both themes, one must clarify the notion of capital, its division into different species and the faculty of conversion from one species into another. The task is not easy, since Bourdieu devoted much less pages to capital than to field and habitus, although he never ceased to say that the analytical model was valid only if the three concepts were closely associated. One must go back to the texts where the coexistence of forms of

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capital appears as such. This is particularly the case of the pages devoted to the Kabyle marriage. The logic and efficacy of marriage depends on: firstly on the material and symbolic capital possessed by the families concerned, their wealth in instruments of production and in men, considered both as productive and reproductive power, and also, in a previous state of play, as fighting strength and hence symbolic strength; and secondly on the competence that enables the strategists to make the best uses of this capital, practical mastery of the (in the widest sense) economic axiomatics being the precondition for production of the practices regarded as “reasonable” within the group and positively sanctioned by the laws of the market in material and symbolic goods (Bourdieu 1977: 58). In those sentences, capital is still named in the singular and seems to exert its action in a unitary way, associating economic elements, viewed as instruments of production, and symbolic properties, view as “men”, as they embody a political force that is active not only in the realm of production, but in the whole Kabyle society. The model of action remains indexed on economic life. Bourdieu thus speaks of an economic axiomatics that aims to maximize profit. The symbolic force seems to manifest its effects, which can be supposed first as re-enforcing, in an economic sphere understood in the broadest sense. The theme of profit maximization does not leave any doubt about the nature of matrimonial strategies. At this point a complementarity exists between economic and symbolic capital, and it is not sure that they can be practically distinguished. The operated cleavage is for the time being a methodological artifact. The actual inquiry made by the family before contracting alliance through the mediation made by mandated warrants essentially lies on the symbolic dimension of capital: Bourdieu thus mentions the symbolic patrimony, the honor capital and the men of honor, the quality of the alliance network and the position of the family within the group. He frequently uses the notions of capital and patrimony, either symbolic or material, in the singular, as if they were the two faces of a single reality, existing in a society only oriented toward its biological reproduction. The absence of clear-cut economic differentiations gives a lot of room for the symbolic dimension of social relations, since the means of production, often owned on a non-individual basis, do not generate strong inequalities and the ups and downs of harvest forbid the constitution of surplus. One could say that in the Kabyle society material and symbolic forms remain undivided. The adjective symbolic is opposed to two terms that are somewhat different:

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­ aterial and economic. It includes all social realities that are not material or m whose meaning is not exhausted by their materiality, as this is the case with cultural goods, which Bourdieu names “symbolic goods”: they can be grasped by an economic analysis that can account for their non strictly economic dimension, by integrating other dimensions such as deferred profit, prestige or disinterestedness, notions that clash with a simple logic of maximization. Opposed to economic, symbolic designates all that in a given society does not come solely from the sphere of production, like power and authority. The concluding pages of the Outline of a Theory of Practice sound as a program, which Bourdieu will not follow thoroughly. Although he keeps using the pair of adjectives (e.g. “important investments, material as well as symbolic”), he notes that the accumulation of symbolic capital can only exist to the detriment of its economic counterpart, since it supposes an investment in time that reduces the possibilities of material production. Here, the two species of capital are clearly dissociated in the analysis, while their separation is not as clear in social life. Agents do not identify symbolic patrimony as such: “It is thus by drawing up a comprehensive balance-sheet of symbolic profits, without forgetting the undifferentiation of the material and symbolic aspects of the patrimony, that it becomes possible to grasp the economic rationality of conduct which economism dismisses as absurd” (Bourdieu 1977: 181). The primacy of symbolic over strictly defined economic capital that characterizes archaic economies supposes that anthropology is able to produce a differentiation among components that constitute a totality for social agents, while treating the symbolic dimension with the tools of economics in the narrow meaning of the term, at least at an analogical level. Thus, one is led to envisage symbolic profit in the same terms as economic gain. The analogical use of economic vocabulary is paradoxically allowed by the fact that the economy, understood as a productive system, plays a very limited role in social life. Is it then possible to speak of a symbolic accounting or should we limit ourselves to the metaphoric register? It is difficult to imagine what would be the accounting books produced during fieldwork. In his first great theoretical work, Bourdieu constructs a powerful tool that will be exported toward the analysis of modern societies, without asking the question of knowing whether the presence of the symbolic is the same in societies where economic capital plays a central role in production and reproduction. In the same time, the economization of the symbolic is the technical means by which the anthropologist can get rid of the narrow materialism of the economist who considers the quest for a symbolic retribution de-indexed from the production of material goods as irrational. The conclusion of the Outline brings in the notion of species of capital and defines a long-term program that

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will not only concern Kabyle society it. The sentence is long and quite complex since the species (kind) is presented under two forms, but is worth close reading: “The capital accumulated by groups, the energy of social dynamics-­in this case their capital of physical strength(…), their economic capital (land and livestock) and their symbolic capital, always additionally associated with the possession of the other kinds of capital but susceptible of increase or decrease depending on how they are used-can exist in different forms, which, although subject to strict laws of equivalence and hence mutually convertible, produce specific effects” (Bourdieu 1977: 183). Here, symbolic capital is both a particular species and a supplement that comes to cumulate its effects with other species of capital. Bourdieu asserts the law of convertibility or equivalence that he will develop in his whole system. Symbolic capital is thus provided with a peculiar status, since it is not only an element in the additive totality that constitutes accumulated capital at a given moment in time. It is a sort of an accelerator of accumulation, but it seems more fragile than other species, as it can be damaged by its own use, something that Bourdieu could have said of economic capital or physical force, which can be used in a negative or sub-optimal way: however, he is remains silent about that. The last sentence of the book makes the game even more complex: “Symbolic capital, transformed and thereby disguised form of physical “economic” capital, produces its proper effect inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in “material” forms which are also, in the last analysis, the source of its effects” (Bourdieu 1977: 183). If it is a transformed form of economic capital, it becomes one of its species, which changes its status of species of capital as a whole, something that the former sentences led us to think, so that one could have the illusion of a form of autonomy of the symbolic level. The use of inverted commas to qualify economic capital, which differentiates it from physical force and from symbolic dimension adds to the complexity of the whole picture. Does “economic” capital express only one part of the economy, which a general anthropology would be able to subsume? What matters the most here is the fact that the effects of symbolic capital are conditioned by its dissimulated character: misrecognition is the price to pay for its efficacy. While he gives a theoretical form to his Algerian fieldwork, Pierre Bourdieu leads with Jean-Claude Passeron a series of surveys on the educational system that confer him his first great scholarly reputation. The Inheritors, published in 1964, had a public success that sometimes led to consider that the book forecasted the student revolt in May 1968. Reproduction, published in 1970, offered a neo-Weberian theoretical synthesis about the powerful mechanisms of school domination. The analysis was totally opposed to the technical vision of

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schooling that the then new Fifth Republic wanted to promote and that both authors knew quite well since they were familiar with many committees that the new “planning” power set in order to organize rationally the economic development of France. In 1966, Bourdieu, under a pseudonym, Darras (the city where the conference took place), published a very interesting book in his own series “Le sens commun” at the Editions de Minuit. Titled Sharing the benefits (Darras 1966), it associated the contribution of sociologists close to Bourdieu with high level statisticians who, at least some of them, had been his interlocutors during his stay in Algeria. The leading thread of the book was to ask how the considerable growth of national wealth was redistributed in society since 1954. Reviewing positively the book in the Revue française de sociologie, JeanRené Tréanton noted: The orchestra conductor, although the team spirit prevented him from taking the first role, is obviously Pierre Bourdieu. The introduction, the conclusion and the linking texts, however not signed, bear his mark. The general themes of the debates rejoin the preoccupations revealed in his previous works, and his own contribution is integrated in them naturally and with brio (Tréanton 1966). In his own contribution to the book, Bourdieu defends the idea that “inequalities seem to have moved from the domain of material consumption (since qualitative differences are not absent) to the domain of symbolic consumption”. In the next page he even adds that symbolic differences “are intended to appear as essential properties of a person, as a being irreducible to having, in sum, a nature, but a cultivated nature, a culture made into nature, that is to say a grace and a gift”. The book was published in the same time as The Love of Art, written with Alain Darbel, a noted statistician. They analyzed culture turned into nature through the visitors of European museums. On his own side, Jean-Claude Passeron, , whose political trajectory had been much more on the Left than his alter ego’s, published in the same year as Sharing the Benefits a book co-written with a Rector on the reform of universities, showing an institutional commitment to the modernization of the educational system (Antoine and Passeron 1966). Thus, The Inheritors was not an incendiary manifesto as it was perceived after the fact, but a contribution to a reformist view of education, in a perspective that was not entirely different from the Republican administrators of the late Nineteenth Century France. The authors were the promoters of a “rational pedagogy” that was able, if correctly applied, to reduce the cultural inequalities brought to light by their empirical surveys. The concept elaborated to account

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f o r those inequalities and the reproductive effects that they generated was “cultural capital”. Against the ideology of “liberating school” (l’école libératrice), then very powerful among the teaching body, both sociologists showed that one of the main elements of school achievement was the at home transmission of a set of resources, the mastery of which eased the learning process, even when it was not related to taught contents. Bourdieu came back to the notion twenty-five years after and noticed that it was conceived in order to break from an economist vision of investments in education. Significantly, in his retrospective text on the three states of cultural capital, he was more hostile to the theory of human capital than to the ordinary vision about the differences in aptitude, his main target in previous texts. Clearly, Bourdieu did not want to be confused with Gary Becker, whose human capital theory had become prominent in economics and beyond. What is the point that economists cannot grasp here? They are unable to account for cultural investments, at least when Bourdieu wrote, since they only consider the investments and profits in money, or the ones that can be directly convertible into money. They are unable to shed any light on “the best hidden and most socially determining educational investments, namely the at home transmission of cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1979: 3). What Bourdieu does not say is that the choice of indicators convertible into money is commanded by the constraints of economic analysis as it is proposed by Becker. Can sociologists do better in that domain? Bourdieu’s short text tries to come to grips with two difficulties: the first one is his own reluctance to see his theory identified with human capital, a concept that benefits from its anteriority, its international reputation and its applicability by governmental agencies; the second one concerns what, as we can suppose, he felt when his disciples use cultural capital in a trivial meaning. The few pages that open a issue of his journal Actes de la recherché en sciences sociales devoted to scholarly institutions sounds as a recall to order. The main indication is the dominant character of cultural capital in educational investment. It is clearly defined as “socially preeminent”, that is to say relatively more important than economic and social capital. If cultural capital is not defined as a concept, it is approached by its modes of existence. There are three modes: in the incorporated state, capital is manifested in long-lasting dispositions of the body; in the objectified state, it is a set of cultural goods (paintings, books, instruments); in the institutionalized state, it appears as scholarly degrees and diplomas. As economic capital, cultural capital accumulates, but it does it in a single body and is based on an investment in time: it cannot be bought and, in this way, Bourdieu notes, it is identical to suntan. In a rather enigmatic footnote, as it concerns cultural sponsor-

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ing, he writes that the use of cultural capital “poses particular problems” to owners of economic or political capital as it is difficult to buy a capital that cannot be dissociated from the person without buying the person. The force of cultural capital, largely linked to its location in a body, lies is its resistance to monetary convertibility. There is another striking feature of cultural capital: it offers a capacity of dissimulation much higher than economic capital. Its conditions of transmission are not visible. Its inherited properties cannot be easily distinguished from its acquired qualities. It is embodied in a personal style and, therefore, cannot be clearly decomposed into qualities. That property makes it close to symbolic capital, since Bourdieu here gives a definition that allows understanding what distinguishes it from cultural capital, although, in other circumstances, the difference is much thinner. Symbolic capital is simultaneously “misrecognized and recognized”. It is the product of the re-composition of economic capital through a “social alchemy” about which economists have nothing to say, according to the sociologist. One could object that Bourdieu himself is constrained to understand the process of transmutation to a form of social magic that does not give us more analytical resources. Nevertheless, we are now provided with a definition: symbolic capital is a denied capital that lies on the transformation of other species of capital through a misrecognition process. The accumulation of the first category of cultural capital (incorporated) is the result of a labor of the subject upon herself. One can instantly identify another central concept, analyzed in the previous chapter. No doubt in this respect: “Cultural capital is having turned into being, a property made body, which has become an integral property of the “person”, a habitus”. If one would be content with only that first mode of existence of cultural capital, the importance of which seems to be uppermost for Bourdieu, one could consider that its is redundant with habitus. He does not object to himself at this point. Here, one could say that cultural capital is a sort of de-multiplication of habitus. Its constitution is linked to the time that the individual and the group can devote to it, particularly the time of early childhood; such an investment in time always supposes a form of economic capital, since the intensity of precocious investment as well as later improvements demand the mobilization of economic resources. One who cannot offer to oneself anything beyond the reproduction of one’s labor force cannot expect to accumulate cultural capital. The second mode of existence of cultural capital is much less complex. One could say that it is a form derived from the first mode, as it owes a lot of properties to the owner’s habitus. As a matter of fact, if it is possible to transmit material goods or buy them with economic capital, their symbolic efficacy always depends on the possession of cultural capital in its incorporated form. The

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institutionalized state of cultural capital corresponds to its objectification in terms of scholarly credentials: this matters because, contrary to the incorporated state, the third state of cultural capital can be converted. The exchangeable value of the credential is opposed to the non-substitutable aspect of the single body, which allows us to classify and to compare individuals at a given moment of time. Credentials are close, although Bourdieu does not say it, to a security: it can be exchanged on a market and the convertibility rate precisely depends on the state of the market. The institutionalized state of cultural capital allows us, Bourdieu writes, “to establish convertibility rates between economic and cultural capital by guaranteeing the monetary value of a determined scholarly capital”. In the last lines of his article, Bourdieu is led to bring in a new species of capital, namely the scholarly capital, which is completely substituted to cultural capital in order to account for the third state of cultural capital. In other words, the incorporated state is translated as habitus, and the third state as scholarly capital. The second state, the objectified one, its meaning and uses are derived from the incorporated state. What then is left of the cultural capital? The effort of clarification made by Bourdieu has led to a more complex version of the concept, which is more and more difficult to decompose. The following analysis will make room for some progress, but two comments are now necessary. The first concerns the measurement of capital. It is to be found toward the end, when the reference to credential allows him to draw the forms of convertibility in these terms: “a credential is worth n. amount of money”, all things equal on a determined market. Three types of value are distinguished. The incorporated one cannot be measured but is experienced. Objectified, it tends to be assimilated to a material value and gets its cultural dimension only if it is activated in a singular body. When institutionalized, it can be exchanged on a market. As a rule, Bourdieu does not give to much importance to measurement, since the economists, who measure everything, have missed the essential, the capture of the symbolic power of capital. The sociologist acknowledges the recourse to alchemy, social magic or quasi-miracle to account for a force that cannot be decomposed into elements and resists quantification. In a footnote, Bourdieu asserts his position on the measurement of the most important form of cultural capital, the incorporated one: “Among all measurements of cultural capital, the less inexact are those that take as a benchmark the acquisition time, provided with, of course, it is not reduced to the schooling time and first family education is taken in to account”. One can say that there is no measurement of cultural capital in the strict meaning of the term, since the analyses of time-budgets within families would be simply less faulty than others while they are difficult and costly to organize in the frame of a sociological survey.

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The second comment bears on the imprecise relationship between the three states of cultural capital. There is a gap between the first and the third state, while the strength of the concept owes much to the distinction between cultural capital and scholarly capital, since the first encompasses all that is not done at school and is nevertheless an essential component of scholarly achievement, such as familiarity with arts, bodily assurance in society, firmness of taste: it was documented by the studies in sociology of education led by Bourdieu and Passeron. The first could be assimilated in the concept of habitus, while the third could be integrated in a theory of human capital. The economists are perfectly able to deal with the value of scholarly credential in terms of exchangeability on a given market. The re-introduction of scholarly capital at the end of the demonstration shows the real difficulty to think the concept of cultural capital in a coherent way. Bourdieu’s clarification is far from having solved the difficulty. One can now turn toward another explanatory attempt that bears on another species of capital, social capital, published a few months after the previous clarification (Bourdieu 1980). Bourdieu brought it in later in his construction. The notion imposed itself when he acknowledged that individuals whose economic capital or cultural capital are equivalent obtained quite uneven returns. The explanation of the discrepancy lies in the differential capacity to mobilize the capital of a group, either family, club membership, association of alumni or any form of social network. The simplest definition of social capital is based on the belonging to a collective entity, provided with it can be activated and recognized in a given system of relations. Activation is the key idea to shed light on the logic of that form of capital: a network is neither a natural datum nor a social datum, but the “product of the transformation of contingent relationships, such as neighborhood, work or even kinship into both necessary and elective relations”. Here again, the accumulation of capital is linked to a form of alchemy, the one that is based on “the exchange of speech, gift, women, etc.” It presupposes specific competencies, like knowing genealogical links and a constant expense of time and effort, which, contrary to incorporated cultural capital, finds rather easily its equivalent in economic capital. While social capital is a collective capital, it does not confer equivalent resources to each member of a group, who is always credited by measuring her or his personal input. Social capital, based on the activation of otherwise sleeping or virtual networks, appears also as a means of activating and maintaining two other species of capital, economic and cultural. It is one of the conditions of their output: holding cultural capital not associated to social capital limits the possibilities to make it fully productive.

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Our analysis has led to distinguish five types of capital: economic, cultural, social, scholarly, symbolic. The articulation between the two first and the third corresponds to a logic of activation: the quality of social relationships tends to affect the productivity of accumulated economic and cultural resources. Scholarly capital is the easiest to measure and cannot be considered as the institutionalized form of cultural capital, since there is some interplay between them: they never overlap. Symbolic capital appears at this point as a super-capital, which find its source in economic capital as it is they are transformed by the operation of misrecognition and are recomposed into another form. All forms of capital, inherited or acquired, are grounded on accumulated labor and temporal investment. Measuring non-economic capital is always difficult. The convertibility of species of capital is uneven: what Bourdieu called strategies of reconversion always stumbles on the limits of their substitutability. Bourdieu thus speaks of capital in the plural. Can the confrontation with the singular of Marx’s Das Kapital shed additional light? From what has been said before in this chapter, one can quickly solve the issue of Bourdieu’s Marxism. It simply does not exist. However, a rapprochement imposes itself, at least on methodological grounds. The sociologist used notions like mode of production or accumulated labor. It happened that misrecognition was associated to alienation or false consciousness. One cannot escape a comparison. In his great text on social space and class genesis, Bourdieu dares to write that “the construction of a theory of social space supposes a series of breaks from Marxist theory”. He ends up asserting that it is a powerful obstacle to the progress of an adequate theory of the social world. The affirmation infuriated Marxists from the entire world: the “inescapable horizon of the philosophy of our time”, as Sartre named it, was assimilated to a crude epistemological obstacle. In the article, the sociologist did not deal with capital, but with class. However, in order to define the relational space that he intended to supersede Marxist theory, he started with a definition that enabled him to conceive the principle of differentiation within social space: “The active properties that are selected as principles of construction of the social space are the different kinds of power or capital that are current in the different fields. Capital, which may exist in objectified form – in the form of material properties – or, in the case of cultural capital, in the embodied state, and which may be legally guaranteed, represents a power over- the field (at a given moment) and, more precisely, over the accumulated product of past labor (in particular over the set of instruments of production) and thereby over the mechanisms tending to ensure the production of a particular category of goods and so over a set of incomes and profits. The kinds of capital, like the aces in a game of cards, are powers that define the chances of profit in a given field (in fact, to each field or sub-field

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there corresponds a particular kind of capital, which is current, as a power or stake, in that game)” (Bourdieu 1985: 724). Capital is defined in a classic way as accumulated labor, and in a more Bourdieuan tone, as a power over a field or as an asset in a game. Here, capital is a constructing principle. A field is defined by the presence of a species of capital within it, although one can suppose, after having read Bourdieu, that different species can be active in the same field. Even if one is dominant, as cultural capital in the field of culture, this does not exclude the action of economic and social capital. The analysis of the market for symbolic goods clearly showed it. One of the dominant interpretations of Bourdieu’s work, particularly in the United States, but not only, views it as a neo-Marxism enlarged to the cultural and symbolic dimensions of market and capital: “Bourdieu deploys the term of capital, which finds its origins in bourgeois and Marxist economy, but he extends its meaning and distinguishes different forms of capital” (Joas and Knöbl 2011). While Bourdieu fights continuously against the narrow economicism of economists and sometimes associates it with Marx, this does not mean that he tried to generalize the postulates of economy to the whole social world. On the contrary, at it was seen before, the economy must be considered as one of the fields in the social world, in which economic capital, understood as power to obtain chances of profit in a determined domain is an absolute force. The social world must be considered as susceptible to be viewed from different perspectives: consequently, the idea of a system distinguishing between an infrastructural world wholly dominated by relations of exploitation and a supra-structural one that would be reduced to the former’s ideological expression was always foreign to Bourdieu. The confusion was born from the analogical use of the notion of capital in the works on the educational system. Real Marxists were not fooled. They quickly organized a riposte against the theses of the Inheritors’ authors. Foot soldiers of Althusserism that dominated French Marxism at the turn of the 1970s, Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet tried to show that the analysis of the educational system could be done only under the light shed by class struggle, and that its main function, as an ideological state apparatus, was to divide pupils into two categories, one doomed to reconstitute the proletarian labor force, and the other devoted to the reproduction of the bourgeois class (Baudelot and Establet 1972). L’Ecole capitaliste en France was a quick and unevenly inspired answer to Reproduction: the book proposed a rather awkward model, under the banner of Chinese cultural revolution, but rightly took back Bourdieu and Passeron to their Weberian turf. They were blamed for constructing social classes as the product of individual properties and not as the product of relations of production. They were also scolded for giving to much place to the family as an agent of socialization. To

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sum up, nobody in Paris could have mistaken Reproduction’s authors as Marxists in the early 1970s. The intent to produce a synthesis between Marx, Durkheim and Weber, expressed in the first pages of the book showed a clear disequilibrium in favor of the two latter. The illusion of a Marxist Bourdieu largely came from the Anglo-American world and from Germany, but detox, paradoxically, comes from the United States. Mathieu Hikaru Desan has proposed a comparison of the uses of capital by Marx and Bourdieu that should put an end to the confusion. Desan starts by recalling Marx’s point of view, for whom capital is a social relation of production defined by its link to a particular historical social formation. Capital is neither a thing, nor a resource, an asset or a competence, but a process. The relation of production involves a relation of exploitation that structures the whole society, and not only the sphere of economic activity. If, as Marx thinks, a general formula of capital exists, then one cannot think capital in terms of species. By proposing a Marxist reading of Bourdieu, Desan stresses the fact that works on education do not give a true articulation between economic capital and cultural capital. He appositely sees cultural capital as a mere translation of class habitus: “Cultural capital is the name given to the dominant class habitus when it is apprehended symbolically within the context of a relation of class power” (Desan 2013: 325). In other terms, cultural capital, omnipresent in Reproduction, would be the other name of the cultural privileges of the bourgeoisie, a recurrent notion in the Inheritors. If one considers that cultural capital clearly stands at the level of super-structure, it could give a chance to a Marxist re-appropriation of Bourdieu, since the theory of legitimacy that underlies the whole research seems to be detached from what makes the substratum of class relations. This strategy has been evoked by some Marxists, but has never been put to a test, so that Mathieu Hikaru Desan does not even mention it in his analysis. Bourdieu’s social topology cannot make room for a Marxist logic. Distinction is undoubtedly the most sophisticated investigation on the process of differentiation understood as a function of volumes and species of capital. Although it is devoted to the sociology of taste, the book is the one that goes furthest toward the analysis of class relations. The construction of a positional space is never defined by the existence of relations of production, but by effects of domination. The notion of cultural legitimacy is the core of the conceptual construction of Distinction. Bourdieu, drawing continuously on the Weberian theory of legitimate violence, develops a very strong definition of cultural legitimacy, the fecundity of which is obvious, notably as one can see at work in all types of social world and as it allows to treat them all in an analogous way, as a consequence of the dual principle of homology and

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transposability. In an explicit Weberian filiation, the capacity of legitimate representations to contribute to the reproduction of power confers its explanatory power to the whole theory. The imposition of legitimacy, as the source of symbolic violence, can be efficient only if it remains hidden while deploying itself. The legitimizing force of an action or of a symbolic construction is derived, in the last instance, from the strength of the group whose it expresses interest. In the case of education, particularly with respect to France, the specific form of pedagogical authority and its inscription in the long run, previously shown by Durkheim, facilitates the identification of structural affinities between the dominant class values and particular systems devoted to the scholarly reproduction of legitimate culture. Talking about educational system means to account for a form of institutional organization that make convergent the diverse expressions of pedagogical authority as coherent form derived from constant pressure. Through curriculum, programs, codification of practices and social-cultural homogeneity of the teaching body, the school permanently actualizes the principle of cultural legitimacy. The theory of the educational system elaborated in Reproduction is only a particular application of that principle. The massive character of the inculcation process (manifested through pedagogical authority) makes easy (particularly with respect to the French situation) the revelation of structural affinities between the values of privileged classes and the particular systems devoted to the scholarly reproduction of legitimate culture. Bourdieu transposed this explanatory principle to less institutionalized forms of social life. As it is the case for the extension of the habitus as defined by Panofsky to all social practices, the distinction model presupposes that everything goes everywhere as in the educational system. Here, what one can call Bourdieu’s school-centrism appears in full light. It is not indifferent from this point of view that the first chapter of the book is titled: “The Aristocracy of Culture”. The class relations made visible by the survey on the cultural preferences of the French people in the first decade of the Fifth Republic can be expressed in the vocabulary of the societies of order, anterior to industrial capitalism. The French cultural model, inherited from Court Society, is one of the matrices of Distinction, as we have seen it. Clearly, the background of the theory is largely informed by the analysis of the curial system under Louis the Fourteenth proposed by Norbert Elias, as the various references to the book that he devoted to it show. The sociology of style developed by Bourdieu is regularly referred to Elias’ work: “(the) cultural creations which we usually regard purely aesthetically, as variants of a particular style, were perceived by their contemporaries, as Norbert Elias reminds us, referring to the society of the Grand

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S­ iècle, as the highly differentiated expression of social qualities” (Bourdieu 1984: 227). Thus, the stratification of taste in French society is never treated as a cultural consequence of capitalism, but as the effect of the structuration of social space in terms of legitimacy. The metaphor of a society of order comes back in about the same terms in the other monograph devoted to France by Bourdieu, State Nobility. The emergence of this aristocracy is entirely thought with respect to the anthropological perspective of institutional rites: “When it is known and recognized as legitimate order, the process of social cutting off and segregation that installs a set of elected persons, carefully selected, into a separated group generates per se a symbolic capital all the more important than the constituted group is more restricted and exclusive. The monopoly, when it is recognized, is converted into nobility” (Bourdieu 1996c). Here, Bourdieu defines a particular form of capital accumulation: the strength of a group originates in rituals that constitute it as such. He makes an explicit reference to social magic. The concentration of capital in the hands of a few persons is the consequence of the “magic participation” to the group. The recourse to the vocabulary of classic anthropology is striking here, is close to the notion of “mystic participation” developed by Levy-Bruhl in Primitive Mentality (1922)-, all the more since Bourdieu starts his book by an analysis of “scholarly forms of classification”, referring explicitly to Durkheim and Mauss’ work on primitive forms of classification. Here, there is an anthropological continuum, which, although it mostly applies to a symbolic domain in that case, questions the radical historical break that capitalism brings in according to Marx. Capital envisaged by Bourdieu is a resource or a dotation: this is why it can be divided into different species and, ultimately, into as many species as there are possible resources. The extensive use made by disciples in creating new species is not illegitimate. In this sense, Bourdieu’s capital does not need capitalism to exert its effects: different species accumulate in different social spaces and according to different processes. Marxist critiques have clearly identified the issue as they have objected that he limited himself to the sphere of the circulation of commodities and remained blind to exploitation and extortion of surplus value. They invite him regularly, as Marx did in the Capital, to leave the noisy sphere of circulation that is only a theater of appearances. Marx opposes the manifest and the hidden: “We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual utilisation, in the consumption of the labour-power. The moneyowner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the

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market, and pays for it at its full value”. The consumption of labour-power is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. “The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business”. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making” (Marx 1867). There is a paradox in the Bourdieuan analysis of contemporary economy. While the whole theoretical construction is centered on the theme of misrecognition, the structures of economy appear in full light, in their phenomenal truth. The cynicism and candid language of neoliberalism no longer bothers with a discourse of justification provided with an optimistic tone, as the one scorned by Marx in the same chapter of the Capital: “This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Ibid.). That probably led Bourdieu to consider that the sphere of economic activity was transparent. The heralds of neoliberalism never promised Eden. There is more: the theory of misrecognition must be lodged elsewhere than in the relation of production. It must be mainly looked for in a symbolic order that is not easy to define, but that is undoubtedly at the center of Bourdieu’s great books. Distinction and State Nobility are the best examples. It should not come as a surprise that Desan is disappointed to note that, in a book as ambitious that The Social Structures of the Economy, a rather misleading title since it is at the point of departure a monograph of the housing market, Bourdieu only finds the “structure of distribution of capital among different ceos”, where Marx would have spotted the secret of capital, i.e. exploitation. He is absolutely right. Bourdieu does not look for any secret, not only because Marx already found it, but because he was never interested in the issue of exploitation, term that would not be found in the index of his books. Thus, in the theme index of his lectures on state, one goes directly from “ex officio” to “family”. Nobody will challenge the fact that Bourdieu is not a Marxist and that he drew the most powerful motives of his theoretical construction from the Weberian tradition. One can only agree with Desan in saying that the sociologist did not extend Marx’s model to all spheres of activity precisely because he never acknowledged the validity of the model. Ambiguity was born from the

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rather vague use of the notion of the general economy of practices and even more from the lexical analogies allowed by the term of capital. In his analysis, Desan, who credits Bourdieu for having opened critical analysis to new objects, particularly in education and culture, pleads for a sort of “Marxisation” of Bourdieu’s concepts, the re-inscription of which in dialectical materialism would allow to multiply their effects. Michael Burawoy reaches about the same conclusion when he imagines Bourdieu and Marx engaging into a dialogue in a sort of posthumous encounter (Burawoy 2012). The sympathy shown by American Marxists stands in sharp contrast with their French counterparts, who maintain an acrimonious assessment of Bourdieu’s work. One must acknowledge that the author of “Marx reader of Balibar” did not take kid gloves against his competitors whom he quickly turned into adversaries. Bourdieu’s project was never an aggiornamento of Marxism or its extension to all social spheres, but he aimed to substitute a new general theory to Marxism. In the second part of his life, after he was elected at the Collège de France, he even added to his program a political strategy that had nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism or even Sartrism, as some striking images have led to think. Marxists think that there is a meeting point between their theory and the sociology of fields: convertibility. The source of any capital is the accumulation of labor, including labor over oneself, and all species of capital can be referred, in the last instance, to economic capital. They find a justification in some Bourdieu’s sentences, as the concluding one in The Outline of a Theory of practice, which was analyzed above. This amounts to discount more frequent remarks about the limitations of convertibility that were stressed in this chapter. It is not interesting to take Bourdieu’s system to pieces and to reassemble it in a Marxist framework. Marx developed quite early a theory of culture, the foundations of which appear in The German Ideology. They do not need to append Bourdieu. They are already fully equipped, perhaps too fully, to account for the world complexity. Burawoy identified the critique of philosophy as a common ground to Marx and Bourdieu. This comparison is not fully convincing. Marx criticized philosophy as such since it is the outcome of the division between manual and intellectual labor that triggers among thinkers the illusion according to which ideas lead the world. Through the reading of young Hegelians, all forms of philosophical activity since the origins are criticized, as thesis eleven on Feuerbach claims (“Philosophers have just interpreted the world in many ways; what matters is transforming it”). Bourdieu’s critique against philosophers is more narrowly targeted. One will find in the first sentences of Pascalian Meditations one of the clearest expressions of the tension, both necessary and unending, between philosophy and sociology: “If I have resolved to ask some questions that

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I would rather have left to philosophy, it is because it seemed to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not ask them; and because, especially with respect to the social sciences, it never ceased to raise questions that did not seem to me to be essential-while avoiding asking itself about the reasons and above all the (often not very philosophical) causes of this questioning” (Bourdieu 2000: 1). Philosophy does not stand where one could expect it if one took it literally. To put it simply, it has gone astray. In this respect, there is a proximity with Durkheim. According to the author of The Evolution of Educational Thought in France, who had expressed in a quite different language the necessity to objectify scholarly patterns, philosophy of the early Third Republic was reduced to a form of playful scholastics, the operation of secularization led by Victor Cousin in a previous state of the system having lost its functions and rotating in a vacuum. If one takes Bourdieu seriously, one can say that sociology appears as a radicalization of philosophical questioning rather than its supersession (Aufhebung). Radicalization or, even better, intensification that philosophy can no longer provide as it is, because it is a large part of its social existence and temporality, devoted to an endeavor of self-certification and self-legitimization. On the contrary, we are led by the sociologist at the extreme point of critical reason. Three names are called for here, who draw the philosophical space as understood by Bourdieu. First, Kant and critical rationality (“I wanted to push the critique (in the Kantian sense) of scholarly reason to a point that that questionings usually leave untouched”). One can identify here the radicalization of a rationalist tradition embodied by Renouvier, and present in French University since the beginnings of the Third Republic, Durkheim being his first representative in French sociology. Then comes Wittgenstein (“I could have invoked thinkers who are close to being seen by philosophers as enemies of philosophy, because, like Wittgenstein, they make its prime task the dispelling of illusions, especially those that the philosophical tradition produces and reproduces”). The last is Pascal (“True philosophy makes light of philosophy”). One could read this triple reference as a perfectly mastered form of philosophical accreditation, if Bourdieu would not express a form of denial (“I could have”) that makes his gesture close to philosophers who thought the vanity of institutions (Pascal, Wittgentstein) or whose reflective intensification allows thinking from within the institutionalized forms of knowledge (Kant). Literally, Bourdieu just put to work a critical program inscribed in philosophia perennis, at least since Kant. Michael Burawoy claims that Bourdieu started as Marx with a critique of intellectualism and ended up as Hegel, since he went back to a “practice of logics” that led him to mobilize himself under the banner of an International of

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intellectuals or of state universalism. Rather than Hegelianism, one should evoke the deeply rooted French rationalism, which includes both Republican Kantianism and historical epistemology in the French style, the Bachelard and Canguilhem’s lineage. Bourdieu never ceased to refer to this filiation, mostly in his autobiographical texts. Attempting to develop fictitious approximations is thus useless. In his remarks, Burawoy adds that Marx did not take enough care of the symbolic dimension of domination, seeing there a possible complementarity. Symbolic capital popped up several times in the discussion but was never fully defined. One must say that Bourdieu, who tried to clarify the notion of cultural capital and social capital, did not make the same effort for what amounts to symbolic capital, which nevertheless plays a central role. “Symbolic” is an adjective frequently used by Bourdieu. It is associated with capital, but also with power, domination, good, violence, representation. As noted by Jacques Dubois, Pascal Durand and Yves Winkin, the “semantic fuzz that constantly enveloped the term was propitious to many reductionist interpretations” (Dubois et al. 2013). The word has been present in the whole oeuvre since the moment of Kabyle ethnology. Sometimes the mere distinction between symbolic and intangible (non-material) becomes difficult, as it is often the case with cultural. Thus, symbolic violence is sometimes defined as the only possible recourse when physical violence cannot be applied; but symbolic goods may appear as mere cultural goods. Those occurrences are not frequent. What is more common is the association of “material and symbolic” or “material or symbolic”, which evokes the clear opposition between material and non- material. As these uses add some complexity, one must go back to the inaugural definition as it appears, in a rather enigmatic way, at the end of The Outline of a Theory of Practice: symbolic capital is economic capital both converted and dissimulated. It is the outcome of a form of denial as this is the case of the delayed counter gift, which allows the reciprocal exchange to appear as a gift without any calculation. Symbolic capital is for Bourdieu the product of a collective bad faith in archaic economies as the Kabyle one. It is directly linked to temporality, since its accumulation is indexed on the temporal lag between gift and counter-gift. It also provides an occasion to bring in a vocabulary freely borrowed from psychoanalysis, through the notion of repression. The main condition of the accumulation of that species of capital is oblivion or misrecognition. If symbolic capital is the capital of Kabyle society par excellence, since neither economic capital nor, a fortiori, cultural capital plays a role, it is not specific to it. Simply, anthropologists can observe it with more clarity in archaic societies. As a rule, one can say that when denial or repression disappears, symbolic capital loses instantly its authority. It supposes the production

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of a belief that will appear in an analogous form in the worlds of art and culture, but also in language. The possession of symbolic capital allows to detain symbolic power, being listened to by other people. Generalized to all types of social formation from the Kabyle experience, symbolic capital can hardly be considered as a supplementary species of capital: in fact, domination and authority can only exerted at the expense of the symbolic efficacy of the resources of those who are in the situation of exert them. The end of Pascalian Meditations, peak of the oeuvre, is devoted, as the last lines of Outline, to symbolic capital. The circle is thus complete. This type of capital is entirely grounded on a theory of legitimacy, which comes as a guarantee while being associated to a logic of recognition. It is different from the species of capital previously identified inasmuch as it cannot be analyzed as a set of resources, like a sum of money, an incorporated culture, a scholarly degree or a network of relations. It is the effect of perfect adequation between habitus and field: it allows buckling in a single circle the three founding concepts, field, habitus and capital. Each sheds light on the others and can ultimately mingle with another. A habitus can create a field, as in symbolic revolutions when Baudelaire and Manet managed to raise, all of a sudden, a new universe. However, it tends to be identified as a capital, since it is indexed on the level of resources that it can mobilize. Theory can be described as a space of transmutation, sometimes qualified by the notions of alchemy and magic. The last definition of symbolic capital, , which appears as a conclusion of a life’s work, shows the buckling up of the theory on itself: “Every kind of economic capital (economic, cultural, social) tends (to different degrees) to function as symbolic capital (so that it might be better to speak, in rigorous terms, of the symbolic effects of capital) when it obtains an explicit or practical recognition, that of a habitus structured according to the very structures of the space in which it has been engendered. In other words, symbolic capital (male honour in Mediterranean societies, the honourabilty of the notable or the Chinese mandarin, the prestige of the celebrated writer, etc.) is not a particular kind of capital but what every kind of capital becomes when it is misrecognized as capital, that is, as a force, a power or capacity for (actual or potential, exploitation) and therefore recognized as legitimate” (Bourdieu 2000: 242) Bourdieu asserts, with some embarrassment (“it would be perhaps better to say”), two important things. First, symbolic capital is an effect: it is like a screen that filters the different species of capital to ensure what he calls elsewhere symbolic returns or efficacy. Recognition allowed by the symbolic is guaranteed by the misrecognition of its functioning. Second, symbolic capital allows us to unify the different species of capital and to think the unity of power, that is always given, in the last instance, as symbolic power. One cannot help from

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thinking that the notion of symbolic keeps a part of mystery, even when one has re-read carefully the scrupulous re-elaboration of concepts that Bourdieu crafted early in his career. This mystery, one could say with a little smile, is the condition of the symbolic efficacy of the theory. At the end of their inquiry on the symbolic in Bourdieu’s work, Jacques Dubois, Pascal Durand and Yves Winkin, who could not be easily be put in the camp of the master’s enemies, acknowledge both its “moving significance” and the fact the whole social world draws its definition from this “force is especially efficient because the whole appearing ideological and political construction negates it”. Bourdieu liked to quote Bachelard’s phrase: “Science is only about hidden things”. This is the key to the most powerful theoretical construction of sociology in the second half of the Twentieth century. Entirely devoted to the unveiling of the game of dissimulation by which powers are established and remain in duration, theory presupposes that social agents do not get to the consciousness of their situation without being in turn social automata or “cultural dopes”, as the ethnomethodologists say. The sociologist, as the agent of unveiling and demystification, is thus the great disruptor of the social game, since he comes to spill the beans in showing what was dissimulated since the origins of the social world. What can be the effects of that unveiling? How can they be communicated to the scientific community and then to a wider audience? In order to answer the question, it is necessary now to examine the sociologist’s method and style.

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The Methodological Inventiveness Luc Boltanski remarks: “Bourdieu’s critical sociology is unquestionably the most audacious enterprise ever attempted to try to conjoin in the same theoretical construction highly constraining requirements supervising sociological practices and radically critical positions” (Boltanski 2013: 18). Although there are some variations in the balance between the construction of a social science able to satisfy the production of evidence on the one hand and the project of political emancipation on the other, the originality of Bourdieu’s position cannot be contested. The quality of sociological practice guarantees the possibility of the sociologist’s intervention in society. Science as such can produce political effects. By strongly linking the constraints of scientific activity and a critical project, Bourdieu inscribes himself in what I called a “latent tradition” (Fabiani 2001). Claiming a specific efficacy of intellectual intervention viewed as scientific pedagogy is a central feature of Auguste Comte’s work and it has a strong legacy. The new principles of social organization according to the author of the The Positive Philosophy can impose themselves neither by political violence nor by any authority based on symbolic manipulation, through a religious order or a charismatic power. On the contrary, the popularization of scientific knowledge is the only way of diffusing in the whole society the new ruling principles of collective organization. Popularized historical knowledge is able, according to Comte “to develop spontaneously social feelings” (Comte 1839). During the Third Republic, the taken for granted adhesion to the belief in the capacity of intellectual activity to produce moral reform without mediation, out of its own authority, is a common feature. Durkheimian sociologists and rationalist philosophers equally required the social efficiency of intellectual labor, through the intensive use of the notion of “morale”. This point of view expresses two things: first, the strength of a civic commitment involving the social optimism of academics led to think that their function in society strongly matters in the process of republican secularization; second, the power of an illusion, which led them to believe that it suffices to express themselves as philosophers or sociologists to be understood. Durkheim’s The Evolution of Educational Thought in France is a good illustration of that belief. By presenting would-be teachers with lectures on the history of French educational system, it is possible to obtain their conversion to “scientific pedagogy”.

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Thus, there is a French tradition, which originates very likely in Comte’s philosophy, that articulates in a complex way a form of esoterism, born out of the necessity to guarantee the autonomous functioning of science, and a form of exoterism demanding that the scientist should be understood by the whole society. The image of a “political Bourdieu” in the public sphere seems, other things being equal, to correspond to this type of articulation. The legitimacy of the sociologist’s intervention in society is guaranteed by a logic of knowledge transferring. There is a common feature to all those types of intervention, well beyond thematic and contingent differences: Durkheim’s promotion of a scientific pedagogy and Bourdieu’s plea for Gay and Lesbian studies are close in this respect. They presuppose the belief in the sui generis efficiency of the professorial discourse implying a short-circuit of the political level. It is certain that the forms of sanctification of the social as such and the continuous affirmation of a republican community through which one must now think the dynamics of knowledge production constitutes a common ground that allows to locate large chunks of French philosophy and sociology in Comte’s posterity. This is not a retrospective illusion that would make the project of positive philosophy the unique matrix of the republican academia, since between Comte and his followers there is obviously a political discontinuity. Bourdieu is probably the most recent example of a French singularity, which draws an original crossing between science and politics. Bourdieu wanted to turn sociology into a craft. When he entered the French world of the social sciences, the domain of study had not yet reached the level of an organized field. The discipline was slowly professionalized. In the informal space of sociology, philosophers without empirical object coexisted with technicians who adopted uncritically the tools of American sociology, as well as with “essayists” who took advantage of the weak entry barriers to lodge their activities in the area. In their books on education, Bourdieu and Passeron frequently evoked sociology as a “shelter” discipline that gave a roof to the less well-off in scholarly institutions. They aimed to turn sociology into a science thanks to a mix of theoretical stringency, with which both, as philosophytrained social scientists, were richly provided, and the capacity to construct a rigorous protocol of empirical study, a practice that they discovered on the job, often with the only means at their disposal. Neither one attended any summer school devoted to data analysis or to real statistical teaching. Their self-taught situation did not lead them to use ready-made analytical models and to blindly trust statisticians who offered their services. Both grasped the stakes involved in using one or another analytical model over the comment of results; their meta-methodological writings constitute a significant element in their work. This is all the more a fact than the early 1960s lead the sociologists to some

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pottering with data: there was no such thing as data processing software at the time. A large part of calculation is still done with hand, on large sheets, slowly filling boxes, with slowness and boredom. The rest was subcontracted to big computing units using punched cards. Being hosted by Bourdieu in his reputed Centre de sociologie de l’éducation et de la culture allowed us to grasp both the artisanal and reflective dimension of practice, before micro-computing came to radically change the conditions of dealing with statistical objects. Today, easy access to software packages provide us with an illusion of mastering the tools while the black-box effects are multiplying. Thus, Bourdieu got his training on the job, in ethnography as well as in data analysis. He seldom gets back to fieldwork methodology, ordinarily content with a general reference to the Guide d’étude directe des comportements culturels written by a rural anthropologist, Marcel Maget (Maget 1962), although it was a bit old-fashioned. He stayed away from the acute 1990s debates in ethnology. One must say that his ethnographical practice referred to a long past moment. His work being situated in a very peculiar time, the end of a liberation war, had an urgent and atypical character, not needing long epistemological comments. However, Bourdieu’s Kabyle works involve, albeit it is not always clearly perceptible, a critical dimension of classic ethnography. The starting point of his deconstruction of the ethnographic perspective is based on the coexistence of two objects, both close and distant, in his own practice. His first fieldwork was not planned, but it surged in the margins of his presence in a colonial war as a subordinate member of the military apparatus. In Kabyle territory, he had to simultaneously discover the object and the method within a compact temporality and a space where the relation to the other is constantly threatened by the very nature of the conflict. His second field site is quite familiar, since it is his native Béarn, but ethnography textbooks did not recommend it, at least when he started, and Levi-Straussian anthropology, which constituted his primary reference, did not appreciate it at all. One can see in the first moments of his career Bourdieu’s paradoxical attitude. On the one hand, he transgressed the rule of the remoteness that still governs ethnography: on the contrary, one can do research on very familiar objects; cultural difference is no longer a condition of the remote gaze, provided with that the proximity to the field is accompanied by a effort to construct a distance, a theme that he often came back to. On the other hand, he did not bother himself with a methodological canon when he did fieldwork in Kabylia. He fired any wood and swiftly grasped all opportunities. By the way, he was not a patented anthropologist. He was just a young man, soldier then teacher, who discovered the disorder of the world at the twilight of the colonial empire, in the middle of the scrum. If his writings on Bearn stand among the

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most beautiful that he ever wrote, this is not because they offered a discreet autobiographical dimension, but because they gave him the possibility of objectifying familiarity and of analyzing his own primal relationship to the world. The remoteness recommended by classical anthropology can be measured neither in terms of nautical miles sailed to reach the field site nor by the spicy flavor of exoticism, which is the scientist’s reward and sometimes her punishment. The relationship between Kabylia and Béarn allowed Bourdieu to feel for the first time the relational dimension of any object. What is familiar can be analyzed otherwise as in the categories of the logic of practice only if it is reconstructed thanks to a process of objectification that detaches it from our taken for granted adhesion to the familiar world. Deborah Reed-Danahay is thus perfectly right when she writes that the works on Kabylie and Béarn can be seen as an anti Tristes tropiques, LeviStrauss’ autobiographical masterpiece (Reed-Danahay 2004). She sheds light on the epistemological device constituted by Bourdieu’s dual position as an insider and an outsider, perceptible in the relationship between Béarn and Kabylie as well as in his own situation with respect to the educational system, as he is both a full-time member and a marginal, due to his lack of inheritance. To some extent, he is an insider in Kabylia too since he recognizes it through an analytical grid that owes much to his native knowledge of a mountain peasantry. One can regret at this point the fact that Bourdieu did not fully objectify his relationship to his native soil. Some readers, particularly out of France, were led to believe that he was the son of poor peasants while his father was a postal service officer as there were a lot in the Third Republic, opened on the social and political world, cultivated and ambitious for his son. There is no doubt that Bourdieu suffered much from his social trajectory. I do not intend to deny this dimension, which was palpable when one talked to him, even in the time of his consecration. One just needs to contextualize it and add some nuance to its singular social character. If Bourdieu’s work is exceptional, his trajectory is less rare if one considers his schoolmates, among others Jean-Claude Passeron, orphan of his father and son of a provincial primary school teacher, or Jacques Derrida, son of an Algerian accountant, Lucien Bianco, son of a wine and coal merchant in Ugine, or even Gérard Genette, son of Parisian sartor worker. Besides, his village, Lasseube, is twenty-five kilometers away from Pau, a middle-sized town but deeply transformed by its status of a resort in the second half of the 19th century. In order to complete the objectification, Bourdieu should envisage the distance, limited but real, that separated him from the rural world. The very possibility of objectification lies in this gap. This is possible only because the observer has already left the community he is observing. Besides, the assimilation between Béarn and Kabylia is

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the consequence of a forcing: there is a significant objective distance between the Kabyle peasant and the Béarnais peasant. Even if one uses the notion of internal colonialism to qualify the development of France, French colonial domination in Algeria is totally different: it is based on a huge repressive apparatus that was built on a dispossession and military violence since the arrival of the French. Standard of living had nothing in common in both regions. The cultural lag with the world of power could not be be compared either. Those objections matter less than the radical change that Bourdieu brings in by adopting the insider’s point of view on the exotic field and the outsider’s on the familiar one. By doing so, he seriously questions the foundational charter of anthropology that was based on the relationship to the Other. Simultaneously, he blows up the disciplinary fracture between sociology and anthropology: he shows that it has no epistemological justification, but that it comes from the colonial division between human beings, objects and works. This means that it is doomed to disappear, although the ideological habit is so pervasive that it survives in a post-colonial situation. In 1960, Bourdieu innovated as he was able to deal with Algeria both with ethnological tools (his essay on the Kabyle house is a classic of the genre) and with the sociology of labor (Labor and laborers in Algeria). More than half a century after Bourdieu established the epistemological and methodological similarity between both disciplines, he remains a pioneer in a domain that is slowly changing. Bourdieu is transgressive because he fires all wood. The methodological canon is less important in his mind than the need to produce knowledge in a situation of war emergency. In 1960, he has not yet worked on the power, sometimes destructive, of the social patterns that orient, quite unconsciously, the ways by which researchers conceive their objects. He already feels that the external signs of science do not make true science. He has only a philosophical training, but he will learn quickly from others. The others, in Algiers, are first statisticians. They are as young as he is, witnessing a war that they condemn, and driven by the ambition to develop, within the frame of the public service, new forms of knowledge on social objects. There is both a generational proximity and an intellectual distance: his interlocutors are often alumni of the Ecole Polytechnique and of the Ecole nationale de statistique et d’analyse économique, but they soon find a common language. Those common features are undoubtedly among the most salient in his work and remain present until his ideological turn of the late years, when he chooses more rustic ways of expressing himself. In a tribute to the sociologist, Alain Desrosières, whose work developed at the crossing of sociology and statistics that Bourdieu made possible, precisely locates in Algiers the origin of this collaboration. He mentions his Algerian

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encounter with a little group of statisticians from the insee (National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies): Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet and Claude Seibel, at the end of the 1950s, in the context of the last years of the liberation war” (Desrosières 2003: 209). The encounter led to the publication of Travail and travailleurs en Algérie. Desrosières considers the book as a kind of manifesto for a new form of collaboration between the statistician’s craft and the sociologist’s craft. Clearly, the addition of two forms of French excellence, the intellectual as philosopher and the engineer provided with high mathematical competencies had the potential to render a little bit rustic the quantitative work of Columbia’s sociologists, inspired by Paul Lazarsfeld. By the way, Bourdieu created a sociological teaching at the National institute for statistics. a few years after his return from Algeria. The first contacts proved very fruitful over time, particularly in The Love of Art, co-authored with Alain Darbel (Bourdieu and Darbel 1993) and in the collective book le Partage des bénéfices (Darras 1966)-an exemplary collaboration between Bourdieu and statisticians. This success should not hide the fact that a significant distance exists between sociology and statistics: the gap will increase as Bourdieu will develop his system and will aim to make it the exclusive analytical grid of all gathered data. Bourdieu’s disciples often have trouble to understand the dissociation between on the one hand the measurement of economic and cultural inequalities among social categories, which is the bread and butter of statisticians, and on the other hand, the theory of symbolic domination, which is the sociologist’s endeavor. Thus, the resilience of cultural inequalities is generally considered as the evidence of the robustness of Bourdieu’s theory. This is infinitely more complex, since, as Desrosières notes from the very beginning of the analysis, there is a gap between the two ways of dealing with facts, although it does not endanger the cooperation between the two disciplines: “However, one can observe from the origin something that is much more than a linguistic nuance between Bourdieu and his statisticians friends: those who measure inequalities when the sociologist seeks to objectify forms of domination, particularly cultural and symbolic, previously unperceived” (Desrosières 2003). The lexicon of domination overlaps with the measurement of inequalities, albeit the latter is not affected by the neo-Weberian grid that Bourdieu applies with a kind of translucent paper. Collaboration was developed through the use of the list of occupations and professions in France. The intensive use of that tool is the methodological trademark of The Inheritors (1964), The Love of Art (1966) and Reproduction (1970). To some extent, Distinction (1979) still depends on the resource, but it enters competition with what will be the ultimate Bourdieuan absolute weapon, the geometric data analysis. What Desrosières aptly calls “the first legacy of

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the encounter between sociology and statistics” ends up redefining a large part of the statistical state apparatus. At the insee, Alain Darbel created in 1973 a triennial publication, Données sociales (Social Data) that was largely the expression of Bourdieu’s vision. One can see the same preoccupation within the statistical service of the Ministry of National Education, where statisticians close to Bourdieu, particularly the ones from Algiers, were in charge: Darbel works there at the turn of the 1970s; Claude Seibel and Françoise Oeuvrard play a key-role in the 1980s and the 1990s. One knows too that what the National Survey on the Cultural Practices of the French, launched by the Ministry of Culture in 1973 by Augustin Girard, owes to the methodology developed by Bourdieu, visible in the central role of the relationship between social position, educational level and cultural competencies. Desrosières notes that in these different places, the socio-occupational criterium (particularly the social origin, captured by the father’s occupation, the fetish variable for the holders of Bourdieu’s first legacy) will be widely used until the end of the 1980s. Every sociology student who was close to Bourdieu in the 1970s will acknowledge the fetish dimension of the father’s occupation, as we can find evidence of it in the historical sociology of philosophy: the sacred vase was looked for even in the dusty archives of small provincial towns (Fabiani 1988). The preeminence of the father’s occupation will decline at the end of the 1980s, when the explanatory power of income level and educational level will be preferred, while the statisticians in the public service will distance themselves from the type of data analysis that Bourdieu advised and will turn to the methods of econometric regression. Bourdieu developed with Darbel an early critique of sociology based on variables and of regression technique that were linked to it. They considered the quest for the “pure effects” of independent variables (reasoning as all other things being equal) as insufficient to account for the action of social structure on individual attitudes. One can suppose that the writing of the chapter “The end of Malthusianism” in Le partage des bénéfices owed more to Darbel than to Bourdieu, when they analyzed the intractable dimension of quasi-co-linearity. However, as Frédéric Lebaron appositely notes, this critique is pioneering: the statistical reasoning originates in the structural perspective proposed by Bourdieu. “More broadly, they write, they develop a more “structural” conception of causality than the sociology based on variables then widely used by demography and economics”. What is at stake is the study of the global effects of a complex structure of inter-relations that are irreducible to the combination of the “pure effects” of independent variables (Lebaron 2015). Social determinants cannot be treated one by one: the analysis must focus on the constellation of factors that is refracted in a given social group.

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Thirty years later, Andrew Abbott reactivated the same type of criticism, albeit within a frame that had nothing to do with structuralism, but that was the consequence of an interactionist and pragmatist approach in line with the Chicago school of sociology. At the end of his book Department and Discipline, Abbott questions himself on the future of methods in the social sciences (Abbott 1999): what can be defined as the causal analysis grounded on the dependency relations between variables as it is made possible by linear regression seems to him refractory to sociological imagination and a source of illusion concerning the ways by which the social is structured. The “revolution of variables” that characterized sociology seventy years ago created a lot of misunderstanding that led to reify causal analysis and produce a realist vision of it, all the more convincing as it took for granted the scientific dimension of sociology produced in this way. The paradigm of variables understood as fixed entities, which implies that the social world perfectly corresponds to the structure produced by the choice of variables has been questioned in multiple manners in the last thirty years. Scholars criticizing reductionist sociology have emphasized the limitations of a procedure that mainly leads to the de-contextualization of action and the de-historicization of the forms of interaction. Bourdieu and Darbel undoubtedly foresaw the shortcomings of the technique and the interpretative consequences that they bore. When he taught at ensae (National School for Statistics and Economic Analysis), Bourdieu always said: “In order to watch well, one must take off one’s spectacles and see how they function”. He sought to avoid that young statisticians believed that their analytical grids were neutral and that they had no effect on the grasp of reality. One of the most significant aspects of his methodological contribution undoubtedly lies in the historicization of analytical categories and in the study of the social genesis of the public statistical apparatus. One finds there Bourdieu’s reflective choice: Desrosières thinks that it is his second legacy in the methodological domain. This dimension of the work does not interest much statisticians who accompanied the sociologist during the first part of his work, particularly those who knew him in Algiers, but it unites another generation, represented by Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot, more sensitive to the theme of the social construction of reality as well as to a political critique of the state apparatus. The reflective choice applied to statistics will give birth to a revision of the list of categories of occupational-­ professional positions, operated between 1979 and 1982. It clearly bears the mark of Bourdieu’s methodological and theoretical preoccupations. A good illustration can be found in a conference devoted to a history of statistics (Pour une histoire 1977), at the moment when a crisis developed within social history, which had for a long time based its assumptions on long series of data, of which

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one should now acknowledge the diversity of modes of production and the artifactual dimension. This is also the moment when a part of Bourdieu’s disciples started to secede and abandon, for some time or forever, quantitative approach on behalf of other modes of investigation. While Bourdieu was interested in the ways by which ethnomethodology criticizes the use of statistics, he never returned the weapons of historicizing critique against the very principle of quantitative analysis, far from it. Although he invited many times Aaron Cicourel in Paris, he never accepted the devastating conclusions of his first book, Method and Measurement in Sociology (Cicourel 1964). Even in the second part of his career, Bourdieu never liquidated his first legacy. As Claude Seibel notes in a tribute, Distinction, very often considered as the moment of a methodological turn, as the geometrical analysis of data appears for the first time, strongly relies on the data provided by the state statistical apparatus, particularly on the households’ behavior according to main functions. One must acknowledge that the use of data made in the book that gave Bourdieu a popular, academic and international consecrationhe was elected at the Collège de France a short while after its publication, is far from being reflective. Many surveys based on polling (by Ifop and Sofres) are used uncritically when they can bring something to corroborate Bourdieu’s assumptions. Thus, Claude Seibel notes with a little irony that: all those analyses converge toward a spatial representation overlapping in the same bidimensional graph “social positions” and lifestyles”. In spite of that ambiguous form, the notes that precedes the graph in pages 128– 129 is unambiguous. The position of data elements are not the result of the two first axes of a “correspondence analysis”, as it was then practiced by many statisticians. At that time, Bourdieu was very critical about those sophisticated forms of statistical data processing, which were slowly spreading, even in Bourdieu’s journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Seibel 2004:118). Reading Distinction leads to raise a complex question concerning Bourdieu’s methodological inventiveness. The first use of geometrical data analysis dates back to 1976 and will be confirmed in 1979 in Bourdieu’s masterpiece. According to Frédéric Lebaron and many other analysts, the use of that technique is Bourdieu’s methodological trademark, since he found at last the way of representing the notion of social space in a sort of perfect harmony between the concept of field and the tool designed to figure it. “At the end of the 1960s Bourdieu resolutely turns toward gda as he undoubtedly perceives the elective affinity with his structural theory, which is clearly increasingly ­spatialized”

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(Lebaron 20: 48). It is not sure that the chronology can be confirmed. It does not seem that Jean-Paul Benzecri and Pierre Bourdieu, who studied at the same time at the Ecole normale supérieure, met there. All those who sat in Bourdieu’s seminar remember his skeptical comments during a statistician’s presentation: Benzecri sought to promote his tool in all research centers. Alain Darbel, who was a close friend as well as Bourdieu and Passeron’s main advisor with respect to quantitative analysis, died prematurely in 1975. This is precisely at this moment, and not at the end of the previous decade, that a covenant is sealed between the geometrical analysis of data and the theory of fields. It would not be wise to overinterpret that chronology. The intensive use of gda spans from 1976 to 1993, when the purely qualitative and close to journalism The Weight of the World came out. When Distinction was published, quite a few members of Bourdieu’s first circle left him. None of them turned toward gda, as it became the earmark of Bourdieuan orthodoxy within the younger generation. This type of analysis is a variety of multivariate statistics, developed by Benzecri from correspondence analysis, in which data are presented as clouds of dots that allow the researcher to interpret them. As a matter of fact, proximities between dots express similarities between profiles. According to Frédéric Lebaron and Brigitte Leroux, “a gda consists in constructing clouds of dots, in looking for its main axes and in studying clouds projected on the first axes and main sub-spaces” (Lebaron and Le Roux 2015: 7). The readers of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales have become familiar with this type of graphic representation, which they very often identify with the notion of field. The format of this book does not allow to deal with technical considerations. However, it is worth accounting for gda in terms of scientific controversy: there is an opposition between the holders of that type of analysis and her many detractors. gda as proposed by Benzecri was not really successful, except a few uses in medicine and, more significantly, in marketing. Rather than attributing the relative failure of the tool to its very characteristics and its conditions of use, its promoters developed the idea according to which an antagonism would exist between French scientific traditions and Anglo-Saxon ones (more likely to be US) that cannot be attributed to language barriers. In order to understand the reasons for not exporting the method, the users often evoke a form of scientific imperialism. Thus, Philippe Bonnet (Lebaron and Leroux 2015: 34) compares, against all reason, Benzecri’s lack of success with the affair that opposed the French professor Philippe Montagnier and the American professor Robert Gallo concerning the discovery of aids virus. In the gda case, nobody appropriated Benzecri’s method, and this is what explains his followers’ frustration. Pursuing the discussion would be difficult,

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since Bourdieu never said much on his methodological choice of the mid1970s, which seems more of a decision concerning presentation, a strategy of visualization than a radical change in method. One can only bear on a few quotes, as the one in his last lectures at the Collège de France, which present an obvious testamentary dimension: “Those familiar with the principles of multiple correspondence analysis will appreciate the affinity between that method of mathematical analysis and thinking in terms of field” (Bourdieu 2004: 33). This is somewhat short when looking for a methodological treatise. The admirers of gda very often evoke a deadly struggle between their method and another that would be dominant in US sociology, namely regression models. Besides the fact that US sociology is in a state of epistemological anarchy that prevents from distinguishing any unified methodological dominant pole, and the fact that Bourdieu’s school is the only one that makes a regular use of Benzecri’s work in France, this point of view does not survive a rigorous analysis if one considers that the critique of linear regression is frequent in the United States, but that it does not lead to adopt gda as an alternative. Thus, Andrew Abbott and Stanley Lieberson have developed a sharp critique of regression while using methodologies quite different from the one preconized by Bourdieu (Abbott 2001 Lieberson 1987). The radical opposition between two antagonistic methods was largely staged by Bourdieu’s disciples in order to strengthen their cause. This can lead to a fetishism of the tool and to a methodological paranoia. Ideologists attached to one or another method tend to confuse their equipment, now available as software for all kinds of audience, with their theory and the construction of their research object. Neither regression nor gda are representations of reality, but technical means intended to deal with a class of problems or to solve a scientific puzzle. They should not be hypostatized. By the way, for statisticians there is no opposition between the two methods, since they totally differ with respect to their target. Techniques of multiple regression allow us to be certain that the groups being constituted in order to identify the specific action of a variable are equivalent from the point of view of all other variables, a thing that is not possible to do in the social sciences are they are not experimental. Regression is the construction of a model that allows testing different assumptions. Clearly all things cannot be measured, since some variables cannot be quantified, and others can be fully hidden when the model is under construction. For most of the researchers, gda is more of tool for “clearing brush”, which permits to see a little better within the bunch of data at the onset of analysis. Thus, Félicité des Nétumières Humières notes that “the first goal of gda is to allow apprehending as simply as possible the mass of data that the survey gathered and extracting relevant information” (Des Nétumières 1997:

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276). This type of analysis pertains to descriptive statistics, which leads to say that it has no explanatory power. In a clear presentation, Alain Desrosières makes a grammatical comparison: the rhetoric of econometric analyses grounded on regression adopts the language of explanation “turned toward action and control”; gda “turns toward description and narration”. In order to qualify the latter, the historian of statistics evokes “its German ancestor, the 18th century cameral statistics: it offers maps and possible travels, by providing social space with cardinal points (factorial axes), with zones and territories partially coherent, with points of accumulation that deserve a visit, just as remarkable cities” (Desrosières 1995: 29). The co-occurrences described and classed by gda do not allow explaining some features by others. Distinction clearly illustrates this narrative dimension. Bourdieu regrets the ordinary constraints of sociological presentation: One of the difficulties of sociological discourse lies in the fact that, like all language, it unfolds in strictly linear fashion, whereas, to escape oversimplification, and one-sidedness, one ought to be able to recall at every point the whole network of relationships found there (Bourdieu 1984: 126). More than to a revolution in method, which is not much commented, Bourdieu is attentive to the issues of presentation, not for aesthetical reasons, but for configuring the object. Bourdieu became interested, from the very beginning, in the techniques of graphic semiology, through the cartographer Jacques Bertin’s work. Since 1975, with his journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Bourdieu created a tool that was able to renovate the communication of the social sciences: the magazine format, the abundance of illustrations that played a role in the display of evidence and the various boxes, methodological inserts and interview excerpts, all those elements allowed breaking with the linearity of discourse and figuring the multidimensionality of the social space. Distinction gathered all that traits in a thick book that can be accessed in multiple ways. There is no introduction and entering the first chapter is rather abrupt. The back cover of the French edition advised to start with the last chapter, as a form of “critical hygiene”. The term of navigation is appropriate to the reading of the book, as it multiplies different levels and requires from the reader a wide range of cognitive resources. One knows that Bourdieu was interested in literary avant-garde, as his references to Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard show. Without making them explicit, his great book uses literary and graphic techniques that distinguish it from the dominant production in sociology. He practices a transgression that is undoubtedly the consequence of his

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reflective commitment. Uni-linearity mutilates the object and reduces social space to one of its dimensions. In order to restore the whole picture, one must use all the resources of the printed page. Thus, the partial recourse to gda is an instrument among others of a strategy of exposition more than the expression of a methodological choice. The results of the survey could be presented in the form of classic tabulations, since it was done long before Bourdieu got to know Benzecri’s work. The book, like great novels, is a polyphony where the most sophisticated is displayed in a vast array of foods, drinks, canvasses and music, which culminates, at the center with a double page excerpted from Madame Figaro, where a sister in a law of a minister, shows her bedroom, “samovar and cosy”. The great force of Bourdieu’s method, which is also its limitation, lies in the unification of the analytical frame intended to account for cultural forms. The frame of distinction has a universal validity and subsumes the diversity of symbolic goods present at the same time in a given society, either on the side of production or on the side of reception of works. Many criticisms addressed to Distinction exploited the lasting effects of the misunderstanding stemming from the methodological decision that homogenized cultural corpuses in order to give them a specific grade in legitimacy. The central dimension of symbolic domination installed them on a scale of which the measuring principle was invariable. The detractors of cultural legitimacy theory had a rather easy job: it presupposed simultaneously, without ever making their coexistence clear, the limitless power of a symbolic imposition that had equal effects on all the members of a given society, and the absolute ignorance of learned culture among popular classes. How can aesthetic forms that are extremely far from agents have continuous terrorizing effects while they are unable to decode them? How can one be impressed by symbols that they cannot link to any interpretative frame? Bourdieu’s theory never dealt with the difficulty, although the methodological issue was evoked at times, for instance when he stated that peasants’ answers to surveys could not be taken into account, as they were so far from cultural forms that any analysis proved impossible. If one looks at the methodological remarks in the appendix of the book, one can find an unexpected approach to the inaugural statements of Distinction: the working class as a whole has not the usual weight that it has in representative samples. This is even more so in the case of semi-skilled workers and unskilled laborers, “who are very uniform with regard to the object of the survey, i.e. very uniformly excluded from legitimate culture” (Bourdieu 1984: 505). When it comes to farmers and farm-workers, they are purely and simply excluded from the picture, “after a preliminary survey which showed that the questionnaire was completely inappropriate and quite other methods were

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required to identify the dispositions of a population totally excluded from legitimate culture and even, to a large extent, from “middle-brow” culture”. Data analyzed by Bourdieu in Distinction allowed him to state that a significant number of agents holding a degree and belonging to various fractions of the dominant class could express their taste for non-legitimate singers, such as Luis Mariano or Petula Clark. Here again, it is more the relationship to practice than the nature of objects that allows to account for the proper effects of distinction. One must acknowledge that the mode of presentation of data does not make the reader’s task easy. The ways by which cultural objects are brought in the book sometimes lead to oversimplification, certainly reinforced by its extraordinary commercial success in France, which multiplied cultural misunderstandings. Sociologists inspired by Bourdieu have remained silent on the phenomenon. This not a sufficient reason for contemporary sociologists to abstain from reassessing it dispassionately, as they are now free from the little profits of distinction offered to hasty contenders who claimed to have superseded Bourdieu. Remembering the post-Weberian controversy about The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism allows understanding to a large extent the recurrent debate over Distinction. A range of objections lies in the total refusal of any objectification of aesthetic relationship, in the way theologians refused, out of principle, to accept Weber’s theoretically agnostic position, as he fully embedded religion in the social and economic world, exactly as Bourdieu embedded art and the whole symbolic goods in the social world. His gesture was interpreted by cultural zealots as a sacrilege. However, there are other objections that lead to question distinction theory in question. As he wanted to establish the universal power of his model, Bourdieu was often led to an overuse of data, eased by the rejection of big chunks of the statistical apparatus to appendices. Thus, how is a legitimate taste distinguished, so that it constitutes a separate world, from middle-brow and popular tastes? It is authorized by the comments on tables indicating stratified preferences as they are referred to a general theory of taste. The sociologist can assert that “popular taste” represented by the choice of “easy-listening” music or of devaluated legitimate music such as The Beautiful Blue Danube or The Arlésienne, or, even more, of songs totally devoid from any artistic ambition, embodied by Luis Mariano, Georges Guétary or Petula Clark, because the maximal frequency of those preferences can be found among popular classes and is inversely proportional to scholarly capital; this explains why it is more frequent among commercial and industrial employers than among public sector executives or even primary school teachers and cultural intermediaries. What are the figures? In a sample of 143 agents of popular classes without any degree, 31% declare a preference for Petula

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Clark. On the contrary, in a sample of 432 agents of upper classes having at least a high school degree, 17% only show the same preference. One cannot conclude from the uneven distribution of cultural competencies and preferences to a general theory of the distinctive properties of cultural consumption without any other mediation, all the more so when one knows that the differences from which those conclusions are drawn are more tenuous than it appears. The empirical reassessment of the survey allows us to understand its domain of validity and to propose alternative visions based on the principle of scalar variation and on a more dynamic representation of the consumers’ cultural competencies than the one offered by Bourdieu. Distinction is fascinating by all what it shows: practices, but also bodies and attitudes. The presentation is partly based on a feeling of familiarity from the reader. Page 191 is titled: The body for the job. Six photos (five men, one women) illustrate French people’s food consumption. The size of photos and the quality of reproduction do not facilitate the identification of the job, although the physical attitudes are quite typical. One can recognize the Air France elegant flight attendant and the mustachioed butcher who carves the meat, wearing his bérêt basque. They stand in sharp contrast. What can a reader do with that page? Methodological appendices remain silent about it. However, a part of what can be called the “Bourdieu effect” depends on the reader’s agency, as he is confronted to the plurality of language levels, from its more trivial forms to the sociologist’s discourse that grasps all the complexity of the social world. The book was a success that went far beyond the circle of peers: although there is no survey of its reception, one can think that readings were very diverse. Of course, those questions are not peculiar to Bourdieu’s work, but they are particularly relevant, due to the overlap of different narrative registers and to the relative marginalization of his methodological discourse, a striking feature of his endeavor. In a remarkable chapter of his Sociological Reasoning, “What a table says and what is said about it”, Jean-Claude Passeron insists on the misunderstanding that shapes the relations between “corporative epistemologies” of history and sociology: “The difficulty of moving between statements which can be formulated in the language of variables and statements whose meaning refers to a historical context is due to the fact that such a context can never itself be fully described in the language of variables” (Passeron 2013: 240). Passeron’s remark is valid for all forms of statistical analysis, including gda. Confronting statisticians with to sociologists is a good way of fighting both the ­experimentalist illusion of the former, which leads them to believe that the world is not historical but governed by physical laws, and the hermeneutic illusion of the latter, which comforts them to believe that natural language and narrative has a superior capacity to construct meaning. The attempt to deflate

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interpretation that was proposed earlier about musical tastes in Distinction situates itself in that perspective. It offered a “flat” reading of the tables and to measure the distance between what they told and what they were told to say by the author. Passeron expresses the principle that governs the interpretation of statistical data: “The statement of a statistical relationship in the historical sciences always call for operations of semantic completion and enunciatory overstatements; if the sociologist fails to take them on consciously they still operate, but without his awareness” (Passeron 2013: 241). In Distinction, more than in the author’s previous works, a part of the interpretation is left to the reader. There is a big gap between data processing and data commenting. The construction of the book is very clever: it is based on the postponing of what should have been the first chapter in a classic construction (“The Social Space and its Transformations”). Bourdieu starts with a study of cultural preferences and broadens the focal length to the whole social space, which that allows him to account for the stratification of tastes as shown at the opening of the book. Boxes like: “A Young Executive who Knows How to Live”, an addition of interview clips of which the conditions of production remain unknown, coexist with a very complex theoretical argument, while information on data gathering and processing is put back to footnotes. While a lot of objections against Bourdieu’s book do not survive analysis since he refuted them in advance, false and inflationist readings proliferate: they are triggered by the saturation of realistic effects provided by the bits of narrative as well as the presence of dishes (veal liver alla Veneziana, veal cutlet with cream sauce); they take for granted categories created to meet the needs of the relational analysis. Many people found easily their way into Distinction, but most of the time they recognized their neighbor, the petit-bourgeois wearing a beret, the self-taught jazz lover who collects index cards or the bank executive who drinks a magnum of Veuve Cliquot three times a month. They recognized them, and they laughed, as people seldom laugh in reading sociology books. No doubt: Bourdieu wanted to break with the classic academic form of exposition, and he was sincere about it. His choice was productive. However, the rupture created a new set of difficulties: the cloud of dots of gda produced a realistic illusion that was reinforced by the rhetoric emphasizing affinities between method and theory. The theory of domination and of legitimacy were never made fully explicit and no empirical evidence was produced about them. They preexisted with respect to the construction of the survey and constituted the only interpretative frame. Illustrations were used as proofs. Nevertheless, the book still holds. It has been for more than forty years a major reference for all those who work in the sociology of culture, in France as

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well as elsewhere. The anchoring of the argument in a peculiar context, France in the first years of the Fifth Republic, does not suffice to date it univocally and to lock it in a time of which it would be a mere account. The critique of the limitations of statistical reasoning or of the overlap of elements designed to convince the reader does not lead to disqualify the endeavor. Bourdieu’s peculiar social ontology, visible in the quite desperate vision of a petite-bourgeoisie doomed to live a sort of fac-simile existence, a trait probably linked to his own trajectory, does not constraint the successive pacts of reception that made the book the first reference in the sociology of culture, whether one thinks with Bourdieu, or against him. In a review that came out right after the publication of the book, Pierre Encrevé aptly sums up the main features of an endeavor that remains unique in the social sciences: In order to prevent learned language from functioning as usual as a denial of reality through distancing, Bourdieu had to renew the very form of sociological discourse and to invent a new object, a very singular book that also suggests another way of reading. He multiplies languages, juxtaposing photos and words, fac-similes of documents and synoptic schemas and edited interviews: those are never mere illustrations but become elements of the text. Writings collide, challenge and interpret each other. A dead philosophical opposition-form and substance, lies side by side with pictures of President Giscard d’Estaing and a bodybuilder. A table of the distribution of foodways is reactivated by the ethnographic description of a popular class meal. All this apparatus, where totality appears in each element-an effect usually reserved to literature- just asks to work by and for the reader (Encrevé 1979). The reference to literature is essential: Encrevé mentions Proust in another part of the article. How to locate then the craft of sociology, by which Bourdieu started his career? If the reader is invited to take a walk in an open work, who will control his interpretative games? Distinction expresses at its highest level the essential tension at work: the will to develop a science like others is confronted with the necessity to transgress the established forms of scholarly production. A naturalist epistemology that does not make room for the historical dimension of the objects of the social sciences, contrary to Max Weber who is one of his main inspiring sources, coexists with the ambition to account for society through a wide range of expressive means. At the end of this little methodological trip, one can better understand how Bourdieu’s inventiveness sometimes turned against itself. By dividing into three moments his relationship to the statistical instrument, Alain Desrosières clearly shows the

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complexity of the sociologist’s itinerary. First, since Algeria until 1970, he relied on the calculating power of the state to build up his own scientific space: at that time he often co-authored with statisticians from Insee. Second, in the 1970s (including Distinction) he considered that the state is the producer and the controller of social categories and insisted on the political role of statistics. Third, “due to the thrust of the neoliberal wave against the state, he gives a more nuanced analysis of it and suggests to distinguish between its ‘right hand’ and its ‘left hand’, in a language more militant than scientific, which suits better the mobilization of public service agents. As a consequence, he feels again the need to use a statistic argument to comfort his political fight” (Desrosières 2003: 218). At that point, Bourdieu ceased to invent methods and his will to do science that he still strongly manifested could not be translated into his practice as public intellectual. Meanwhile, partly due to the use of gda that comforts the presentist uses of the field, history is pushed into the background. It was central at the beginning of his endeavor, with the dual legacy of Durkheim and Weber. It vanished at twilight, submersed by the emergency of present mobilizations. It is now necessary to give a more precise account of the importance of historical inquiry in Bourdieu’s work.

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Event, Structure and History Although he gave a central role to the notion of social space in his methodology, Bourdieu did not renounce the historical approach. Structuralism is not necessarily ahistorical, as it is often believed, since a structure can be defined as a system of transformations, which implies that it is able to integrate temporal dynamics. Although the notion of social change is not entirely satisfactory, we can say that his system attached value to it, mainly through the notion of hysteresis. Besides, by inscribing his work in the lineage of the social genesis of categories that Durkheim and Mauss inaugurated, he pursued tenaciously the historicization of the forms through which we deal with the social world. His seminar welcomed very early the most important historians, particularly the British ones, such as Edward. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and there are a lot of articles dealing with history and historical sociology in his journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Historians and historical sociologists read him a lot and make extensive use of his concepts. Let me evoke at this point the historian Christophe Charle, who imported the method into his own discipline, and Roger Chartier, who constantly conversed with Bourdieu, however without adopting his style of analysis. In his thoughts about the transformations of social history in France, Jacques Revel noticed the importance that the historians of his generation attached to the works of Pierre Bourdieu, but he qualified his statement by noticing that the second history of mentalities “soon realized that there was a gap that could possibly exist between social segmentations and cultural dispositions. Hence the idea of changing the point of view that had mobilized many of us at the turn of the eighties and asking whether or not social practices could as well produce social distinction” (Revel 2006: 23). In the last years of the 20th century, during which the wave of structuralism flowed back, Bourdieu’s model seemed obsolete to many young historians, entering their career and willing to free themselves from the supervision of sociology that seemed to herald the triumph of an unified social science. However, in the USA, the renewers of the historical sociology have often seen Bourdieu as an inspiration, as reflected in the collective book Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, published in 2013. Among the contributors are many prominent names in the field. It seems that there is no doubt about the case: by proclaiming the cohesion of the social sciences, so much that the singular is used to qualify the produced knowledge-rather oddly taking back the designation that Frédéric Le Play gave

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004442610_007 Jean-Louis

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to the activity-Bourdieu reconciled sociology and history in a unified proposal that did not however present the imperious features that many historians kept seeing in the Durkheimian endeavor. Simiand’s famous article on method, published in 1903, concealed a project of annexation under an offer of service (Simiand 1903): Durkheimians proposed to historians altogether a project, a style of intervention and a model of intellectual sociability, Jacques Revel added. We know that from the point of view of Simiand, the critical methods of history are not sufficient to define the scientific nature of the discipline, but only constitute a particular “process of knowledge”. Science cannot only be defined by an empirical methodology, as thorough as it may be. It depends on the work of a conceptual construction and on the construction of a body of hypotheses waiting to be verified. Simiand’s article represents a deep criticism of the primacy of the historical fact. We know, particulary after reading Jacques Revel, what the founding members of the Annales would later make out of the program of Simiand, in spite of the brutality that he used to deal with their body of knowledge: “The primacy of the history as problem, the search for models, the convergence toward a social science, and even the call for collective work and for broad surveys, are all important issues in the historiography yet to come”. Let’s go back to Bourdieu: he was an incomparable reader of historians’ works, first about culture and art history, on which he carefully built his Flaubert and his Manet, then about political history, on which much of his teaching on the state relies (Bourdieu 2014). If he did not develop his work in programming a historical sociology, as Weber systematically did and Durkheim committed to doing in The Evolution of Educational Thought, Bourdieu understood very early that the historical foundation of a social science was a necessity. Many of his remarks about the desynchronization of temporalities, particularly within the educational system, owe so much to Durkheim as well as to the foreword that Halbwachs wrote in 1938 for the posthumous publication of his lectures on the French educational system. The concept of inertia, developed by the latter in order to describe the discrepancy that can exist between an educational form inherited from the past and the present of the actual social conditions, gather a few features that will help Bourdieu build the key concept of hysteresis. The repeated reference to the sentence of Durkheim, “The Unconscious is History” illustrates this filiation too. Should we go further if everything seems to contribute to the representation of a prolific encounter between sociology and history? Are we at risk of placing Bourdieu under a kind of suspicion by suggesting that he sacrificed the integration of multiple temporalities for a too constraining metaphor of the social space, all the more since it was displayed in the mature work in the form of

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a geometrical analysis? In fact, the matter is much more complex. The relation of Bourdieu’s system to history concentrates all the difficulties of his theory. Sociology has strived to break with the dominant narrative forms used in history in the course of its development. So the farewell to the narrative was mandatory for every good reader of the founding article of François Simiand. The need to locate the space of inquiry at a macro level and the preference given to the quantitative treatment of data required to split with the traditional narrative mode of the discipline, as well as with the chronological imperative and the taste for biographies and events. Jacques Revel reminded us that since the beginnings of Greek history, “the link between a knowledge operation and a form has been constitutive of the historical genre”. The project of a scientific history has set as a main goal the disqualification of the mode of literary exhibition long preferred by the discipline as well as the privilege given to the singular and the eventful. It is only under the condition of rigorously building the facts from a hypothesis and of proceeding to an empirical validation of that construction that history can claim to meet the standards of scientific production. The literary aspect of its traditional narrative mode and the reduction of history to its eventful and spectacular components locate it on the side of literature. In order to become a science, it has to break away from those traditional patterns. This configuration has been dominant for the historiographical production for decades, particularly in France. It was widely redesigned about thirty years ago, as historians and anthropologists gradually questioned their approach to field research and to writing when they started to cast doubt on the certainties of structuralism. In France, sociology remained widely exempt of them, perhaps because the dominant form of disciplinary practice during the last quarter of the century favored, with little concern for reflexivity, analytical models that belong to what is called “Mixed Media” in art history, and that associate, within a structural analytical frame, narrative modes with elements that are formalized primarily for an illustrative use. The most famous example in that regard, because it is the most effective, is without any doubt Distinction. The presentation of the sociology of taste indeed is striking because of the combined presence -but relatively independent- of a sociological narrative, of survey data of which the conditions of production are only evoked in the appendix, and of illustrations that are extracted from different heterogeneous corpuses and interviews: a significant amount of the interpretative work is left to the reader, who does not necessarily identify the narrative and analytical construction that she faces. Thereby, the taken for granted opposition between quantitative and qualitative, between analysis and narrative, between reasoning and reporting can be subjected to a questioning that does not find a clear answer in the work.

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In order to shed more light on this matter, we should analyze the works in which the sociologist deals with historical material: they are often closer to art, literature and social and intellectual life, that were the main subjects – with Algeria and Béarn – of his empirical investigations. The Nineteenth Century plays a key role here, but we can consider Homo Academicus as a historical sociology of the May 68 movement. We can approach the object in two ways: first, report what is in a somewhat cavalier fashion called the historical method of Bourdieu, starting from a choice of objects: second, we must study the uses that he makes out of the historic field, through the games of references and borrowings. It will then be possible to assess the way he contextualizes a temporal change that bears his brand and remain focused on the concept of hysteresis. I will then try to assess the conditions of productivity of an approach of history mainly based on the concept of structural gap. Three books by Bourdieu can be labeled as historical sociology: The Rules of Art, Manet and Homo academicus. There is an elaborate form of sociology of the revolutions developed in terms of structural logic. In the first two cases, it is an accomplished symbolic revolution, in the third we find ourselves confronted with a failed political revolution. Theda Skocpol, who created a whole field of research dealing with historical sociology, does not appear in these books, whereas her work will be widely used in the lectures on the State. As usual, Bourdieu keeps away from the sociological tradition, in order to better formulate his own evaluation grid. How can we appreciate a chain of events that constitutes what is ordinarily called “May 68”? The sociologist, who was often praised – with his colleague Jean-Claude Passeron – for his intuition of the student uprising in Reproduction, waited for almost twenty years to deliver his analysis, while there was a plethora of works in the months following the crisis. The power of the movement and its quick backflow generated an intense editorial activity. The discipline was not unanimous about it. May 68 generated many lasting divides. Some found there grounds to justify their conservative position towards every social uprising, as Raymond Aron and François Bourricaud, who taught in Nanterre and knew the virtues and the limits of the non-directive pedagogy. Some others used it to develop sociological interpretations that comforted their own conceptualization: this is for example the case with Edgar Morin who popularized his famous “Lutte des classes d’âge” (Age Group Struggle) that was widely revived in French society. Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis, working at the juncture between philosophy and sociology, stressed the “breach” that May 68 opened in the dominant ideological representation of democratic societies, considered as incapable of revolutionary uprising. Much less extensively, and mainly around the journal Esprit, the

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notion of “cultural revolution” worked its way through, by separating the symbolic dimensions of the movement from their radical political expression. May 68 represented a unique opportunity for the spread of critical thinking in the social world. Sociology and sociologists were thereby given confidence, because they could be easily identified as the suspicious observers of a society that had become unbearable for many of its members. If Bourdieu waited so long, it is because he was hardly receptive to the simple dynamic of the event, and he judged with some harshness the protagonists of what he called a failed revolution. The disbelief that he showed regarding the pioneering work of E.P Thompson is therefore remarkable. The Making of the English Working Class is a publication that established the processual approach in history (Thompson 1963). In the general sociology lectures, it is reduced to a “more or less spontaneous” perspective. He adds: “the Marxist historian E.P Thompson describes the class as an event, a happening, an emergence”. In the last part of Homo Academicus he describes precisely his conception of historical analysis: “Those who pay instant attention to the instant, which, drowned in the event and the emotions it arouses, isolates the critical moment and thus constitutes it as a totality containing within itself its own explanation introduce thereby a philosophy of history: they tend to presuppose that there are in history moments which are privileged in some way more historical than others … The scientific ambition, on the other hand, aims to reinsert the extraordinary event within which it finds it explanation”. There is an illusion of the event that its affective dimension supports. “The immediate attention for the immediate, that is diluted in the events and the affects that it stimulates, isolates the critical moment, and constitutes it as a totality containing in itself its own explanation. It brings philosophy of history: it leads to think that there are special moments in history, more historic than others so to speak. The scientific purpose aims on the contrary to replace the chain of extraordinary events in the chain of ordinary events in which it explains itself”. The historical explanation cannot be fully contained in a mere structuralist explanation. The starting point is a structural crisis of the academic field: the transition from an organic state to a critical state of the system, a notion that Bourdieu and Passeron had already borrowed from Auguste Comte in Reproduction, can be first explained by morphological changes. Changes in the reproduction mode of the teaching staff led to a crisis of succession: the recruited assistant-lecturers neither shared the same socio-demographic features nor the same habitus as their predecessors, and could not even aspire to the same type of career that the homology of former academical habituses and the possession of a state dissertation (thèse d’Etat) allowed to envision. New entrants understood quickly enough that their promotion was in fact funny money. Bourdieu thus notes:

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“All the conditions had been met, so that, in medium/long term, the new entrants that were the furthest from possessing the properties and disposals that can ensure a career that was formerly guaranteed to all of the people that accessed higher education, that is the grammar Agrégé that became assistant at 35 as well as the sociology bachelor appointed at 28, just found out that the continuity of the career standards (as attested by the proprieties of the full professors in Parisian universities at the time of the survey) made fictitious the transgression of the recruitment standards which they benefited from” (Bourdieu 1988). The explanation here is given only by the structural gap between recruitment standards and career standards. The system is here unlocked from the fact that he accepted in droves new entrants that did not share the same features as their predecessors, but the lock was soon rebuilt when it came to lead a career in the institution. A glass ceiling quickly appeared and condemned many of the new entrants to hit the wall of career progress. The morphological crisis was redoubled by a belief crisis. The former recruitment mode, that coincided with the organic state of the system, was the anticipated co-option where dominants recruited their potential peer. The homogeneity of the body relied on the homology of the habituses. On the contrary, the transformation of the recruitment methods, that led to bring new entrants with less credentials and socially remote from the traditional homines academici also, led to two strongly distinguished types of vested interests: one for the full professors and one for the subordinate agents of the system. The new entrants ceased to believe in the idea of a unified body based on the standard of delayed counter-gift constituted, where you should not take umbrage with remaining the assistant of a master, assured that you would become a master over time. When delivering his analysis, Bourdieu makes two statements that have a different status. On the one hand, we can only understand a historical situation if we apply an analytical model, which he calls “the analysis of the structural conditions of the crisis”, that blends with complexity the Comtean distinction between organic state and critical state with the Durkheimian theory of morphological change, and his own thematic about the crisis of the belief in a symbolic authority. On the other hand, theoretical questions should be thought of as historical questions, in accordance with the principle that consists in permanently denying the autonomization of a theoretical standard. Bourdieu kept stating this since Outline of a Theory of Practice. The crisis is always the result of the disruption of the homeostatic state of the system. But was there once any state in the social world close to homeostasis? The question remains about knowing if he actually applied his project of total historicization of the concepts. It seems that the most important explicative trigger remains the opposition between organic state and critical state, between

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homeostasis and the loss of equilibrium among parties inherited from Auguste Comte. There are obviously situations that are much more unbalanced than others. But when Bourdieu refers to an organic state in order to define the past of the teaching institution, he overlooks, perhaps unintentionally, that what we understand as organic state can be described, if we take another perspective, as a critical state. Thus the first decades of the Third Republic in France are often described as a golden age of the teaching system in which the homeostasis was reached through the perfect match between institutional expectations, the homology of habitus among teachers and students and the stability of value of the credentials on the labor market. A finer analysis shows that this system went through many crises, which, although they took other shapes than the crisis at the end of the 20th century, were no less intense (Fabiani 1988). For Bourdieu the crisis inevitably takes the shape of a structural gap, a shape that he often points out in italics in order to stress the importance of the gap between the statutory aspirations that individuals inherited from their perception of the former state of the system and the “actual insured chances” by the credentials they possess when the equilibrium conditions have changed. The effects of this gap never start to appear purely mechanically. Even though he did not exploit in his theory all the possibilities offered by his analysis of the time lag between the actuality of the morphological transformations of higher education and the perception that the agents have of their actual consequences, that can be summed up as a notion of downgrade, Bourdieu often evokes the permanent desynchronization of the different levels of structure. One can say that there are gaps inside the gaps; the time of perception of the changes is not homogeneous if we consider the different social groups and their differential ability to appropriate the present or if one considers different moments in history. There is no such thing as a mechanistic determinism in the words of Bourdieu: different modes of articulation between gaps and perception of gaps are possible in the theory itself. It is in this opening that he develops his most pertinent analyses on the effects of allodoxia in the field of teaching: some agents can continue to be satisfied with the nominal value of their education credentials or their subordinate position within the system because the distance produced by their modest social background tends to satisfy them with what they have. Regarding those with a higher social background, the relationship to the depreciation can be expressed in the mode of the double conscience: young bourgeois who are bad students tend to follow studies or careers that keep a fuzziness about the determination of their social identity. In order for the structural gap phenomena to be able to fully produce an effect, they must be coupled with structural affinities between different groups. To appreciate the effervescence from the 68 movement, Bourdieu summons

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the morphological homology between students end subordinate teachers. While the population of teachers and of the students of the Grandes Ecoles roughly remained steady between 1950 and 1968, the population of the students and the subordinate teachers at universities surged. According to Bourdieu, the agents excluded from the race tend to contest the conditions of this very same race. It is then possible to relate the analysis of May 68 to a “general model of revolutionary processes”. The initial drive comes from the perception of a gap between objective chances and subjective expectations. It leads the less dominated amongst the dominated (in this case the teachers and the petit-­bourgeois) to refuse the conditions of the competition and to enter a revolutionary struggle that aims to build other stakes, and through them, another sphere of power. Here I want to highlight two things: on the one hand, the revolutionary process constitutes a brutal interruption of the illusio that leads the agents to enter the sphere and to play the game by the same rules of this game. Hence the revolutionary breach constitutes a breach of the spirit of the game. On the other hand, agents of the revolutionary process are never recruited amongst the most dominated, but rather amongst the less dominated of the dominated. This idea is close to the paradox that Tocqueville described regarding France in The Old Regime and the Revolution: the most deprived are never the ones to commit to the revolution, but rather the ones with a relative position that leads them to think their situation so unbearable that they commit to it. The Tocquevillian pattern will find a huge success in the US functionalist sociology as relative deprivation. Even then, the demands of the lexicon tend to mask quite a few sociological continuities. Gap, affinity but also conjuncture. Bourdieu is fully aware of the fact that structural elements are insufficient to explain the occurrence of disruptive events. In order for the crisis to happen, it must benefit from the conjunction of independent causal chains: Cournot is then summoned, this time in his own name, but at the expense of some kind of twist. As a matter of fact, the mathematician insists on the fact that “in order to understand each other, attention should be exclusively given to what is fundamental and categorical in the notion of chance, that is the idea of independence or of non-solidarity between various chains and causes” (Cournot 1843: 62). According to Bourdieu, this non-solidarity of chains is questioned by the field theory. If the independence is guaranteed by the relative autonomy of the fields, which the sociologist expresses in terms of separated worlds, the encounter of causal chains is allowed by “the relative dependence on fundamental structures – particularly in the economy – that makes the historical event possible”. The sociologist does not intend to discharge the event, but he wishes to see it as a structural effect: the event is the product of the interaction between different fields, various but

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linked between one another and subjected to the same factors. Bourdieu thus rectifies Cournot, evoking the “independence in the dependence”, whereas the latter had insisted on the non-solidarity of the chains as a condition of the production of the event. Although the sociologist recognizes to some extent the importance of accidents, such as a police crackdown and the answers given to it, he wastes no time about the own dynamic of the event. This remains fully taken in the grids of structural homology. One can only understand the extension of the movement if one can state the synchronization between the crisis that affects each field or subfield: “agents holding so far homologous positions in different fields” are committed to play the same game. Bourdieu is led to use again the notion of objective orchestration in order to account for the process of unification of positions that amplifies the crisis. It is important to note that the critical state of fields is constructed on the same basis as the organic state: the homology of habituses is the necessary and sufficient condition for collective action, either that the agents adhere to the rules that prevail in the field in an unconscious way, through illusio, or on the contrary, their eyes suddenly opened, they refuse to play the game and propose other rules. The model is thus extremely elegant, in the mathematical meaning of the term, since it is based on a fairly simple axiomatic: whether organic or critical, the states of the world are always structural effects. In the same way, allodoxia, based on a wrong interpretation of the situation, can lead to two radically opposed attitudes. Some amongst the most dominated may consent to the keeping of the established order because they do not take into account demonetization of their capital; others more likely to belong to the petite bourgeoisie may be victims of the same effect identifying “rightly or wrongly” themselves with the movement. The phrase “rightly or wrongly” expresses better than long theoretical elaborations the inherent contradiction present in every general theory, whatever the object on which it asserts. In order to account for all possible cases, this one is forced to simultaneously state the independence and the interdependence of causal chains, the momentary suspension of the governing rules of the field and their continuous functioning in critical situations. It leads to thinking the allodoxia effect as pertaining to a false or just perception (rightly or wrongly). I believe that it is a high price for a general theory of revolutionary processes, particularly if one acknowledges, as Bourdieu did, that May 68 was not a genuine revolution. Homo academicus is only partly a historical work. The event only remains an abstraction situated in a fold of the structure. According to Craig Calhoun, one of the American experts on Bourdieu, The Rules of Art constitute his strongest historical research (Gorski 2013: 52). However, it is not presented as a history book. Although the substance is mostly on the French case, the author’s

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ambition goes well beyond the limits of a historical monograph on the French literary field in the nineteenth century. The absence of a chronological outline is not what is at issue: this one has ceased to be for a long time a condition of the historical form. As a matter of fact, literary history is only a resource mobilized for a broader program, i.e. annexing literary studies to sociology. Sociology must define its territory, with respect to other disciplines that deal with texts. According to Bourdieu, the “science of works” must constitute itself by radically opposing the bedrock of literary analysis that starts from taken for granted the uniqueness and singularity of the artwork crystallized in the notion of creative project. Bourdieu sees in Sartre the accomplishment, as well as its simultaneous unveiling, of the discourse of mythical foundation that reads the successive developments of the work as the historical inscription of an original project. By pushing to the limit the antireductionist position that makes the artistic creator a self- creator, Sartre allows us to uncover the implicit dimension of all the methodologies of literary analysis that are based on the relationship between biography and artwork or that are grounded on textual singularities, as in all formalisms. The operation of sociologization of literary objects has been a great success, partly because teaching of French entered a deep crisis at the onset of the seventies: Bourdieu offered a fruitful alternative to a discipline struck by a great confusion. By the way the books starts with a spectacular execution of Danièle Sallenave, whose eulogy of reading that constitutes The Gift of the Deads (1991) is seen by Bourdieu as a dull academic drill. One can find here the sociologist clad in the armor of fighting prophet, but certainly not the historian seeking to define a new method. The book can be divided into two very different moments, quite loosely tied. The first one, defined as a prologue, is a stunning structural analysis of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The structure of the book, defined as a social space in which Frédéric’s adventures take place, happens to be the structure of the social space in which Flaubert was situated. Frédéric is an “undetermined being” who challenges the “fundamental law of the field of power”, whereas the other characters are defined quite sociologically by a kind of “generative formula”, a genuine identification kit (such as Martinon’s clipped beard) that announces all their subsequent behaviors. The other parts of the book draw a composite set of elements where one can notice on the one hand frequent jumps between the leading frame, devoted to the French literary field in the nineteenth century and to the conquest of artistic autonomy, and on the other hand adventitious episodes that deal with the market of symbolic goods in the second half on the Nineteenth century, but also on methodological issues, oddly located at the heart of the book. It ends with a plea for creative autonomy

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written in a feverish prose that announces Bourdieu’s pessimistic concerns in his last years. One must try to reconstruct the logic of Bourdieu’s endeavor, starting from a synthetic approach. By refusing a unilinear model of development for the literary field, he tries to bring the principle of historical variation back in his structural analysis. Three joint statements allow us clarifying his position: – First, the second half of the nineteenth century is defined as the “moment when the literary field reaches a degree of autonomy that has never been surpassed ever since”. However nothing allows knowing precisely from which historical process (that could be theoretically measured by the quantity of accumulated labor by the successive writers’ generations) this peak is the result. One cannot know either if this degree of autonomy is unsurpassable, if it constitutes an objective limit or if the movement has been interrupted by some type of factor that should be uncovered.-Second, eras and national traditions impact fields with a specific stamping. The reference to national peculiarities easily allows thinking about the diverse functional logics of artworlds within comparable contexts with respect to economic development or general educational level. – Third the autonomizing process is reversible although the author does not give many details on the conditions or the circumstances of reversibility. Things can always change brutally. By contrast, Bourdieu notices that “the history of the field is really irreversible; and the products of this relatively autonomous history offer a kind of cumulativity”. The end of the Twentieth century looks paradoxical: whereas all the legitimate artistic production (what the author calls the restricted field of production) is placed under the label of maximal reflexivity (art is constituted as a whole by self-­commentary), the threats against the field autonomy have never been so strong. A contradiction can be perceived between the slowness of the accumulation process of aesthetic resources that mostly operates a series of power grabs or hijackings at the expense of the owners of the economic and political powers on the one hand, and the speed of the regression towards heteronomy on the other. It is not clear that the author is aware of this contradiction. He does not bring any other explanatory element to account for the dangers that threaten intellectuals and artists at the end of twentieth century, except that new corrupting mechanisms exist, through changes in the media and sponsorship. As a matter of fact, the paradoxical conquest of a world of freedom, which that plays with economic and political determinations, is always to be reclaimed. Independence can only be maintained if the agents who occupy the position of the pure artist are fully provided with its distinctive ­properties.

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The principle of non- cumulativity is sketched here, but it is difficult to go further in the process of historicization of the literary field. History is outweighed by the quest for modelization (Fabiani 2007). If the lectures on Manet are in many ways similar to The Rules of Art by its reference to the logic of fields, they look largely freed from the constraints of structural homology. One owes perhaps the impression of freedom to the lecture form, undoubtedly the most free-rolling and joyful amongst those Bourdieu taught at the Collège de France. He had reflected upon this project since his youth: some pupils of the Moulins Lycée reported that he taught a class on Impressionists and that he showed them the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, a painting that they had never seen before. The sociologist gathered comprehensive documentation on art history, a discipline that he respected much more than literary studies, as if, through the occasional criticisms of the art historians’ intellectualism and incapacity to ask the right questions about the works that they analyzed, there emerged some admiration for their bold confrontation with pictures. Bourdieu often dares to go into iconographic analysis. This one is less constrained by structural effects than literature, and it often hits the target, associating the sociologist’s eye with the art historian’s one. The assumed partnership with the experts is fruitful. It allows for the grounding of sociological reasoning on facts that was not always present in The Rules of Art. The lectures look like a journey that includes excursions and returns on the objects originated by the public’s questions. The induced sinuosity does not allow Bourdieu to build a monograph on Manet but rather invites to diversify perspectives and angles of attack. The theory of fields is not weakened but complexified by the confrontation with positive facts that art historians analyze. Bourdieu has been criticized for reducing the world of reception to a pale copy of the world of artistic production and for indulging himself in the false facilities of homology, but the research on Manet tends to fissure the usual frames of structural analysis. Bourdieu is not always conscious of this process since he constantly strives to go back to the doctrine in order to stitch together his argument. The February 23rd lecture, absolutely fascinating, is significant in this respect. The sociologist relies on the work of Joel Isaacson and Jean-Paul Bouillon (Isacson and Bouillon 1989) to show how artists’ societies have enabled, by their expressive refusal of pictorial academism, a “universe favorable to Manet’s oeuvres)”. These societies present two aspects: they are commercial endeavors designed to favor the artists’ economic survival but also circles based on proper aesthetic intentions. Bourdieu evokes some forms of collective action that favored the symbolic revolution that he nevertheless continues to attribute to a sole individual. The field of art criticism is analyzed in the same way, as a revolution facilitator. Taking history into account leads the s­ ociologist

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to complicate his model and to give some space to reception: “The artwork is so to speak produced twice (this is a far too simple formula): it is produced by the producer as wells as the receiver, a very vague term”. This remark is not particularly original as such, particularly since Marcel Duchamp stated: “It is really the beholder who makes the work of art”. According to Duchamp, “there is the pole of the one who makes the work and the pole of the beholder. I give to the beholder to same importance as to the maker” (Duchamp 1998). The bipolar dimension of the work has originated the literary theory of reception developed by Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Bourdieu is however very reluctant to the idea of a double production of the work. He is more precise in the following parts of his lecture: “If I am not very favorable to this concept [reception], it is because it is soft and apoplectic: it does not say much, whereas reception is produced by the cooperation within struggle, within conflict, of all agents engaged in artistic field”. A fair part of the Manet lectures is devoted to sort out, from the rich historical documentation at his disposal, the elements that will help him corroborate field theory. The argument is based on a certain number of concessions made to art historians who work on the concreteness of interactions and on the economic dimension of artistic life. However, these concessions are always re-­ inscribed in a broader circle that shows the limitations of a historical approach deprived from a conceptual apparatus of a structural type. The summary of the February 23rd 2000 lecture sheds some light on the topic: “The production of belief. – Usefulness of the notion of field. – The field of art criticism: The two dimensions. – Portraits of critics. – The functioning of the field of art c­ riticism. – The principle of competence. – The analysis in term of field. – Manet, subject and object of the artistic field”. In his lectures, Bourdieu offers a more sustainable and more radical version of the revolutionary power of the creative individual. It is based on an association of the strength of morphological transformations at the macro level and the arising of an individual who has accumulated such a tremendous level of resources that his “heretical” position is enough to trigger a historical tipping over at the micro level. Why Manet rather than another artist? The question is never asked. There would be quite a few candidates to embody the position of the symbolic revolutionary: Courbet, whom Manet hated, would come first. Bourdieu, following a logic of identification, embraces Manet’s quarrels. Manet had well understood that Courbet was his main contender. He thinks that Courbet is a “Pompier Painter”, who would have leftist leanings, so to speak a symbolic conservative coupled with a political progressive. Things, as we know, are not so simple and we could, if we played the game of the symbolic revolutionary contest, attribute the title alternatively or simultaneously to Courbet as Christophe Charle does in Discordance

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des Temps (Charle 2011), but also to Cézanne and perhaps to Rodin. Limiting oneself to Manet reduces modern art to individual heroism and thus, at the same time, reduces the ambitions of sociology in a both grandiose and paradoxical gesture. Can one consider The State Nobility as a historical work? No, if one considers that the goal of the book is to produce a theory of power grounded on Bourdieu’s three fundamental concepts (field, habitus, capital). Yes, if we take the second chapter -A Structural History- into account. Here Bourdieu is confronted with a situation that he already encountered in Distinction: how can one justify the relationship between a general theoretical ambition and the empirical, statistical or qualitative basis that allows developing that type of statement? It turns out that Bourdieu published in the eighties books based on surveys run in the sixties, within the peculiar context of Les Trentes Glorieuses. This lag is not astonishing in the social sciences as the survey analyses constrain researchers to publish a long time after fieldwork. Distinction and State Nobility are both based on the peculiarity of the French situation, but aim at superseding it in order to bring about a general theory. The temporal lag between conception and publication is inscribed in the change of era: data gathering time is prior to the events of May 68, to the first oil crisis, to the rise of unemployment and the growth of neoliberal thought. The sociologist must account for the always fragile blend between the grasp of a conjuncture and the statement of universal principles regarding the organization of the social world. This question is regularly underestimated by Bourdieu, because it might shake the robustness of his construction. Nevertheless he comes to grips with it in State Nobility and it is worth paying attention to his attempt. Does data age? The sociologist asks: How valid are the results of a 1967 study of the field of the grandes écoles 20 years after the fact? And if today normaliens are less likely to read Le Nouvel Observateur and more likely to read Libération (left, intelligentsia. Tr) which did not exist in 1967 or if the Maoists have disappeared from hec, while future ena graduate students (moderately…) criticize their education, does this mean that such a study is only valid as the historical description of a past age or even that it does not hold any interest has lost any value, since it relies on old data? (Bourdieu 1996: 188) The answer is obviously negative. Bourdieu uses the occasion to make the relationship between his sociology and history more precise. He strives to show that the structuration of the field displayed by the 1967 survey is quite close to the one that prevailed in the eighties. “Thus, the main opposition re-

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mained between the sixties and the eighties in spite of the 1968 jolt that, far from revolutionizing the structures of the field of the higher education institutions, seems to have favored individual and collective reactions, aiming at retaining them”. The deformations of the field structure exist but concern for the most part the accentuation of differences between the dominant pole and the dominated one. This acknowledgement has been corroborated by different surveys that followed the release of The State Nobility. The intensification of competition to enter the schools of power has increased the gap between the “great gate” and the “back gate”. The retroactive reassessment of the survey strengthens Bourdieu’s position and reminds researchers that the dynamics of an event can be deceiving. Society is always less mobile than the image given by the media. The test of time deepens Bourdieu’s structuralist commitments, so much so that he ends up proposing a “structural history” as an antidote to the eventful temptation that haunts historians. He criticizes the monographic approach that severs an institution from the competitive space in which it is located. He also plays down the importance of events. From Homo Academicus to The State Nobility, i.e. in five years the general crisis of May 68 has become a jolt. The structure swallowed the event. The lesson is clear: Only a structural history designed to grasp both the objective relations that obtain among the different institutions by virtue of their relative positions in the social and academic hierarchies and the competitive struggles that oppose them can thus enable us to perceive the logic of invariant and inevitable processes where we usually see nothing but the chronological succession of arbitrary and contingent events (Bourdieu 1998b). I think that Bourdieu overstates the point. Giving room to the processual dynamic that links chains of events does not mean that one limits oneself to witness the temporal succession of separate moments. Refusing to consider history as a process allows us beyond any doubt to safely state the virtues of a theory of invariance against the limitations of the chronicle or of necessity against contingency. However in the following pages Bourdieu alleviates the epistemological rigidity of his principles. Important changes occurred in the relatively short time between the survey and its publication: thus, the gap between the Ecole normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm and the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud has been reduced to the point of vanishing, whereas their opposition had a structural dimension in a previous state of the system. The Ecole normale supérieure and the Ecole polytechnique “were slowly reduced to the strict definition of their official mission, the training of teachers and engineers”. The Ecole nationale d’administration imposed its domination over

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the whole field of Grandes écoles. One can see that in spite of the limited change, because it did not question the domination of the Grandes écoles, their field or sub-field, as you like, underwent deep transformations that would continuously increase at the turn of the new century. Bourdieu acknowledges this fact at the end of his chapter when he links, in a quite justified way, the accentuation of the contradiction between on the one hand “the strictly scholar demands and the social demands of reproduction of dominance” and on the other hand the “deep changes that have taken place in the economic field”. The financialization of the economy has increased the phenomenon since the release of the book on Grandes écoles. The internationalization of the competition to access the dominant positions has seriously shaken the national frame that held tight structural analysis. In the quarter of century since the release of The State Nobility, the very notion of Grande école has been questioned with respect to recruiting modes, to the forms of socialization, and to the strategies of alliance with the external world. The emerging landscape is radically different, although Bourdieu’s analysis remains important in order to understand the history of the dominant class and its modes of reproduction in France. It belongs to a bygone past. As seen previously, the major element in Bourdieu’s historical approach is the notion of structural gap. The habitus is history made nature: the man of yesterday still speaks, but we do not know that yesterday took place, since the habitus moves in the present and enables the achievement of an indefinite multiplicity of tasks in an apparent spontaneity. Structure in itself is a huge deposit of history, so much so that it seems that there is no longer history but only a second nature. The adjustment between the individual (or the group) and the structure is not a permanent guarantee offered by structuralism. The adjustment between mental structures and social structures that opens The State Nobility means neither adequacy nor overlap. A gap, a fold is always possible between the mental dimension that is here fully embodied, and the social one. The wedge that divides habitus and social is named hysteresis. This concept comes from mechanics and plays a role both central and buried in Bourdieu’s theory. Within the rich Greek and Latin lexicon that he used, hysteresis has a special place. The first occurrence of the term in Outline of a Theory of Practice clearly shows it. The author implements it without defining it, contrary to his three fundamental concepts. The word is absent from the Collège de France lectures devoted to the “elementary concepts of sociology”. However, the notion is necessary to the functioning of habitus: “Thus, due to the hysteresis effect that is necessarily involved in the logic of the constitution of habitus, practices are always exposed to receiving negative sanctions, therefore a ‘secondary negative reinforcement’, when the environment they are really

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confronted with is too far from the one to which they are objectively adjusted”. The etymology of the Greek term connotes deficiency or retardation i.e. a negative lag. However, hysteresis is not an accident of habitus but one of its proprieties: the consolidation of a dispositional system throughout the primitive relation to the social world enables to ensure an infinity of situated actions in as much as they are in affinity with the historical constitution of habitus understood as a series of historical experiments in socialization. Change in objective conditions opens a gap between habitus and the actual experience of the field. It can be expressed either through historical transformations that are structural transformations in Bourdieu’s mind, or through the space traveled in the course of a social trajectory, that is the product of the coexistence of different historical forms of socialization. History returns in the habitus as a second nature. As a rule, every habitus is likely to be affected by hysteresis, since it is inherent to it. Effectively, the phenomenon is mainly present within the dominated classes, real losers of history since they are too tied to the peculiar history of their socialization. Although Bourdieu does not give a definition in Outline, he gives a concrete example: the conflict of generations that opposes habitus generated under different conditions. The second occurrence of the term in the book has a more distinct historical dimension, since it deals with the notion of conjuncture. Bourdieu sees there “one of the bedrocks of the structural lag between occasions and dispositions to seize them that makes missed occasions and particularly the inability, often observed, to think historical crisis according to categories of perception and thought different from those of the past, even if revolutionary”. Habitus is the restoring force of history that prevents us from taking into account the future in the present. Hysteresis plays a central explanatory part in Distinction and The Logic of Practice in order to think the structural lag both in inappropriate behavior, particularly petit bourgeois awkwardness in society and in historical situations when one is led to repeat strategies of the past. Bruno Karsenti is perfectly right when he writes that one can regret that Bourdieu did not make a more systematic and more thorough use of the notion. He adds that “the doctrine, in its dogmatic consolidation, is overshadowed” (Karsenti 2013). It tends to be made invisible, so much so that the authors of Bourdieu and Historical Analysis do not mention it. It is however the only one that enables Bourdieu to deal with history as a structuralist. To conclude, one has to be impressed by Bourdieu’s historical ambition and by his great mastery of historiography, as the astonishing bibliography of the lectures on the state clearly shows. His will to historicize concepts and categories is striking, and is widely successful. Nevertheless the reader has often the

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impression that the sociologist has been regularly trapped in hysteresis, which is observable through the structural lag between his scientific habitus acquired from Gaston Bachelard, and the form taken by the historical course of the world during his career. Hysteresis is particularly observable in his last lectures, Science of Science and Reflexivity, where he nervously refutes the contribution of science studies, clearly experienced as “negative sanction” to use his own terminology, as if treating scientific activities as social activities among others constituted a major affront, to which the only answer was withdrawal. One can see in Bourdieu’s negative relationship with science studies something of a missed occasion. The rigidity of his habitus did not allow him to operate the aggiornamento (updating) that led his colleague Jean-Claude Passeron to come back to Weberian epistemology while going away from the naturalist epistemology that made the bedrock of The Craft of Sociology. There is a moment when the will to build a system invulnerable to experience and to the awareness of the irreducible historicity of the course of the world can be considered as a form of hysteresis of habitus. There is a massive objection that you can raise here: this reading overlooks the interest of historians and historical sociologists in Bourdieu’s thinking. Far from it, nobody denies the fruitfulness of the borrowing from field theory. Although the most advanced forms of historical practice during the years 1980– 2015 did not widely rely on genetic structuralism, one can say nothing about the future, so much the logic of successive re-appropriations and rediscoveries in historical sciences can be surprising. My aim in this presentation was simply to document a difficult point: structuralism is always at pains when it deals with process. Closing the door to any form of contingency or insisting on the interdependence of independent causal chains amounts to pointlessly make things more complicated. One of the prominent historical sociologist in the USA, William Sewell Jr., while acknowledging the merits of Bourdieu’s theory, thinks that the model tends to make any social transformation impossible (Sewell 2005: 138–139). He contrasts in order to do so the almost immobile description of the Kabyle house, whose inhabitants work even in their improvisations to reproduce structures, and the role of the Kabyles in the national Algerian revolution, at the very moment when Bourdieu did his fieldwork. According to Sewell Jr., the overtotalized conception of habitus is not adequate. In every society, a large number of actions and representations is not consistent with habitus. Perhaps it is better to let one of the best French historians Alain Dewerpe speak. “Paradoxically, there is little historicity in Pierre Bourdieu’s logic (Dewerpe 1998). Three arguments enable him to strengthen his position. First fields are conceived as factorial experiments and the rules of transformation from

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one experiment to another are never clear. Second, the system reproduces ­itself because it is the object of a misrecognition, and its reproduction increases misrecognition. Third, history is unlikely as the agents who make history (“the people with stories” as Bourdieu says) are themselves unlikely. Alain Dewerpe concludes: “There is history everywhere, to the extent to which possible strategies are only effects through which past history has structured the present state of the field where they apply, but there is history nowhere since the dynamic of invention seems to be reduced to the minimal ‘suspension’ following the aphorism according to which everything must change in order for everything to remain the same”. Structure everywhere, history nowhere, we might say. This statement is unfair. Bourdieu never ceased to fight to include history in his model. The geometry of fields did not a priori exclude temporality. The first works on Algeria attached great importance to the relationship to time, whether for Kabyle peasants or for urban workers. The system won in the end. The space of possibilities gradually closed on itself, and the factorial experiment imposed its demands.

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A Narrative for Two Audiences Bourdieu imagined himself as a founder of science, as if his predecessors, particularly Durkheim and Weber, had just been forerunners. He considered his work as a universal theory of the social. He progressively erased most of the links that attached him to an intellectual tradition and invented a new lexicon. Like Durkheim, he made France the ideal object of his sociology, not only because he was French, but because he saw it as a perfect exemplification of his theory of the social world. His work, particularly when it is translated, is very difficult. It presupposes an important level of tacit knowledge, associating philosophy, art history and history of sciences besides an extraordinary erudition in the social sciences. It illustrates the wide gap, proper to the French situation, between on the one hand sociologists provided with a training in classic humanities, mastering Latin, ancient Greek and German, and on the other hand a student public coming frequently from socially dominated groups and characterized with a low level of scholarly capital. In many countries, instructors note how it is difficult to explain the sociologist’s reasonings, expressed in long and complex sentences. However, Bourdieu’s books have been greeted with a large social reception, which has not reduced their scientific legitimacy in spite of their commercial success, as if their author could play with his own theory of symbolic belief. One knows that it distinguishes two regimes of production for cultural goods: first, restricted production, otherwise called art for art’s sake, which addresses a selected public, connivant with the author, who can only expect limited, and delayed, material profits, but compensated by a high recognition in the symbolic order. Second, mass production, characterized by short-lived products, instant material consistent profits; the author yields to the demand of the productive system and cannot hope for the symbolic legitimacy that goes along with artistic commitment. The sociologist often insisted on the structural opposition between those subfields and identified his endeavor with the highest artform. Bourdieu started as a scientist and ended up as a public intellectual, while he had himself objectified the figure of the “total intellectual” in a critical way as he analyzed Jean-Paul Sartre’s trajectory. He united heterogenous publics: he largely benefited from the expansion of the educational system and from the growth of intermediary occupations, as those of social work and cultural mediation, which constituted a significant part of his wider audience. These

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categories may have seen Bourdieu as the spokesperson of their suffering and anxiety, linked to their uncertain position, so aptly described by the sociologist. However, he was welcomed by the cultivated bourgeoisie, which instantly recognized an intellectual in the great tradition under the mask of transgression. The spouse of a high-ranking civil servant could say without any irony, upon leaving a debate where Bourdieu was present: “I subscribed to Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales due to the illustrations that I love”. Laurence Parisot, the former chairperson of the Medef, the organization of French big business, wrote on her Twitter (December 12th 2013): “News channels keep talking on football while interesting things happen at Cop 21. Unbearable. Reading Bourdieu again”. Many internet users found that hard to believe. How could the executive class, which Bourdieu had so hardly castigated, have read his work? The reconstruction of Bourdieu as a full rebel is a fiction. Raymond Aron early recognized his exceptional abilities: his career was very quick, although it was accomplished in the margins of the academic system, comfortable margins one must say. Distinguished in his early thirties by the 6th section of the Ecole pratique des hautes études and by the Foundation of the Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris, he was provided with unusual means of research with respect to his generation: Fernand Braudel and Clemens Heller, who headed those institutions, saw his career with great favor and did not moderate their support. He knew how to find the economic means for a research of which the scale often was over average. The inquiry on photography, published in Photography a Middle-Brow Art was sponsored by Kodak. The survey that led to The Weight of the World benefited from an exceptional funding from the Caisse des dépôts et consignations, an institution of public banking. Bourdieu himself created quite early a sort of “scientific multinational company”, sensitive to networks and open as well to the anglophone West as well as the Soviet World. He constituted a fair level of social capital during his stay in Algeria, which was multiplied as soon as he went back to France. At 51, he was distinguished by the Collège de France and became the French sociologist par excellence. The entrepreneurial dimension lacks in Bourdieu’s autobiographical texts, as if he took it for granted or had not even noted it. The director’s style that he developed in his research center was probably ahead of modern forms of management. No position, expect his own, was guaranteed. There was a high uncertainty concerning the tasks to be done and the autonomy left to the researcher. Young researchers entering the field were invited to work in pair, neutralizing each other. The master knew how to play with the social origins of his colleagues, who also were his informants, in order to install tensions as scientifically productive as emotionally stressing. The ones provided with a high level of cultural capital were frequently humiliated, having to listen to the

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correct version of their presentations in front of all their colleagues. His seminar had nothing to do with a cool place. The turn-over of young “normaliens” who did their training there was huge. Bourdieu asked them to forget all that they had learned, a thing that looked excessive to ambitious young men. However, the man was warm and welcoming to the most provincial and awkward among the new recruits and could be at times extremely generous. While many among the disciples still acknowledge how lucky they were to meet him, even in confrontation, many have kept from their training with Bourdieu an everlasting rancor (Heinich 2007, Verdès-Leroux 1998, Grignon 1996). The sociologist sometimes tried to objectify his own public trajectory, without paying much attention to the conditions of reception of his work. The previous chapter showed his reluctance to this very notion. An inquiry remains to be made on his wide lectorate as well as the great fortune of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, which Bourdieu wanted transgressive, and which certainly transgressed the limits of academic lectorate. One can distinguish three writing regimes in the oeuvre. The first corresponds to the “apprentice Bourdieu”: he mainly uses his philosophical resources and shows that he belongs to the world of the “khâgne”. The conclusion of a report written for the Secrétariat social de l’Algérie published in 1959, when Bourdieu was 28, illustrates perfectly his first style: Should one conclude that the mere improvement of material conditions is the necessary and sufficient condition of the global restructuration of the cultural system by which the passage from traditional economy to competitive economy is assured? One finds here again the old debate between materialism and spiritualism. Is material progress enough to make the aspiration to progress surge or is the aspiration to progress a necessary and sufficient condition of progress? The answer seems to be that the progress of material conditions allows the individual to access a threshold from which he can aspire to take hold of his future; however, possibility does not mean necessity. One can say, by slightly changing Aristotle’s words, ‘the virtues of competitive economy require some affluence’ (Bourdieu 2013: 73). Here, one can recognize all the tricks of the khâgneux’s trade: one finds the well-balanced discourse and the refusal to take a position by leaving all options opened (“the answer seems to be: possibility is not necessity”) as well as the philosophical quote of Aristotle, although with a little inventive twist as he adapts it from the Ethics to Nicomaque. The message is progressive: the relative Aristotelian affluence is the condition of the integration of Algerian population

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in a new type of economy. The text, as a technical document, does not show any sociological or theoretical ambition, but it is interesting as it shows how Bourdieu adds to his culture of a young philosophy teacher very diverse readings: one can find classics of anthropology (Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits) but also recent texts from Germaine Tillion and Georges Balandier. With respect to economics, Bourdieu refers to François Perroux, who advocated a third way between liberal capitalism and socialism and who inspired the social doctrine of Catholic Church. One must add a very good knowledge of the Algerian topics. Bourdieu potters with a commissioned paper by assuring its rhetorical strength out of his astute philosophical background while gathering a technical culture bearing on the issue of development, which shows his capacities to work seriously. History, geography, economics, anthropology and sociology are invited on a par. The young Bourdieu is still extremely polite with the academic hierarchy. As an example, in the noted “Révolution dans la revolution” (Revolution within revolution), published in the journal Esprit in 1961 and showing his genius for titles, he pays tribute to his mentor Raymond Aron with many quotes and even writes that “this distinction and these definitions are borrowed from Raymond Aron’s lectures” (Bourdieu 2013). At that time, he was still the good student who does not seek to stand out: he still shares the point of view of his master, who happens to be the author of The Algerian Tragedy (Aron 1957). The young man is still looking for himself and he knows how to show respect to great academics. Even more, he avoids peremptory or shocking conclusions in his reports to a reformist colonial bureaucracy. One can find another good example of Bourdieu before Bourdieu’s style in a famous article of Etudes rurales, 100 pages long, “Célibat et condition paysanne” (Celibacy and peasant condition). The piece will draw attention from ethnologists and rural sociologists while inaugurating an anthropology of proximity that radically breaks away from folkloric studies still dominating in the studies of rural France. This is not an occasional text, but one can see the first manifestation of the young anthropologist’s ambition. It is surprising due to the absence of any theoretical frame. The text starts rather abruptly with a problem: one deplores the peasant celibacy of the early 1960s as a consequence of the current crisis in the rural world, while the celibacy of the younger brothers is not new at all. The question that drives research looks like a puzzle: “How can one explain, under those conditions, that men’s celibacy is experienced as exceptionally dramatic and totally unusual?” (Bourdieu 1962: 18). The author does not bother with methodological preambles and enters directly the heart of the subject. Information gathered in an ethnographic way are intertwined with a material of descriptive statistics, quite simple, but which is shows how

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the inquiry is precise. The occurrence of many words belonging to the Bearnese dialect shows the author’s familiarity with the field. He will develop only later considerations on the relationship with the object of study in a reflexive way. The author is not present in the article, even if one can feel that he is there; his relationship to the rural community is not accounted for. Theoretical and methodological sobriety does not damage reading, although one can feel at times an avalanche of data, qualitative as well as quantitative. Bourdieu wants to prove himself and he passes his entry exam into the community of rural scholars with flying colors. There is only one mention of habitus when he analyzes dancing and shows the awkward relationship to the body that characterizes precisely the habitus of peasants of lower condition, who have no chances on the marriage market. Here, description refers to Marcel Mauss’ anthropology of the body-he is one of the very few quoted authors, but it quickly becomes autonomous and deploys its own analytical virtues. Bourdieu, who has not read Goffman yet, appears here as a sociologist quite sensitive to the risks of interaction and to the traps of the presentation of self. This piece by the young Bourdieu is a jewel, since it displays a strong talent, able to merge ethnography and sociology based on statistics into a powerful and unified argument. The inquiry is as such historical: it grasps all the ages of peasant celibacy and explains why a practice that was an strategic element in maintaining “household” capital and guaranteed its autonomy becomes an anomaly or a pathology. In the rural society, the logic of marriage exchanges is wholly centered on safeguarding holdings in a context of capital scarcity. It holds on the double opposition first, between the eldest child and the junior one, and second, between big and small households, commanding the division between bottom up and top down marriages. Junior sons’ celibacy is the indirect result of marriage logics, which are the consequence of economic constraint. The situation is completely different with respect to contemporary celibacy, which is the consequence of the opening of rural world toward towns and of the relative autonomy of women on the marriage market. The necessity to find a partner on the marriage market encounters major obstacles: women are more and more reluctant to share their mother-in-law’s house. The gendarme or the postman are more advantageous match. Courting a woman is completely foreign to men who have lived in the segregation of genders and whose habitus is characterized by awkwardness. While Bourdieu avoids any theoretical overemphasis in the account of his research, his conclusion reveals an attitude that has nothing to do with the overhanging position that his later epistemological statements could induce. The sociologist strives, on the one hand, to capture and to understand the spontaneous consciousness of social facts, which, by essence, is not reflective, and, on the other hand, to apprehend

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the facts in their own nature, thanks to the privilege given to the observer who renounces to “act upon the social” to think it. Then, he must reconcile the truth of the objective datum that his analysis provides him with the subjective certainty of those who live it. For instance, when he describes the internal contradictions of the marriage exchange system, as they do not appear to the consciousness of those who are their victims, he just thematizes the lived experience of those men who concretely feel these contradictions in the impossibility to marry. While he forbids himself to give credit to the consciousness that the bachelors develop and to take their explanation to the letter, he takes their consciousness seriously enough in order to discover its proper grounding. The commitment of the sociologist is then to restitute the meaning of their action to peasants. The happiness felt when reading the article mostly lies in the fact that it is not contained by the straitjacket of general theory. There is no field at all, no capital and very few habitus, only a sociologist at work who playfully grasps all the tools at his disposal. Experts would say that Bourdieu has not found his style yet. However, one should not succumb to a pre-or a-theoretical nostalgia. The second regime of writing is undoubtedly the most important and the most interesting. It can be characterized in two ways: the sociologist strives to create his own theoretical world, by distancing it from mainstream production in the discipline, which has multiplied, during the twenty years preceding his debut, the external signs of scientific aspect, based on the absence of style and a positivist turn of the mind. He requalifies its lexicon and re-anchors it in the vocabulary of philosophy that he acquired during his studies and that is extremely difficult to get away from: he will cultivate a mix of deference and insolence with respect to the disciplinary tradition. On the one hand, he works to revivify Durkheim and Weber’s oeuvres. The operation is quite difficult with the former. When Bourdieu enters the field, Durkheim seems to be deadwood. Sartre thought so. Thus, the co-author of Reproduction needed a lot of thrust to resurrect the founder of French sociology. Today, Durkheim has become again an author who matters, as well in philosophy as in sociology: Anne Rawls, Bruno Karsenti and Francesco Callegaro’s works clearly show it, among others. This was not the case in the 1960s. Let us consider Michel Foucault: “And the old realism Durkheim-style, thinking society as a substance that is opposed to the individual, who is in turn a sort of substance integrated in society, this old realism seems to be unthinkable now”, he answers Alain Badiou in a 1965 interview (Foucault 2001–1: 469). Foucault often disqualifies Durkheim in a harsh way and sometimes even caricatures him. One must say that caricaturing the old s­ ociologist

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is quite common in 1960s philosophy teaching. In October 1970, lecturing in Tokyo, Foucault distances himself from Durkheim again when he opposes his own method, consisting in looking for interesting things “what, in a society, in a system of thought, is rejected and excluded”, while the sociologist, dealing with a prohibition like incest, “asked himself what was the value system of a society when it prohibited incest” (Foucault, 2001–2: 489). In fact, Durkheim presupposed both the homogeneity and the sacred character of the social body, assertion that was totally foreign to Foucault’s preoccupations. Durkheim’s work has no longer any potentiality. Here, Foucault locates himself in a French philosophical tradition that puts the author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in a closet devoted to store old garment: his survival is purely negative; nobody should think like him. In 1970, Durkheim had lost all credit. Rehabilitation is not present in the uses of Weber made by Bourdieu. The author of Economy and Society escaped the opprobrium that struck Durkheim, even if he remained relatively unknown in France in the 1960s, due to translation problems. If one goes back to Foucault, one notices that he gives more consideration to Weber than to Durkheim. He evokes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in a debate on culture issues with Giulio Preti: Today, in our times (I always speak as a historian, even if I try to be a historian of the present), moral problems only concern sexuality and politics. I give you an example. During a very long period, in Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the issue of labor, or of the absence of labor, was a moral issue. Those who did not work were not considered as unfortunate people who had no job, but as lazy people who did not want to work. To sum up, a work ethic existed: I do not need to insist since Max Weber said that much better than I could do. Today we know very well that a man who does not work is a man who cannot find work, who is unemployed. Labor has gone out of the realm of morality and entered the realm of politics (Foucault 2001–1: 1244). Bourdieu did not rehabilitate Weber, but he took him out of the rightist intellectual ghetto where he tended to be locked in. Raymond Aron, Eric de Dampierre and Julien Freund had insisted on his opposition to dialectical materialism and had defined him as the anti-Marx. Re-read by Bourdieu in a structuralist perspective, Weber was depoliticized, if one may say, and the acuteness of his historical and sociological gaze resurfaced. Thus, Bourdieu removed the layers of varnish accumulated by unscrupulous readings on the founding fathers’ statues. Their conceptual arsenal was remobilized.

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Returning to the classics is only one element of the conceptual re-arming. The constitution of a set of intertwined concepts as examined in the first chapters, is the real heart. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari noted a property of philosophical concepts: they are permanently assigned to an author: “First, concepts are born and remain signed, Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’ cogito, Leibniz’s monad. But some require an extraordinary word, sometimes barbaric or shocking, which must name them, while others are content with a very ordinary word … Some appeal to archaisms, others to neologisms”. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 13). This is not the case in the social sciences, where Robert Merton’s obi (“obliteration by incorporation”) is rather the rule: the most important notions end up belonging to an anonymous tradition as their use is obvious and become imperative. Bourdieu undoubtedly imported a philosophical habitus into a sociology that was still poorly structured; he did so while he thought that he had broken away from the logic of practice of the former discipline. Although he was really attentive to the difficulties inherent to the communication of sociology, either to the students or to a wider public, he was not able to get out of the intellectual tradition of which he was in the meantime one of the most incisive critics. He opened his first ordinary lecture at the Collège de France by evoking the “coefficient of modesty” presupposed by the very notion of teaching, but after a few minutes he brought back a little bit of Latin: “I would like to allow myself by the fact that I give my first lecture to try-as a form of captatio benevolentiae, as classics orators used to say, to justify my way of doing in anticipation” (Bourdieu 2015: 12–13). He takes a position with respect to his teaching that can be considered as a perfect example of the description that he gave of the “denial of scholarly attitude” by the best pupils: “While saying that a lecture is always only a lecture, but in striving to make this lecture as little as possible a lecture, I would like to neutralize the domination effect exerted, almost unavoidably, by teaching” (Bourdieu 2015: 15). Conscious of the fact that his position does not allow him to get out of his position, he nevertheless thinks that the sociologist can locate himself at the edge and engage into a collective reflexive work on the very nature of a lecture, while he knows quite well that his audience is heterogeneous and often very far from his own habitus. As the examples of scholarly excellence that he precisely analyzed, he distances himself from the most scholarly dimensions of the lecture, while accepting its format. In doing so, he affirms his superiority over all those who could not do better than a good lecture. One can find here the very famous figure of Erving Goffman’s role distance: the best way of achieving a social performance does not mean to stick to the role, to identify completely to one’s character, but on the contrary to detach from oneself without in turn abandon one’s post. Many affirmations in the lectures

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show that Bourdieu was not duped by the frame that he was trying to set in order to neutralize the authority effects induced by his position at the Collège de France. If he slayed the “agrégation lesson” at the beginning of his lectures, he did not ignore that none of his colleagues ever gave that type of “lesson” at the Collège. By distancing himself from the ordinary forms of professoriate, he marvelously fulfilled the function assigned to him by the institution: presenting in a clear manner an ongoing research. While he questioned himself on the powers of academic ritual, he never ceased to accomplish it. The limitations of the critique of intellectualism appear in a clear light in the constant use of Latin and Greek in sociological discourse. There is no pedantry in that choice, and deficient readers only can see there the legacy of Thomas Diafoirus. Bourdieu chooses to create a new sociological lexicon out of notions inherited from ancient philosophy to a large extent, since he wants to avoid the traps of ordinary language. The sociological vocabulary must be consisted as a system of differences with respect to the common way of naming things. The power of nomination is taken for granted in everyday life, and the scholar’s goal is, if not “to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe”, at least to dissipate misunderstandings associated with the uncontrolled use of words. The creation of a new lexicon answers two demands. First, it can be seen as a strategy in the field. The young Bourdieu deals with a sociological community that is rarely equipped with his level of scholarly capital, the one of a young and brilliant philosopher with great prospects. The set of his dispositions, his habitus, leads him to have high ambitions and to grasp the scepter out of the hands of the dominant agents: he is going to launch his own assets on the game table. Those assets are mainly those who come from his familiarity with the scholarly tradition: conceptual agility, easy access to the main works of Western philosophy, mastery of scholarly drills where playing with words is essential, as one can see it in the expression “neutralizing the effects of neutralization”. He puts those tools at some distance and objectifies them: this is a fact. We owe to Bourdieu the fact that these tropes and sometimes these clichés make the substance of the scholastic manner. However, he does not abandon them as we have not abandoned them either, since they offer a comparative advantage to the challenger who enters the field, with respect to the established such as Georges Gurvitch, Henri Mendras or Michel Crozier. Here, the paradigm of role distance functions at maximal efficiency. Besides, due to the second requirement of his philosophical habitus, he has kept the signature of concepts as a principle: a high ambition demands that the thinker must be strongly associated with concepts. The condition of survival in the world of ideas is undoubtedly the almost rigid association between a character and a lexicon. Bourdieu never ceased to hammer his central concepts so that

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they entered the head of his auditors as well as history. The provincial disciple who believed that he had made a very good joke in saying that the habitus could be found in every field was totally wrong. The obsessive reiteration of a vocabulary is the most efficient way of constructing a conceptual persona. If one remains faithful to the sociologist’s dispositional philosophy, one easily understands the strategy of nomination that he deployed during his whole life. One should not feel compelled by a reading in terms of theoretical habitus. Bourdieu manifested a will of science that must take us out of the limitations inherent to the logic of practice and that should take us to the operative dimension of a research program. The creation of a partial lexicon does not amount to the creation of a special language. The sociologist continues to speak a natural language, to narrate events and to comments tables and cloud of dots. He talks to us about what is familiar since we were born in the social world. We recognize it immediately in the accounts that he makes of it. It is out of question that such a connivance can be dissipated by the use of an artificial language or of an integrative system of formalization. The “scholarly” words in Bourdieu’s language have the same function as statistical tables: they interrupt the natural and deceptive course of the narrative to engage the reader to actively pursue the sociological reasoning that is presented to her: thus the use of doxa commits to think something different from opinion, as hysteresis permits an original opening on the errors of perspective that lead social agents to make bad investments. There is more: a scholarly vocabulary has the power to de-familiarize. Bourdieu thinks that this is an operating condition for sociology. In one of his oral interventions, he is harshly questioned on his propensity to use a language that does not sound familiar to the reader: “Why are you using a peculiar jargon, particularly difficult, which makes your discourse inaccessible to the layman? Is not there a contradiction in denouncing the monopoly that scholars grant themselves with, and to restore it in the discourse that denounces it?”. The scholar has not hard time answering, since his endeavor has an explicit linguistic dimension: “The necessity of using an artificial language imposes itself to sociology more than to any other science. In order to break away from the social philosophy that haunts usual words and also to express things that ordinary language cannot express (for instance all things that are located in the realm of what is taken for granted), the sociologist must resort to made up words and offer a protection, at least partial, against the naïve projections of the common sense. Those words are all the more defended against the diversion that their “linguistic nature” predisposes them to resist hasty readings (this is the case with habitus, which evokes the acquired capital, or even property). Perhaps they also have that power since they are inserted, ­embedded in

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a network of relationships imposing their logical constraints: for instance, allodoxia, which says well a thing difficult to say or even to think in a few words: the fact than one takes a thing for another, to believe that a thing is different from that it actually is, etc, is taken in a network of words with the same root: doxa, doxosopher, orthodoxy, heterodoxy, paradox (Bourdieu 1993). Thus, scholarly language offers us a network of logical constraints that can lead the reader to avoid the traps of ordinary language. What does one really gain in using allodoxia instead of “taking bladders for lanterns” or even simpler “blunder”? It seems that allodoxia allows the sociologist to think about a phenomenon in its generality. “Taking bladders for lanterns” refers to credulity, naivety, or daydreaming. “Blunder” may refer to an optical illusion. The Greek word refers to the purely social dimension of the operation that leads to take a thing for one another. The misunderstanding is neither visual nor linguistic. It is wholly social. The scholarly word leads us to think sociologically. Besides, as we are equipped with a Greek mini lexicon, we can take relationally the fact one takes something for another thing: we can match it and contrast it with other phenomena. The notional network plays the role of a principle of identification and classification. We have the means of thinking a wide range of objects through their inter-relations thanks to that jump into a de-familiarizing vocabulary. With this particular example, we apply the principle of charity to Bourdieu. He has undoubtedly the project of rendering ordinary language more scientific. Significantly, many of his notions belong to the specialized vocabulary of other sciences: habitus is currently used in medicine and in pathology; hysteresis can be found in mathematics, physics and economics. However, one must note that the elements of lexicon do not lead to the construction of a formalized language able to account for the social world. The terms that constitute the sociologist’s grid in his discipline and beyond, in the whole society, cannot be named a language. They do not change the way by which ordinary language functions. They can constraint it in an intermittent or occasional way. One can suppose that their de-familiarizing power wears out while they enter the routines of ordinary language, which necessarily come back with the massive diffusion of the oeuvre. When he mentions the necessity of an artificial language for sociology, Bourdieu does wishful thinking. Historical sciences cannot have access to it, as Jean-Claude Passeron clearly showed by deepening Max Weber’s epistemology. The point of departure of epistemological description developed by his former co-author lies in the historicity of the social sciences. The nature of their empirical objects commands all the epistemological particularities of those disciplines. The conditions of gathering information about the world determine

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the assertions in all historical sciences: in order to know whether they are true or false, it is impossible to de-index them from the contexts where and when data are gathered. Relevant statements always depend on historical contextualization. Those who forget the constraint produce the illusion according to which variables such as gender, age or place in the stratification system are identical to the variables in physics. In spite of Durkheim’s efforts to make his discipline an almost experimental science, through the detour by the “quasi”, permitted by the analysis of concomitant variations as constituting a form of indirect experiment (Durkheim 1901), one cannot escape the constraints of historical observation that oppose the reproducibility of an experiment. The irreducible singularity of contexts forbids their decomposition into a finite series of simple elements (Passeron 2006). Bourdieu, in spite of his knowledge of Max Weber, remained in the epistemological frame of a naturalist epistemology that seemed to prevent him from thinking the specificity of historical objects and that made him miss his appointment with history. Rather surprisingly, in the meantime, he was more sensitive than others to the specific relationship that his discipline had with the objects of the social world, and to the fact that the words of sociology remained taken in the stake struggles of the ordinary world, in spite of all precautions and logical constraints created by the use of a scholarly language. Its use was then double-edged. Here his remarks on the notion of class are quite relevant. He notes that the word class “will never be neutral as long as there will be classes. The issue of the existence or non-existence of classes is a stake struggle between classes. The necessary writing work in order to obtain a rigorous and controlled use of language seldom leads to what is called clarity, namely the reinforcement of commonsensical evidences or of the certainties of fanaticism” (Bourdieu 1993: 21). What does this lack of clarity means? The complexity of language and the distancing of the objects from their commonsensical form can only be efficient if the reader of a sociological report shares the same characteristics as the author. In principle, scientific activity addresses the group of peers, which we can suppose sharing something as a paradigm; although it has not the constraining force evoked by Thomas Kuhn, it allows scientists to circumscribe a common world. Bourdieu, as we saw it before, is often harsh with his sociologist colleagues: due to their scholarly trajectory, they are often less prepared to receive a discourse based on the de-familiarizing with the evidence and routine of the ordinary world. Here lies a great risk: the linguistic cure proposed by the great scholar might miss its target and increase the ills by the Diafoirusstyle misunderstandings that will occur and that he will not notice, as he his so busy with the reinforcement of controls and constraints. Bourdieu has little

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respect for the notion of reception and expresses scorn toward sociologists who strive to account for the relations between artworks and publics. Perhaps this is due to the fact that he goes on believing in a sort of magic of words: talking about allodoxia and hysteresis would have a genuine power to convert listeners and readers and would contain transformative virtues when it comes to the spontaneous relationship to the social world. This issue of the public is all the more important that we consider now the third writing regime of the oeuvre, which dominated the ten last years of Bourdieu’s life. He adopted then an explicit transgressing attitude with respect to scientific practice. While he continued to preach the principles of The Craft of Sociology, particularly the necessity of breaking away from commonsense and the imperative of painstakingly constructing the object. Bourdieu went headlong to a series of transgressions that will astonish, or, even disgust, his eldest disciples. In the 1990s, it is time to reaching out, to move out of the academic world in order to meet the people. As he wanted to have a political existence, which we will examine in the next chapter, Bourdieu had to radically change the ways by which sociology constructed its objects and its tools. The collective book The Weight of the World attracted many new readers and remains the most spectacular evidence of a methodological and stylistic revolution. It was not Bourdieu’s first transgression: even in the most scholarly works, he was prompt to attack his colleagues when he thought that they were not doing good sociology. He was not afraid of saying that “there are many people who say and believe that they are sociologists and whom I find it hard to recognize as sociologist” (Bourdieu 1993: 8). As soon as he was done with the deferent position characteristic of the first writing regime, he made a full use of his challenger’s right to attack his colleagues, not respecting the rules of academic civility. His pugnacity was legitimized by many epistemological justifications: he did not fight against rival peers, but against a bad way of doing science. However, the transgression that orients the third regime of writing is quite different. In his address to the reader that opens The Weight of the World, Bourdieu does not want to compromise with the scientific demand that always characterized his endeavor. Nevertheless, he is conscious that the chosen format, a series of vignettes coming out of interviews intertwined with methodological and epistemological considerations, predisposes the unprepared reader to be content with the plainest reading, which identifies slices of life, close to the ones provided by newspapers, radio and television, particularly in social or psychological shows. The books clearly appears as a delivery: Here we deliver the testimonies that men and women gave us about their existence and their difficulties to exist. We have organized and presented

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them in order to get from the reader a gaze as comprehensive as the demands of scientific method impose on us and allow us to give them. This is why we hope that she will accept to follow the proposed undertakings. This, even if we understand that, seeing the different “case-studies” as sort of short stories, some can prefer to read them randomly and choose to ignore methodological preambles or theoretical analyses, however necessary, according to us, to the fair understanding of interviews (Bourdieu 2000). Properly speaking, these transcribed interviews are not case studies: they are just introduced by a short presentation that strongly looks like what journalists can do when they work seriously. The book is clearly an interesting document on the state of French society in the beginning of the 1990s, although one should keep in mind that the misery filter produces a considerable bias. Collective work mobilized the most eminent members of Bourdieu’s research center, among those some have or are about to publish first-rate books. The whole purpose stems from a directive line: the withdrawal of the state triggered by neo-liberal ideology creates misery and suffering. Both terms appear on the cover of the book, a great work created by one of the best French designers, Gérard Paris-Clavel. The tone is clearly pessimistic, as the title shows. What matters the most is the atmosphere of the book, which played a central role in reconfiguring the sociological mood of the last years of the 20th century and was widely imitated abroad and among students. Although it does not appear as a methodological manifesto, the book is a claim for a new way of doing sociology: it stands in sharp contrast against the recommendations of The Craft of Sociology’s authors. At this point, one can see a paradox: while Passeron realized in the 1980s that the methodological rigor claimed by The Craft of Sociology led to a deadend and claimed that it was necessary to deal more sharply with actual sociological practice, he crafted very meticulous and innovative surveys like Le temps donné aux tableaux, based on quantitative ethnography (Passeron and Pedler 1991). On the contrary, Bourdieu maintained the untenable rigor of a naturalistic epistemology while freeing himself from the rules of object construction commonly accepted. Bourdieu and Passeron’s relationship can thus be viewed as a chiasm: it constitutes a real sociological enigma. Seen in retrospect, The Craft of Sociology was a weapon developed by the young fighters in a very peculiar context. Stuck between triumphant Marxist-Althusserian theory that then made fun of the “so called” social sciences and the dull empiricism of institutionalized sociology, they had to conquer a new territory, quite improbable in the French intellectual landscape: an empirical sociology oriented

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by epistemological preoccupations largely drawn from Bachelard’s philosophy of the scientific mind. In the 1970s, The Craft of Sociology attracted quite a few ambitious students toward sociology: a program that allowed them to associate conceptual stringency with the taste for fieldwork seduced them. More, it mostly offered the possibility to break away from philosophy while remaining quite close to it. In the decades that followed, this manifesto tended to become a foil as relativism and epistemological anarchism made progress and questioned Bachelard’s concepts. By refusing both the Diltheyan-type dualism and the positivism that contents itself with a scholarly caricature of hard sciences, it was easy exonerating oneself from the task of accounting in epistemological terms for the empirically verifiable difference between two types of knowledge. Meanwhile, mainly in the United States, another variety of critical sociology, equally driven by a hostility toward functionalist empiricism, rehabilitated commonsense competencies by making the resources mobilized by social scientists and those used by the agents on a daily basis indiscernible. Two years after The Weight of the World came out, Nonna Mayer expressed a point of view that many professional readers shared. Her article made a date: “Generations of students learned from The Craft of Sociology that a social fact is constructed against the pre-notions and the false evidences of commonsense. The Weight of the World does not follow this model” (Mayer 1995: 358). Clearly, the reader has no idea about the mode of selection of the sixty people or so who were interviewed. Sometimes one learns that there are among episodic or more stable researchers’ relational network: this is justified because it facilitates non-violent interactions. This is the case with Pierre, a wine merchant, a fan of Maréchal Pétain and Jean-Marie Le Pen: he seems at the edge of the abyss and Patrick Champagne strives to make us share the misery in an episode tragically titled: “The fall”. Why was this guy chosen, since he sees the origin of his infortune in Pierre Mendès-France’s anti-alcohol policy in the mid1950s? “Mendès-France! This was total bullshit! He started to do a milk plant in the Tournus area. I saw the plant under construction in 1956. They gave milk in schools and in the army. It did not work” (Bourdieu 1993: 853). Here, the wine merchant’s misery is directly linked to governmental action oriented toward alcoholism prevention. According to the poor man, De Gaulle and Giscard d’Estaing continued a policy in favor of fruit juice and worsened the situation. Pierre’s misery is thus more of the consequence of state intervention than of its withdrawal: it does not coincide with the main line of the book. When reading the book, one has the impression that some interviewees were chosen as in popular magazines, because they cumulated many handicaps. For instance, an unemployed woman falls into a deep depression after

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the premature death of her son. While some interviews are remarkable, as those done by Abdelmalek Sayad, Francine Muel-Dreyfus and Stéphane B ­ eaud, since they continue to do their work under the peculiar conditions of a collective project, others are less convincing: they seem to be a little bit forced. A strong impression of populism and misery-oriented discourse prevails in the whole book, as if the team wanted to bring an empirical confirmation of the theses developed by Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron in their book Le savant et le populaire (Grignon and Passeron 1993). Contrary to all methodological precepts, one sees more than many induced answers and positive reinforcements that lead individual to go in the direction sought by the researcher. The emotional load of the interviews is always quite high: it is the basis of the reading pact. The reader must put herself in the situation of feeling a strong empathy for miserable people, which is not always easy. The wine merchant’s descent into hell is a long-lasting process: since the aftermath of the Second World War, his life has been just a long complaint against all governments. Why did not he quit the alcohol business? a dry heart could say. The reading pact is homologous to the one contracted between interviewers and interviewees: what is at stake is, through showing strong empathy, is to allow the subject to express herself in a space devoid of symbolic violence. The emotional turn of Bourdieu’s thought will be studied in Chapter 8. For the time being, the task is simply to mention the radical change in epistemology and methodology involved by the ambition to be understood by all the people.

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Chapter 7

From Public Service to the Redefinition of Public Interest In an excerpt from the Pierre Carles’ movie on Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art, the sociologist meets his main collaborators in order to identify the negative consequences of neoliberalism for a collective book. Researchers are invited to look for examples and do not seem to be really inspired by the topic. The most zealous try to find ideas that others express doubt about, particularly when life expectancy and the sanitary effects of neoliberalism come in the discussion. The episode surprised Bourdieu’s eldest readers, those who kept in mind the somewhat rigid recommendations of The Craft of Sociology concerning the necessity of constructing the object and of breaking away from commonsense pre-notions. There is nothing of the sort in the brainstorming session that failed. Neoliberalism is never defined as a sociological concept. Researchers are embarrassed by the fact that they are not used to work under such conditions. One has concluded a little bit quickly from those images that Bourdieu was radicalized, particularly in his last years. His international fame would have led him to feel his political power and to seize the occasion of delivering a revolutionary message. The most learned commentators used the concept of cleft habitus to account for a turn that otherwise would remain mysterious. On the contrary, others, victims of a retrospective illusion, saw germs of radicalism in Bourdieu’s first works. When he talked about his new commitment, Bourdieu used the language of obligation. Acknowledging that his political writings were less robust that his scientific work, he said that he collected them in volumes titled Counter-Fire to provide people with “weapons to fight the neoliberal plague” (Bourdieu 2003). He added that his discourse was both inspired by a “legitimate furor” and a “feeling of duty”. There is no way of applying to those political texts the same reading grid as the one used for scientific texts. They manifest a turn in the author’s sociological practice, closer to a sort of “chronicle” of society in the last years. The Weight of the World remains the best example of it. Political commitment corresponds to the end of theoretical and methodological censorship that he imposed to himself in his early carrier. However, it would not be honest to say that Bourdieu produced only brochures at the end of his life. Pascalian Meditations came out in 1997, after his author had become one of the key actors of public protest in France. Maturity’s vehemence is neither a

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r­ enunciation to science nor an epistemological palinode. It expresses an internal ferment and an exasperation concerning the weakening of the French welfare state. This is the reason why there is no articulated critique of capitalism in it and even no deep investigation into neoliberalism as an ideological form of current capitalism. His indignation, communicated by an intense emotion that is never made up, contrary to what his detractors have often claimed, comes from a civil servant, son of a civil servant, who senses that the world he has lived in is coming to an end. While he always objectified French meritocracy with severity, Bourdieu remained faithful to it to some extent, as it lifted him to the top of academic hierarchy and to the very small company of worldclass intellectuals. The message to rail workers at the Gare de Lyon in Paris during the 1995 strikes is significant in that respect. 1995 marks the end of the great strikes in public service, which are part of a large social ritual, acknowledged and accepted by all. The social movement will end up successfully, costing his job to the Prime Minister, Alain Juppé. It will lead to the return of the moderate left to power. Bourdieu’s determination against Lionel Jospin’s socialist government, which came into office right after the success of the strike, may induce to think that he had radicalized his position, while he maintained constant dialogue with Michel Rocard, another socialist, between 1988 and 1991, through the mediation of Pierre Encrevé, a great linguist who was also Rocard’s advisor. However, if one pays attention to the speech at the Gare de Lyon, which was appraised internationally, one notices that it is a defense and illustration of the French public service, and more generally of the redistributing state, as he had met it in his encounters with higher administration in the 1960s, particularly at the time of the Arras conference, already mentioned. The introduction offers an unambiguous explanation: “I am here to tell our support to all those who have been fighting for three weeks, against the destruction of a civilization, associated with the existence of the public service, with the republican equality of rights, rights to education, to health, to research, to art and, above all, to work” (Bourdieu 1998: 30). In many ways, the political Bourdieu is somewhat withdrawn with respect to Bourdieu as a critical sociologist of education. He considers as positive, at least implicitly, the evaluation of the Republic, particularly the organization of a welfare state at the end of the Second World War. The organization of the public service is the condition de possibility of a civilization, which sees the mailman delivering in the most remote villages and the student ride to Paris on a cheap train. In his speech, the sociologist seems to only address the members of the public service: “rail workers, postal workers, teachers, employees of public services, students, and so many others”. Nobody noted that there was no

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reference to the working class as such in his call for mobilization. Bourdieu’s universe is the public service. His political intervention is not far from the project of a rational education, which remained as an abstraction, after he preconized it in his books co-authored with Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors and Reproduction. Thus, he defines his political project in front of the rail workers: what is at stake is “the restitution of the enlightened and reasonable definition of the future of the public services” (:32). He puts science at the center of struggles: “I think in fact, he says to conclude, there is an only way to fight against national and international technocracy, it is to affront it on its privileged field, notably economic, by opposing to an abstract and mutilated knowledge a knowledge more respectful of human beings and of realities they are confronted with” (:33). Bourdieu’s address to the people is admirable, but there is a limitation: it exclusively concerns the people of the public service, the only one that mobilized during that large social movement. As one can see, the intervention at the Gare de Lyon had nothing revolutionary in it. It manifested the emotion felt by Bourdieu when he met an assembly of strikers who were close to him, at least due to their common belonging to the public service. He continued to propose rational and reasonable solutions and to whish that a bigger place would be devoted to the social sciences in the art of governing. He announced, but without any prophecy, an extension of the movement to Europe and the whole society. He was wrong on this point: 1995 strikes were more the swan song of an established form of mobilization than the prefiguration of future struggles. Himself a convinced European, and thus close to European administrative elites whom he castigated, he thought that France could serve as a mobilizing model. He ignored that the French model of public service was unique. He did not know that the ideological forces of new capitalism were winning the battle of cultural hegemony. He felt it undoubtedly, which allows us to understand his furor and his moral indignation; but he could not envisage other forms of movement, which would take other ways, as the mobilization of precarious and unemployed workers. Can one equate Bourdieu’s political commitment with a form of hysteresis of the habitus? Was it a late in life commitment that would unconsciously take the shape of traditional forms of mobilization, as if he continued to think the railways having in mind the pictures of Zola’s and Renoir’s Human Beast in the age of high speed trains and of the transformation of users into customers? The 1990s see a lot of economic and symbolic struggles, to use Bourdieu’s lexicon, for the legitimate definition of the rail worker’s craft. The National Railways leadership wanted to move from a model grounded on bureaucratic and administrative principles, implying some degree of co-management with

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unions, to a new management model, entirely foreign to the enterprise tradition and largely imported from abroad. The confrontation has been violent, and transformations have been slow: still today, traditional styles remain among conductors and drivers that seldom match the commercial discourse of the National Railways. The old model slowly disappears. Perhaps, public service constitutes Bourdieu’s “doxic” world, a set of pre-established schemes that triggers a pre-reflexive adhesion and takes a taken for granted mode: the mailman remains a civilizational element when electronic communication is fully dominant. The end of this world took place in France during the 1990s with an unprecedented social violence, as postal and telecommunication services clearly show. This could frighten a man whose intellectual and moral constitution had developed in the heart of the public service so that he could believe that it occupied the whole social world. He could not, and did not want to, see the change that was coming. He overestimated the capacities of collective resistance. His academic way of life did not able him to grasp the popular classes’ adhesion to a consumerist model that looked incongruous to him. As his people was the people of public service, accustomed since the start of the welfare state to a decent life, he could not see that very different forms of life grew at the margins, made of precariousness and cultural isolation. His sensitivity to the public service allows us to analyze his own relationship to the state: here he distances himself from a Marxist, who thinks that the state is the mere instrument of capital. Intervening at the Greek workers ‘congress in 1996, he noted that the state is an ‘ambiguous reality’ (Bourdieu 2003: 39). One can never assimilate the state to a pure weapon at the dominants” service, particularly when it has a very long history. Power can be defined as a field, since it benefits, like all other fields, from a relative autonomy. Thus, it is not an homogeneous reality that could be defined as an apparatus, but a space of struggles in which a right hand a left hand affront each other all the time. The state keeps the memory of past struggles in his archive: for instance “the Ministry of Labor is a social conquest that became real, although, under some circumstances, it can also be an instrument of repression” (: 38). Spender ministries are opposed to budgetary ones, the task of which consists in cutting down other requests. Bourdieu is thus led to install a real defense plan of the state: its general tonality is inextricably linked to the peculiar history of the French state. In his political suggestions, which generally remain quite abstract and often start with “one should do”, the sociologist intertwines two main themes. The first remains implicit: the paradigmatic role of France in the organization of the resistance against the neoliberal plague. The French model has been central in Bourdieu’s theoretical construction since the origins, considering either

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education or culture. It is the same with the political model, which cumulates a long-established history and the solid anchoring of welfare state, reinforced by the weight of the public service in the life of the nation: For instance, one of the big difference between France and England is that the Thatcherized English people realize that they have not resisted as much as they could have, largely because the labor contract was a contract of common law, and not, as in France, an agreement guaranteed by the state. Today, paradoxically, when one exalts the English model in continental Europe, English workers at the same time look at the Continent and discover that it offers things that their working class tradition did not offer, which is a labor law (Bourdieu 2003: 58). France is characterized by having a real left hand of the state: this is the reason why it can become the political and cultural locomotive of future struggles. The second theme is decidedly internationalist, and constitutes an originality in Bourdieu’s positioning, although leftist euro-skepticism developed mostly after his death. He trusts in the European social movement to fight against the multiple regressions borne by neoliberalism. He sees a global movement as the horizon of new mobilizations. He was from the start passionate about Europe. One of his most original collective endeavors was the Liber. Revue internationale des livres, a European journal, which he developed from 1989 to 1994, with the support of the Collège de France. He tried to federate artists and intellectuals from Western and Eastern Europe. The project had nothing Eurocentric in it: the main idea was guaranteeing the autonomy of the European cultural field against the assault of US cultural industries and their attempt toward ideological hegemony. In the last years of the century, his tone became more vehement and anxious, but the overall orientation of his discourse did not really change. The novel forms of communication and publishing strategies that marked Bourdieu’s political turn lie more broadly in a continuous entrepreneurial logic on behalf of the necessary countering of “half–learned”’s grip on intellectual and political life. “Half-learned” (demi-habile) is a complex notion, coming from Blaise Pascal: it was diversely interpreted. The excerpt from the Thoughts titled “Reason of Effects” allows us to localize the position of those learned people who are only half-learned: The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man’s true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is

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the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge, and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them (Pascal 2018: 83). Whom does Pascal target through that notion? Probably, he thinks of the libertines, but first of all, of all those who know something to assert a rational judgment. Thus, some scientific observations are grounded on a true principle but stop at half-way, by producing only a half-reasoning. One remembers Montaigne and his “mestis” (mongrels in the English translation), these incomplete learned-people who develop an ignorance of the second order: A man may say with some color of truth that there is an Abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it: an ignorance that knowledge creates and begets, at the same time that it dispatches and destroys the first. (…) The simple peasants are good people, and so are the philosophers, or whatever the present age calls them, men of strong and clear reason, and whose souls are enriched with an ample instruction of profitable sciences. The mongrels who have disdained the first form of the ignorance of letters, and have not been able to attain to the other (sitting betwixt two stools, as I and a great many more of us do), are dangerous, foolish, and importunate; these are they that trouble the world. (Montaigne 2007: 331–332). Mestis or half-learned are obviously polemical notions. Bourdieu steadily used them to attack his adversaries, particularly sociologists who embodied what Montaigne called “the ignorance that science makes and generates”. However, Montaigne included himself in the mestis category, which is less a social group than an inevitable consequence of the learning process. Bourdieu could have noticed that sociology is particularly susceptible to feed doctoral ignorance, produced by the familiarity with knowledge and by the development of scholarly institutions. As he characterized his own discipline as a “shelter” in his earlier texts, he could have hinted that it was a “halfscience” camping midway between the construction of concepts and the air of

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the time. Perhaps his constant and public aversion to the processes of reception became an epistemological obstacle. While he multiplied grammatical and lexical precautions so that his discourse would not be trivialized and that it could not become an asset for the half-learned discourse, the scholar himself was to transport his discourse in the realm of peremptory statements and thus to put it in danger. The fear of being trapped in an ivory tower led him to expose himself, in the most ordinary meaning of the term: becoming a public figure while, in the first part of his life, he firmly refused to play the game of the public intellectual. In doing so, he could not avoid the effects of doctoral ignorance. Although he regularly demanded to have readers who would be able to reproduce the author’s complex logical ways, he was doomed to have fans who took one word for another and whose naïve adhesion, far from being a chance, became a terrible burden. The weight of the burden is perceptible in his lectures at the Collège de France. He never stops evoking the difficulty to talk to quite heterogeneous audiences, since his collaborators, the eldest, those who became familiar with his concepts thirty years ago and the young people who just made it to Paris sat on the same rows. He discovered during this trial the potentials effects of receiving a scholarly discourse in an unprepared world. He encountered them through the written questions that he had to answer in the following lecture: quite often, they showed a huge gap between the master’s talk and what remained of it: I would like to say that one of the problems with this teaching, what makes it scary for the one who does it, is the extreme dispersion of publics. One of the problems raised by teaching at the College de France is the fact that, for the better or the worse, it juxtaposes auditors who have extremely dispersed specialties, training, age, etc., and that the weight of that dispersion is extremely heavy, particularly one is conscious of it (Bourdieu 2015). Far from being an occasion of emancipation, the Collège de France seems to have become a place of servitude. Bourdieu exhausts himself while trying to obey a double injunction: remaining a great scholar, a world reference in his domain, and simultaneously being a teacher of the people. What is bad with the people is not the alphabetic ignorance evoked by Montaigne, prior to scholarly socialization, but the half-learned people produced by mass university. Bourdieu is provided with Montaigne’s conceptual frame as well as his own theoretical construction in order to easily understand that the teaching of sociology is full of unintended consequences. The almost general access of an

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age cohort to the baccalauréat did not lead to expected outcomes. Massive access to higher education was neither accompanied by an increase of legitimate cultural practice nor by an improving of the average quality of judgments. Students are the most intense consumers of American cultural industries and conspiracy theory is high among high-school pupils. These remarks are not culturally or politically conservative; far from it, they just want to question the unintended consequences of a policy that aims to increase knowledge if one considers that it contributed to multiply Montaigne’s mestis or Pascal’s halflearned. When he includes himself in the mestis category, which he castigates in the mean time, the former offers us an opportunity to think of doctoral ignorance as an unintended effect of knowledge, since ignorant peasants are free from it. Bourdieu’s sociology does not escape that effect, all the more that it is simultaneously esoteric and exoteric. Bourdieu is a Durkheimian in some respects: he wants to make sociology a full-fledged science and thus an esoteric knowledge. He also shares with the Division of Social Labor’s author the claim of its social usefulness when applied to the improvement of the world (“sociology would not be worth an hour of pain if he just had a speculative interest”, Durkheim wrote). However, he distances himself from his predecessor when he wants to be the people’s tribune at his Collège de France chair. While he keeps his own theoretical construction at a maximal distance from any attempt of simplistic appropriation, he ends up by offering the public, which he never bothered to define, a simplification that is not sufficient to being understood. Bourdieu’s persona is the embodiment, always grave and often pathetic, of a contradiction lying at the heart of any social science: speaking about what people believe that they know in terms that people do not know, and reaching the point of a contradictory movement in which one can no longer recognize opposing forces: the pre-reflexive adhesion to the world is suspended as people end up saying: the world is quite the same as what I thought it was, as my own suffering gives evidence to it. Those difficulties are not specific to Bourdieu’s work. Anthony Giddens has offered a convincing analysis of the dual status of sociological words: scholarly constructions always end up being appropriated by social agents (Giddens 1976). Sociological concepts have always a second life in the streets. Thus, Erving Goffman’s stigma, analyzed in his book titled Stigma, is the most used form of social categorization today. The term has become a weapon in social struggles, which allows the “stigmatized” to be recognized as victims. Labeling theory, developed by interactionist sociologists, particularly Howard S. Becker, was the object of a massive appropriation that went much further than his promoters actually meant. The growth of social mediation agencies and the

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emergence of social work as an intervention sector account, to a large extent, for the success of those words and their constant use by “stigmatized” and “labeled” people. This the reason why politicians and police think that sociologists provide delinquents with excuses, why the latter answer that their knowledge is a mere statement about a reality that the former want to hide. The theory of “double hermeneutics” developed by Giddens allows us to analyze how people appropriate sociological concepts. It offers in turn the possibility of understanding inverse trajectories, from lay concepts to sociology: popular notions obstinately resist against attempts to the purification sought by researchers. In the social sciences, concepts are never produced independently from social agents whom they aim to account for, while their outcomes end up existing as objects of the world that they claim to describe. The first edition of Giddens’ book came out in 1976. Informed by phenomenology and ethnomethodology, he wanted to reassess Durkheimian epistemology, which based on the break away from prenotions. Taking the double hermeneutics into account, which means the permanent dual interpretive circuit between sociology and the ordinary social world, does not solve all the difficulties inherent to an object that speaks, but it helps to get out of the dead-ends to which the non-reflexive use of the break away from the commonsense leads. Bourdieu remains the best example of the divulgation of an esoteric language, largely elaborated by one scientist only. All his notions did not get an equal recognition, but they impregnated ordinary language, mainly due to the mediating work of journalists. Field and habitus have become ordinary terms; but doxa is particularly striking since it entered general vocabulary. A political scientist, Alain Garrigou, thus expresses his vision of things (Garrigou 2014): The Greek word doxa, used by Parmenides and mainly Plato to name opinion and stereotypes that rational thinking had to fight against, then sociological concept that Pierre Bourdieu, among others, developed to define public opinion, its interpreters (doxosophers), as well as a perception constituted by the evidence of things (the doxic relationship), this world was little known. At least before politics grabbed it. Here, the commentator misses a crucial step, since Bourdieu borrowed the notion, while reconfiguring it, from the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who used it to account for the primitive relationship to the world. While it is distinguished from the scholarly relationship to the world, Husserl’s doxa is a fundamental structure of the view of something in general, and thus is neither an infirmity nor a form of false consciousness. It should be clearly distinguished from the pejorative use that Bourdieu’s quick reading spread in ordinary

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l­ anguage. Thus it comes as a surprise that, as Alain Garrigou notes, Jean-Marie Le Pen uses the term, as, more recently, his daughter Marine: “He (Eric Zemmour) makes observations that are obvious but that were negated by the doxa, which have created a certain number of truths that it has tried to impose since the Libération” “(Garrigou 2014). Clearly, the politician considers doxa as an intentional manipulation of what he thinks is historical truth and is in fact his own opinion. His daughter widely uses the term in her interventions: for instance, the President of the national Front judged in a statement to the press that” “the president of the Republic has taken over the ultra-liberal doxa of the umps caste” (Le Pen 2012). In his anthropological texts, Bourdieu develops a definition of doxa that keeps some proximity with Husserl’s when he considers that “the logic of practice is almost a bodily view of the world that presupposes neither a representation of the body nor of the world, and even less of their relationship, immanent to the world by which the world imposes its imminence” (Bourdieu 1990a:). Doxa is one of the elements of the logic of practice understood as experience of the game: “The ‘feel for the game’ is what gives the game a subjective sense-a meaning and a raison d’être, but also a direction, an orientation, an impending outcome, for those who take part and therefore acknowledge what is at stake (this is illusion in the sense of investment in the game and the outcome, interest in the game, commitment to the presuppositions-­doxa-of the game)” (Bourdieu 1990a: 66). Here, doxa involves no pejorative dimension. On the contrary, the doxic level is a necessary component of the logic of practice. The term took a different meaning in later texts, as Bourdieu got away from the Husserlian meaning and got closer to something that reminds us of the Platonist opposition, presented mainly in Meno and Gorgias, between doxa, as opinion, popular or sophistic, on the one hand, and logos (reason) and episteme (knowledge) on the other hand. In this meaning, doxa is on the side of falsity and manipulation, although things are more complicated when one looks at singular situations. At the end of the lectures on the state, evoking the return of religiosity and the return of the individual, Bourdieu asks: “Do these doxic discourses (on these phenomena), which are not always false, owe a part of their efficiency to the fact that they wrongly name things that are a little bit true?” (Bourdieu 2015a). As one can see, contrary to his disciples, he never simplified his own task. The relative indetermination maintained by the use of what he called “fuzzy concepts” makes the analysis all the more difficult. In France, professors of political science, due to their academic power, tend to control interpretation: they privilege both the Platonist and trivial uses of the term. Thus, Alain Garrigou, who does not care about the Husserlian dimension of the notion, albeit central if one wants to understand the Logic of

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Practice, uses doxa as a category, in the ancient Greek meaning of “accusation”, an etymology that Bourdieu recalled almost ritually: doxa is a false opinion that opposes historical science. While Garrigou is perfectly right to oppose Le Pen’s assault against historical truth, with respect to the extermination of European Jews, he should not be surprised that the far-right politician fires any wood and returns doxa against those who conceived it in order to dissociate science and opinion. At this point, one can now associate Bourdieu and Giddens: the hermeneutical double implies that the words of sociology migrate toward the social world and become a stake of struggles. How can we protect the social sciences from their illegitimate uses? Le Pen’s extreme case and his extraordinary arrogance that lead him to give a false epistemology lecture should not hide a wide range of contaminations looking harmless or even unseen. As sociologists’ ideas enter the public domain, they are appropriated in a wild and interested manner. Denouncing those predatory attitudes is not enough to create an epistemological policing of language. In order to make a proper use of Bourdieu, one would need, as he repeatedly said, to have in mind all that led him to build his system. Garrigou’s example clearly shows that it is impossible, not only for political science professors. One must accept the particular social condition of the social sciences. The relationship to the media constituted one of the most singular dimensions of Bourdieu’s political endeavor. He denounced the grip of journalism over intellectual and political life in France before he engaged into politics. Journalistic thought is the quintessence of doxa, viewed in a negative way: it expresses the mental world of the half-learned, simultaneously aware of a lot of things and unable to sustain a rational argument. The critique of journalism is related to the general critique of public opinion, as a media artifact and to the declining autonomy triggered by the association between journalism and the intellectual world. Bourdieu did vitriolic portraits of Philippe Sollers and Bernard-Henri Lévy that display a rare violence: he holds them as imposters, mimicking intellectuals while they are only the media expression of the dominating class’ interests: All the masters of fake, who were grouped at one time or another around Tel Quel: fake-writers, fake-philosophers, fake-linguist, or all that together, one one is nothing and knows nothing about it; as, in the joke, one knows the music of culture, but not the lyrics, one only knows how to mimic a great writer and even to rule by terror in literature for a while (Bourdieu 1995: 18).

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This text, written in 1995 and published in the daily Libération, is surprising as it transforms the theory of the literary field into a lethal weapon against opportunist intellectuals who navigate according to weather reports between bourgeois avant-garde and neoconservative thought. Here, the sociologist tells the norm of the field and expresses a set of value judgements, just filtered by the knowledge that science offers concerning internal struggles specific to a peculiar world. It takes a dual form: quick analysis of the field and critical evaluation. Femmes, a novel “à clé” is viewed as a “massacre of literature”. There is an explicit fusion between field analysis and gatekeeping of the field. The same grid applies to Bernard-Henri Lévy, albeit not in the ephemeral space of a daily. One could ask why Bernard-Henri Lévy appeared in the post-face of a very ambitious book, The Rules of Art. The post-face was titled: “For a corporatism of the universal”. One year before The Weight of the World, Bourdieu gave there a prefiguration of his transgressive turn: he was now able to take a normative position: “Contrary to previous chapters, this one is, and wants to be, the expression of a normative position grounded on the conviction that it is possible to draw from the knowledge about the functioning logic of the fields of cultural production a realistic program for a collective action of intellectuals” (Bourdieu 1996: 336). Here a party chief appears. He looks like a representative of literary combat in the Nineteenth century. He identifies Bernard-Henri Lévy, albeit not naming him, knowing that everybody in Paris will recognize him: It is significant that one of the most representative of these “journalistphilosophers”, as Wittgenstein called them, expressly attacked Baudelaire, and went on to make a television history of intellectuals in which (like that character of William de la Mare’s who only saw the lower part of the world-plinths, feet, shoes- he singled out from this immense adventure only the parts he could grasp-cowardice, treachery, baseness, small-mindedness) (Bourdieu 1996: 339). This vehement attack is a little bit disconcerting, since what could have a straightforward meaning for close readers soon becomes opaque for many readers. It is an insult properly speaking, which aims to downgrade an adversary on behalf of the science of the field. Although Bourdieu’s point of view on media intellectuals is widely shared in the social sciences, it is not sure that the confusion between science and polemics serves his author’s interests. If the theory of fields is a mere weapon for shouting out in the field, is it really useful, all the more that the calls to mobilization have backfired? After all, one does not need any theory to insult another.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy appeared before in Bourdieu’s work. In 1984, a convincing demonstration was made in the Appendix 3 of Homo Academicus: “The Hitparade of French Intellectuals. Who is to Judge the Legitimacy of the Judges?”: a high position in hierarchy strongly depends on ratings in the media. While the assertion has nothing counter-intuitive, it is very well documented. Journalists have a tendency to consider the authors belonging to the autonomous pole of restricted production with the same criteria as they use for large production. It leads to an allodoxia effect, by which a “telegenic essayist”, whom the reader quickly identifies by his opulent hair and his wide opened shirt, is branded as Jean-Paul Sartre’s successor, which amounts to, as seen before, taking bladders for lanterns. The analysis is impeccable. However, a feeling of uneasiness grows when the reader is invited, by the Appendix end, to know the Hit-parade: Claude Lévi-Strauss comes first, just ahead of Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. Fernand Braudel gets an honorable 7th rank while an academic as discreet as Georges Dumézil manages to get to the 34th. The agents belonging to the autonomous pole of the field get quite good positions, which is quite surprising if one takes into account the allodoxia effect that bears the whole analysis. Would the upper ranks express the tribute paid by journalistic vice to scientific virtue? The key of the demonstration is to be found in Bourdieu’s last position, along with Pierre Boulez, Albert Cohen and Leopold Sedar Senghor, who are older than he is. One can think that the sociologist’s libido sciendi was activated by the furor originating in the non-recognition of his intellectual eminence. The affair can be read at three levels, among which the reader is invited to choose: the analysis proves that an impeccable will of science reaches out to the tiniest objects, as it is unlikely that a single reader determines her choice out of that list; the sociologist is extremely sensitive and one must look for the reasons of his oeuvre in his passions; the example shows that even the most autonomous agent in the field needs a visibility that can only be brought by journalistic recognition. While Bourdieu knew how to develop strong friendship with journalists, he never ceased to slay the media grip on French scientific and intellectual life. His 1996 brochure on television, today his most known book in the world, reached a paroxysm, which paradoxically reveal its limits. There, he pursued his transgressive itinerary, blurring the demarcation line between empirical research and polemic endeavor. Journalists generally liked the book. As said on the back cover, the author aimed to spread “the outcome of research on television in the wider public” (Bourdieu 1998b), thanks to its impactful analysis and its low price. In the book however, announced research is non-existent. One cannot find the sociological analysis of production and reception of televisual messages referred to specific contexts. It did not really matter. In France, all the

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agents in the intellectual field knew that the book came out of Bourdieu’s real and quite understandable furor after a television show when he could not express himself in acceptable conditions. Right after the fact, he had given a crisp ethnographic account in Le Monde diplomatique. The message is clear: market logic exerts a growing grip on the “journalistic field”, which in turn contributes, in other sectors of cultural production, to the growing pressure of commercial goods over “pure” ones. This is a way as another to denounce the tyranny of ratings. When pushing the reasoning at its limits, one can say, as Karl Popper, that television endangers democracy in its present uses (Popper 1993). Here, the sociologist adds his voice to an ensemble of protests that do not need science to be voiced. One effortlessly recognizes a recurrent theme in Bourdieu’s last works: threats against the autonomy of intellectual field have never been as strong as at the end of the Twentieth century. Here, the real question is not the journalistic grip, but the unbelievable fragility of the social science knowledge: in spite of the powerful rhetoric inherent to the “epistemological break”, it can abandon an autonomy laboriously conquered in a very short time. Thus, science cannot resist television. The book intertwines two types of assertions. The first concerns the routine treatment of information by television (systematic research of sensational items, very rigid scansion of time, privilege given to trivialities and sport) and the uneven resources at the disposal of social agents: Bernard-Henri Lévy has a better mastery of television tricks than a rail worker on strike. The second assertions, grounded on the idea according to which events are fabricated, are retrospectively more questionable: thus, the issue of Islamic veil would only exist because journalists would produce a reality effect simply by a peculiar use of words. Without the research of that effect, the affair would have remained a simple question of headscarf. The reiterated critique of journalists could simply be considered as the consequence of the characteristic effort made by the epistemology to equating social sciences with natural sciences in a representation that the most recent sociology of hard sciences largely considers as a fiction. Here this equating vision leads to produce an artificial demarcation between sociology and all other discourses on the social. Viewing journalism and sociology as incompatible has not been constant in the history of sociology: Max Weber, the Chicago School, Raymond Aron and Bennett Berger insisted on the interest of journalistic experience for the sociological endeavor. Sharing their point of view is not necessary to legitimately ask: what can a sociologist gain in slowly blurring the frontier between a social science that keeps showing its epistemological vigilance and a discursive practice that cannot be told apart from polemic or invective and that looks so much kike what we have so often heard about television? The reader would prefer a field

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analysis of television: using positional space as a frame would allow us to understand journalism not as an undifferentiated entity but as a world cleft by trajectories, histories and contradictions. The book disappointed many among Bourdieu’s colleagues, as they were after the publication of the Weight of the World. They worried about his abandonment of methodological rules that he had imposed with such a force and a conviction and his new taste for explosive style unknown to them in the past. There was a huge gap between Bourdieu’s quite dogmatic argument of authority and the recourse to narrative or interpretative strategies impossible to distinguish from those existing in the ordinary world. The demanding epistemology advocated in The Craft of Sociology was suddenly cancelled. Everybody was able to understand Bourdieu’s discourse, even the most obtuse journalist. The effort of simplification led to a huge social success of the last works. However, success and the feeling of immediate understanding show the limits of an exoteric gamble that never dares to be expressed as such. Political emergency dominated then. In spite of those late excursions, it is not impossible to insert Bourdieu in a genealogy of the French intellectual in the public service: he represents its achieved synthesis, even if one includes his transgressive maturity in his portrait. The public service intellectual appeared in the first decades of the Third Republic. Professors, particularly academic philosophers, started to claim for a monopoly of professional competence when the republican reforms of the educational system greatly improved their working conditions due to the growth of educational supply, the increase of professional qualification among teachers and the launching of new pedagogical products in the publishing world, originating in the growth of student audience. Academic function as identified with a body of technical and specialized knowledge seems to be in contradiction with the dominant image of a “generalist” intellectual, the literary man who has ideas and develops them while socializing. The legitimate definition of intellectual activity is at stake in a fierce ideological combat, as the dispute over the New Sorbonne and above all the Dreyfus Affair. Fighting is for academics the best way of putting the issue of certified competence at the center. They aim to disqualify the practice of writers-ideologists, who see the new organization of academia as the biggest threat. The figure of Sartre, as he was defined by Bourdieu as the total intellectual, appears as a post-republican reconstruction of philosophical activity. The tight association between philosophy, journalism and literature, the exit from academia, the return to cafés at the detriment of seminars and libraries and the preference for writing under urgent conditions compose an intellectual

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a­ ttitude that no longer renders account to republican institutions. In the 1950s, Sartre’s oeuvre, albeit produced out of academia, became rather significant in philosophy teaching in high schools, as references in textbooks clearly shows: thus, in Armand Cuvillier’s Précis de philosophie, one counts 27 references to Being and Nothingness’ author while the most canonic classical authors are not over 50. Although the most known philosophers of the 1960s distanced themselves from Sartre’s intervention style, they systematically went out of their professional world to get closer to the literary avant-garde and to transform the canonic forms of philosophical presentation and, even more radically, the very object of their discipline. A contradiction arose between the pedagogue who is exclusively at the service of a body of knowledge that guarantee her authority and the creative mind who does not recognize any master in the history of the discipline. This progressively erodes the belief in the strength and the unity of a professional universe that owes its coherence to its inscription in the republican space. An anti-institutional mood develops. Philosophers tend to identify themselves with the margins rather than with the summit. Subversive thought against the established order tends to become a professional norm. Bourdieu always stood quite far from the avant-gardist temptation that seized many of his colleagues, particularly in the aftermath of 1968. However, he gradually included a transgressive dimension in his public character, developing a new relationship to politics, albeit a few spectacular attitudes were not enough to radically change his position. The lectures on the state as well as the short public addresses collected in Counterfire are still faithful to a “republican” definition of his activity: constant defense of scientific autonomy and of academic freedom, firm opposition to the socialite intellectual and permanent care for the public interest. All those elements contribute to include Bourdieu into a legacy that emerged in the first years of the Third Republic by referring to two philosophers who had lived outside state institutions, Auguste Comte and Charles Renouvier. The Logic of Practice’s author was never a party intellectual. While he was infuriated against technocracy and the Socialist Party as it was in power, he never despaired of the Republic. When he proposed a typology of the intellectual anticolonial commitment, Pierre Vidal-Naquet explicitly situated himself in a republican legacy, by clearly associating his action with “the competence that he detained” (Vidal-Naquet 1989): “I tried to fight against the Algerian war as a historian”. One remembers that he distinguishes three types of position, when considering the forms of engagement against colonial wars: the “Dreyfusards” among which he located himself, the Bolcheviks, and the Third-World partisans. Dreyfusards, very often academic people, determine themselves with respect to an intellectual tradition of justice, but non to a political project. They were more preoccupied by

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the executioners than by the victims, he noted. On the contrary, Bolsheviks explicitly viewed themselves in the logic of revolutionary professionals, while Third-World oriented intellectuals could not be situated in terms of professional model: they often came from journalism and announced in many ways the humanitarian commitment to come. Vidal-Naquet’s example clearly show how the mode of republican articulation between principles, competences and action frame can be reactivated in conjunctures that are quite different from the founding moment of the Third Republic. Contrary to appearances, Bourdieu was not far from Vidal-Naquet’s position. The lectures on the state gave him a chance to make a constant comparison between his own perspective and Durkheim’s one when it came to their relationship to the state. It does not come as a surprise that Bourdieu started his teaching with a reference to the author of the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. He evoked the distinction he made between “logical integration” and “moral integration” (Bourdieu 2015a: p. 15). “The state, as it is ordinarily understood, is the foundation of the logical integration and of the moral integration of the social world”. (Bourdieu 2015a). While the author does not stop with this definition, he nevertheless makes it a point of departure of the investigation, as it shapes the fundamental consensus that is the condition of any conflict in the social world. Along his demonstration, Bourdieu strives to open a gap between the sociologist in the public service and the state. He even sees there a difficulty inherent to the construction of this particular object. However, he pays tribute to Durkheim as a state sociologist, and very often puts his feet on his path by reactivating his theory of religion and his conception of primitive forms of classification to construct his own inquiry on the genesis of state forms: In a superb text, Durkheim identifies the sociologist with the state. He says that, in fact, the sociologist does what Spinoza’s second order ideas do: she produces a truth freed from the deprivation generated by particularity (…). The sociologist, Durkheim said, is the one who can situate herself at the point where particular truths appear as particular and he is thus able to assert the truth of particular truth that is truth tout court. In doing so, the sociologist is close to the state, and it is not by chance that Durkheim had a vision in which the sociologist is spontaneously an agent of the state: she is the one who puts this de-particularized knowledge at the service of the state, the function of which is to produce official truths, that is to say particularized (Bourdieu 2015a). One can easily measure Bourdieu’s distance from Marxian theories of state when considering his almost affective proximity to Durkheim. While it is

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d­ angerous to exactly reproduce the Durkheim gesture when one is a critical sociologist, the usefulness of his work is essential, including when he does not speak of the state: the state is the embodiment of the collective; it may be defined as a meta-field that includes all others. That analogy is undoubtedly related to the early development and centrality of the French state. A US sociologist would probably have a different view. According to Bourdieu, the social sciences cannot be fully dissociated from the welfare state. While he does not consider himself any longer as a state agent, only able to express its point of view, very often thought by Bourdieu as Leibniz’ s geometral point, the point of view of all points of view, he remains the direct inheritor of the struggles that led to the development of the state’s left hand. Sociology itself contributed to the constitution of the state, and the whole social sciences played a considerable role in preparing a space of possibilities for the advent of the welfare state. They are strongly linked to the attempt to socialize risks and with the constitution of public problems about which an answer from public authorities is expected. Sociology had also a crucial importance in the fact that women and men ceased to consider that they were responsible for their own misfortune, their poor health and their poverty. Thus, the discipline has a close relationship to the birth and the development of a public domain. Among the three founding fathers, Durkheim is the most quoted in On the state. Here, one could have expected Weber, who is also present through the concepts of domination and legitimacy, but the author of the Sociology Lectures comes first. The lectures are the most anti-Marxist among Bourdieu’s works. One can see Bourdieu’s constant preoccupation for the public interest as defined by the category of public intervention in his return to Durkheim. What worries him at the end of his long inquiry about the genesis of the state, is the quick dismantling of the grounding upon which the republican construction was built. Although he never mentioned it, as he considered himself as a true exception in the system, it was precisely the state educational system that allowed him to reach the heart of the French academic state, quintessence of intellectual refinement and public power in the long run. The world described by the sociologist is a world of debris. It is difficult to identify the remains of the long fight for the public interest in the history of the nation. What is destroyed first is the collective morale, the public morale built by a philosophy of collective responsibility. The faithfulness to the Durkheimian lexicon is striking. The association between sociology, at least in its traditional definition, and the public interest is taken for granted. The sadness of the conclusion is absolutely sincere. The lectures end with a paradox: some sociologists consciously contribute to the disintegration of public power,

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a­ lthough the whole discipline is, by definition, on the side of the collective. By definition, certainly, but only if one chooses the Durkheimian paradigm. A methodological individualist or a rational choice theorist has no predisposition to envisage their work within the frame of collective realism. Bourdieu does not care: some sociologists’ cooperation with the disassembly of two centuries of creation of a collective space appears as a betrayal. “But some people, he sadly concludes, who realize the exploit of doing a sociology in contradiction with the central postulations of the discipline, a sociology that is on the side of demolishers, one can say, of all what was associated to the public, the public service, to this form of universalization through the public” (Bourdieu 2015: 583). In his last years, Bourdieu is a suffering man, less from the disenchantment of the world than from a disappointment concerning sociology, which is no longer able to constitute its action by feeding itself from the strength of the social, and which seems to happily contribute to its own annihilation. It is now time to turn toward the theme of suffering, which became central in the mature years.

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From Suffering to Love Bourdieu’s disciples seldom comment on some parts of the Sketch for a SelfAnalysis when he abandons the warrior attitude to adopt a more affective approach to inter-individual relationships. The very principle of self-analysis, which could be defined as an anti-autobiography, does not lead to sentimentality. On the contrary, “one must identify all the traits that are relevant from the point of view of sociology. i.e. necessary to sociological explanation and comprehension, and those only” (Bourdieu 2008: 11–12). Saying that Bourdieu does not open up is an understatement, either about his relationship with his parents or his own affective life. However, there are some exceptions. The most surprising, if one remains at the surface of things, is the evocation of Sartre and Aron, which contradicts the common view: In fact, between the two figures (who, as Aron himself knew, had no common measure) the resemblances are much greater than the differences – starting with what makes both of them, despite everything, profoundly appealing to me: I mean by this what I shall call their naivety or even the innocence of overgrown bourgeois adolescents who have succeeded in everything (while I cannot testify as regards Sartre, I knew and – need I say it? – felt affection for Raymond Aron enough to be able to attest that behind the cold, disenchanted analyst of the contemporary world was a sensitive, even tender and sentimental man, and an intellectual believing naively in the powers of the intelligence) (Bourdieu 2008: 24). The remark is put into brackets and is nuanced by a “should I say it”, which reveals Bourdieu’s shyness when it comes to acknowledging affection. Aron is one of the central characters of the Sketch, a fact that may have surprised the members of the “group” as Bourdieu named his disciples, as it was in good taste to make fun of the distant figure of The Opium of the Intellectuals’ author. A joke was widely circulated, and everyone could make it: Aron was a sociologist when he wrote for the conservative daily Le Figaro, and a journalist when he lectured at the Collège de France. One must remember that Bourdieu constituted his group by removing his mentor from the head of the Centre de sociologie européenne, due to his use of its institutional address to call for a gathering hostile to May 1968. One can even see in the few lines dedicated to Aron the sketch of a self-portrait that he categorically refused: he did not only share

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an interest in Max Weber with him, but also a sentimentality and a tenderness that a great modesty prevented him from showing in public. The naïve belief in the powers of intelligence was the most shared thing by philosophers and sociologists since the Third Republic: Bourdieu’s political attitude in the last years is undoubtedly part of this tradition, as it was noted in the previous chapter. From rational pedagogy advocated in Reproduction to the call for a big intellectual movement in Counterfires, the faith in the powers of reason remained untouched. Another evocation in the Sketch also takes an affective dimension. It is less surprising, as it concerns Georges Canguilhem, who was so important in Bourdieu’s early philosophical training. “Cang”, as his admiring, and sometimes fearful, colleagues and students called him, developed an affection for Bourdieu “by one of these movements of sympathy obscure to itself that are rooted in the affinity of habitus” (Bourdieu 2008: 27). He offered of position in Toulouse to the young man, as he thought that, as a provincial, he would be happy to be closer to home, while his ambitions naturally led him to envisage a career in the capital. Habitus affinity was not sufficient to erase a major difference between the evaluation of ambitions. Canguilhem defended and illustrated philosophy teaching, notably through his tenure as Inspector General of the discipline and his sitting on the admissions committee of the agrégation. Bourdieu wanted to go higher and further. The affective relationship between both men has a sociological foundation: the homology of habitus accounts for a friendship that resists episodic quarrels. On the contrary, friendship with Aron is not grounded on social proximity: although Bourdieu says nothing about it, one can suppose that, reading the former’s memoirs, Fifty Years of Political Reflection, that a mutual intellectual admiration intertwines affection and misunderstanding (Aron 1983). Without any irony, one can add that the three men developed, albeit from different points of view, a critical analysis of May 1968. Undoubtedly Canguilhem suffered more from the situation: “We often talked during the turbulent days of May 1968, which were a great trial for him: he was one of those ‘oblates’ who had given everything to the educational system and who saw the sympathy of their pupils (of my generation) for the student movement as a betrayal inspired by opportunism or ambition”. (Bourdieu 2008: 24). Affective remarks popping up in the attempt of self-analysis illustrate Bourdieu’s faithfulness toward some figures of the educational system that embody behavioral asceticism and commitment to the pedagogical cause. Here one could speak of rationalist friendships made of mutual recognition that never lead to effusion. In the Sketch, Bourdieu’s affective world remains a manly world, perhaps because it remains silent over the last part of his life.

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One finds very few details on the circulation of affects among the group united around the sociologist. Testimonies given by some members lead to think that it was intense. The pages devoted to the issue in the Sketch only bear on the refutation of the sectarian character of the Centre de sociologie européenne and on the benefits of collective labor, always referred to the Durkheimian example. However, the comparison is misleading, since Durkheimians did not work under the same roof and were mostly linked by a postal network (Fabiani 2005), which was, one must say, a men’s network. However, one can find an interesting remark on the ways by which the master envisaged the affective dimension of the collective endeavor. Here, Bourdieu uses Durkheimian terms: How can one deny that the intense intellectual and moral integration that favours collective work which is both gratifying and highly productive does not come without the permanent effort of encouragement and unification that falls to the leader [animateur] of the group, a kind of orchestral conductor or stage director, or, more modestly, trainer, as the role is called in the world of sport, on whom the group that he galvanizes confers in return his ‘charismatic’ powers through the affectionate recognition that they accord him? (Bourdieu 2008: 20). The group is both happy and affectionate. The high level of integration has nothing to do with the domination of the boss over other members. It is the outcome of a system of gifts and counter-gifts that is the origin of the chief’s charisma and the group’s happiness. This is a beautiful definition, which clearly corresponds to how Bourdieu viewed his action in the institution. One can keep in mind that the group is magically relieved from the constraints of the field and becomes a collaborative space. Historians will say whether or not the representation matched the reality of social relations in the Centre. It does not really matter at this point: one just has to note that an affectionate relationship can annihilate the effects of domination in some small units. The sociologist as an orchestra conductor signs a form of emotional contract with his group. One knows that in his youth Bourdieu wanted to work on emotions in a phenomenological perspective. He even registered a dissertation proposal on the temporal structures of emotional life under Canguilhem’s supervision at the Sorbonne. He mentioned the issue in the introductive chapter of In Other Words: “I had undertaken research into the “phenomenology of emotional life”, or more exactly, in the temporal structures of emotional experience. To reconcile my need for rigor with philosophical research, I wanted to study biology and so on” (Bourdieu 1990b: 6–7). The episode is well known,

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a­ lthough neither Bourdieu nor his many commentators never asked whether the interest for the object could have survived in the following years, not as a theme but as a disposition both inherited from his primitive relationship to the social world and from his philosophical learning, loaded with phenomenology. He never hid the multiple re-uses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical works. A part of his vocabulary precisely comes from this type of philosophy and the temporal issue is probably an echo of his passionate reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time. One can also think that he wanted to challenge the champion French philosopher in the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had published the Sketch of a Theory of Emotions in 1939. Entering the field with scientific dispositions, as he described them in his autobiographical texts, Bourdieu could play the challenger’s role while drawing on a more technical form of phenomenology and on the proximity with life sciences offer by Canguilhem. Deborah Reed-Danahay is the only scholar who attempted to make a link between Bourdieu’s pre-sociological interest for emotions and his anthropological work (Reed-Danahay 2004: 99–128). The question must be related to the early interest for the body, which appeared as early as in the works on Kabylia and Bearn, interest informed by his phenomenological readings, but absolutely unheard of in the sociology of the time. One can find in some texts an articulation between, body, habitus and emotion when he tries to combine a theory of bodily relation to the social world that he borrows from phenomenology with the legacy of French anthropology, particularly Marcel Mauss. The body functions as a “practical operator” (Bourdieu 1990a: 157), which allows us to understand the whole practical logics. The critique of Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology is grounded on his neglect of the fact that the relationship to the world develops through the corporal schemata organizing the practical connection to the world. There is a sort of logical illusion of anthropology that leads it to replace a bodily move by a formal theory: gymnastics can be described as geometry, under the express condition that the gymnast is not considered as a geometer. The primacy of the body in the practical relationship to the world is a fundamental element in Bourdieu’s theory: it is the core of all his anthropological works. The syntactic approaches to myths or the mathematical treatment of kinship may have some interest when they are used as a notation system but can become epistemological hurdles if they are taken as the unique language used to account for the social world: all social agents are suddenly changed into logicians. The sociologist uses this statement as his main weapon against Levi-Strauss’s position, which he labels as objectivism. Thus, the bodily relationship to the world allows Bourdieu to challenge both the dominant philosopher, Sartre, and the social science hero of the afterwar period, Levi-Strauss. What is at stake in the

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corroboration of the logic of practice is considerable, and one easily understand that its early presentation in the Outline of a Theory of Practice was significantly rewritten in The Logic of Practice. Bourdieu’s approach is deflationist. In a clearly Wittgensteinian move, he frees himself from the logical and theoretical bubble that plagues anthropology. Many interpretations are only the consequence of forgetting the existence of mobile and emotive bodies. The example of the “primitive mentality” is striking in this respect: “One would be less surprised by the strangeness of Lévy-Bruhl’ s primitive mentality if one could conceive that the logic of magic and “participation” had some relationship with the most mundane experience of emotion or passion (wrath, jealousy, hatred, etc.)” (Bourdieu 1990a: 156). Bodily mediation reinserts ritual practice within the space of practical necessity. Grasping what Bourdieu sometimes calls praxis must be done through accounting for the real nature of the primitive relationship to the social world, which constitutes, very precisely, a process of incorporation. The attachment point of theory to materialism is bodily logic. Emotion is closely linked to habitus when anticipating possibilities is at stake. As one knows, habitus is based on the representation of a probable future, which “it contributes to make it come since it directly read it in the present of the presumed world, the only one that it can ever know” (Bourdieu 1990a: 108). In order to clarify the paradoxical nature of this kind of anticipation, which cannot be taken for granted, Bourdieu lets enter emotion in the game through a footnote commenting on the resent of the presumed world: Extreme example of such an anticipation, emotion is an hallucinated presentification of the still-to-come that, as corporal reactions show, completely identic to those of the actual situation, leads to live as already present, or even already past, thus, necessary, inevitable-‘I am dead’, ‘I am finished’, etc. a future still suspended, in suspension (Bourdieu 1990a: 108). Here, we stand very far from a rational anticipation based on probability computation. Emotion is an extreme form of practical adjustment that always happens out of a bodily movement. The embodiment of practical schemata that is the very principle of habitus is mainly the outcome of affects. One could speak of a socialization through emotions. The Sketch pictures Bourdieu as a very emotional man, either when he negatively reacts to the terrible rigor of the boarding-school or when he evokes the “emotional context” in the Algerian war: there he must, very often with Abdelmalek Sayad, dominate his fear. Although the oeuvre does not content

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s­ omething like a general theory of affects, one notes that passions and emotions are always present in the construction of the relationship to the world, but also in the anticipation of future chances and in class relations. Distinction is full of affects, since judgements of taste and distaste, as they depend on the logic of practice, have an emotional dimension too. The feeling of not being in the right place or not doing the right gesture when it is necessary is grounded on an interactional component. Social uneasiness, finely analyzed by Bourdieu, is not far from the notion of embarrassment in Goffman’s work. The social world is constituted by a set of emotional risks that make the fabric of everyday life. Affects are central in class relations. In the last ten years of his life, the sociologist developed his interest for the issue and made it a central preoccupation. He paid attention to two objects: suffering and love. He always knew how to capture the air of the time, and social suffering became central at the end of the 1980s, in society as well as in the social sciences, while the working class experienced a very difficult moral situation due to dis-industrialization and the middle classes abandoned the optimism that lifted them up in the previous period and were afflicted by a strong depressive mood. One could witness a form of psychologizing of the social question: while the frames of socialization of popular classes (unions and parties mainly) were quickly fading away, a new psychological offer emerged and new objects appeared, such as suffering at work and moral harassment. The market of suffering developed: the psychological intervention unit is now present in the management of accidents and crises. In this context, sociology and its diagnoses seemed to have nothing to offer to the public. Since he had for long identified the emotional part in practical logic, Bourdieu reoriented his work around those emerging preoccupations. The Weight of the World was published five years before Souffrance en France. La banalisation de l’injustice en France, written by a psychoanalyst, Christophe Dejours, and Le harcèlement moral. La violence perverse au quotidien, by Marie-France Etchegoyen. There was undoubtedly an emotional turn in the analysis of social relations while the crisis deepened, and new actors appeared in the sector. Bourdieu and his colleagues’ work mainly bears on the “difficulty of existence”. As such, the phenomenon is not necessarily linked to a specific conjuncture. The business of living is not an easy business, and never was. Sociological analysis unveils a generalized state of misery, which Bourdieu mainly attributes to the neo-liberal ideology, the crisis of the welfare state and the socialist power’s inability: suffering is no longer the monopoly of the dispossessed, but it tends to become a major feature in the relationship to the social world. Everybody suffers, either from a misery of condition that classically expresses the lack of material resources, or from a misery of position that is

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r­ elative to the place occupied by agents in a particular social space. Here, relative deprivation, a classical sociological theme inherited from Tocqueville’s intuition, is put into use. The relative decrease of great misery has contributed to make more salient an infinity of little miseries. The whole picture is tragic, since the juxtaposition of interviews makes clear “the confrontation without concession or possible compromise of incompatible points of view, equally grounded in social reason” (Bourdieu 1999a: 15). In order to give a picture of what might be called the emotional state of France, Bourdieu added emotion to the sociological toolbox. One had already the occasion to grasp the methodological transgression that allowed sociologists, on behalf of efficiency, to juxtapose interviews associated with a brief description of the situation. There is more: the interview is considered as a “spiritual exercise, aiming to obtain, by forgetting oneself, a real conversion of the gaze on others in the ordinary circumstances of life” (Bourdieu 1999a: 1406). We are far from the classical forms of control over the interview situation that are required by epistemic vigilance. The goal is to create the emotional conditions of an experience of spiritual communication compared by Bourdieu to Spinoza’s amor intellectualis. The reader does not know whether the spiritual exercise needs a spiritual training rather than a technical training on semi-structured interviews or data analysis, but one understands that the central focus is now on the management of emotions. The Weight of the World is supposed to have more intense effects than the reading of an ordinary account of inquiry. One moves out of the coldness of science to the warmth of literature: By virtue of exemplification, concretization and symbolization that they operate and that give them a dramatic intensity and an emotional force close to the literary text, transcribe interviews are able to exert an effect of revelation, particularly on those who share such and such of their speakers’ generic properties (Bourdieu 1999a: 1418). The interviews must be “touching and moving” in order to contribute to the conversion of the gaze as a source of understanding. There is a sensible gap here with the rational pedagogy advocated by Bourdieu when he worked with Jean-Claude Passeron. He is not duped either by the constitutive ambiguity of emotional forces: it does not mechanically lead to a just understanding. For instance, should one be moved by the wine merchant met above, who says that he has suffered from anti-alcoholic campaigns for decades and regularly votes for the national Front? His suffering is as authentic as others. “How, Bourdieu writes, can one account for the reasons of his talk without agreeing with his

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reasoning?”. He does not propose either a policing of emotions or the after the fact reconstruction of a cold gaze: sociologists’ presentation texts must be sufficient to prevent the reader from misunderstandings linked to the emotional load present in the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee as well as between the text and its reader. As it was mentioned several times, Bourdieu never raised the question of either his reception or the modalities of the reading pact that is to ground the relationship of the reader to this new type of scientific-literary object. The sociological frame and the methodological texture are so light that one can think that a part of the readers read The Weight of the World as an ordinary document and not as the outcome of a spiritual exercise. One may be surprised by the constant lack of investigation about the relationship that this type of production has with the management of emotional fluxes in society. Is it right to give such an importance to the emotional load of the interviews? Should the sociologist obey to the world order and play his score in the great emotional concert that Eva Illouz judiciously called “emotional capitalism”? Cultural industries invite us to be permanently moved. Far from relying on the rationalization of social relations, new capitalism constantly plays with the warmth of feelings. Emotional capitalism has appropriated itself affects and turned emotions into commodities, as it is to be seen in the use of social networks (Illouz 2006). Should one accept to be merged in this big flux in order to spread sociological speech? The debate is not closed, since the effects of the transgression brought about by The Weight of the World have not been measured yet. Nevertheless, the huge book contributed to redefining the sociological endeavor in shedding new light on hidden discontents and sufferings that are inexhaustible by definition. Social fragmentation disseminated suffering in all spheres of activity and made it a central element in the structuration of the relationship to the world, even when it is not fully conscious. Here, the figure of the therapist appears: if he does not heal properly speaking, the sociologist is able to offer to “those who suffer the possibility of imputing their suffering to social causes and thus of feeling exonerated”. Through the analysis of suffering, Bourdieu opens a new market for sociology, the therapeutic dimension. The great success of the book showed that his intuition was right: suffering was then a category of the commonsense, able to subsume all forms of psychic and social dissatisfactions, blurring lines between them. Apart from methodological reservations that the book inevitably triggered, it provided a rather fair view of French society, as the twenty years that followed clearly showed. One more time, as in Distinction, Bourdieu was able to draw a portrait of France. The first time, as Craig Calhoun noted, the thirty

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glorious years were the focus of attention, when growth was present and a new petit-bourgeoisie ascended (Gorski 2013). The second time was the one of disindustrialization, of working-class disarray, of growing frustrations among second-generation immigrants and of the spectacularly hostile reaction from the popular classes toward a more ethnically diverse country. Suffering was the unifying principle that permitted to link the diverse forms of non-wellness in a single problem. The book had a great merit in showing that all had good reasons not to be satisfied, that unhappiness did not exist only in the miserable population, but that discomfort was diffused in society. Although the issue was not raised as such, the book was a farewell to the radical left, which successively saw the privileged actor of social change in particular groups, workers first, then colonized people, and to end immigrants’ children. It is another sign that shows Bourdieu’s faithfulness to a reformist vision of the world, and also the continuity of the oeuvre. However, there is a risk inherent to the generalization of the misery gaze. Psychologizing social relations, as a consequence of the attitude, may lead us to dissolve the specificity of sociological knowledge in a kind of mishmash where one could find all the props of emotional capitalism (personal development and little therapies). The confrontation with Eva Illouz’s work shows that talking about neoliberalism in an incantatory way is not sufficient to analyze the transformations of capitalism. Whatever the merits of the Weight of the World’s authors, they are trapped in a paradox: they unconsciously borrowed the lexicon of emotional capitalism. Sociology became sentimental without realizing it, as it was moved by extra-scientific forces, as all social agents are. However, the most emotional Bourdieu does not appear in The Weight of the World. A post-scriptum in Masculine Domination came as a big surprise for his readers, who were more familiar with the sociological version of Nietzsche’s love of fate (amor fati). How could the master of disenchantment speak about love? One should see the little love excursion, a short sentimental journey by a scientist, as the extension of Bourdieu’s transgression of standard sociology in The Weight of the World. After all, should sociologists only treat love in terms of social homogamy, class interests and transmission of patrimony? The little book did not offer a new perspective on masculinity: gender studies were already well-established at the end of the Twentieth century and the sociologist arrived a little late. Bourdieu recycled previous works, particularly his texts on sexual division of labor in Kabylie. The “Post-scriptum on domination and love” was the most original part, five pages that shed new light on the author of the Ball of Singles. The point of departure is a farewell to sociology understood as an operation of disenchantment, to the discipline that tells you: you believed that you experienced love at first sight, but in fact it can be explained by

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the interplay of a few variables and it is the mere result of a set of social determinations. To some extent, it seems that Bourdieu is weary of playing this game. He locates his endeavor under the banner of literature, and more, literature represented by a woman, Virginia Woolf: “To stop at this point would be to surrender to what Virginia Woolf called the “pleasure of disillusioning” (which is no doubt one of the satisfactions surreptitiously pursued by sociology) and to exclude from the inquiry the whole enchanted universe of relations of love” (Bourdieu 2001: 109). A perspective of re-enchanting the world seems to be outlined, as the sociological project of unveiling mechanisms of reproduction finds its limit and appears, in spite of the “no doubt” and the “surreptitiously” nuance the assertion, as a possible drift of the scientific operation. As for television, no research project is used to support the sociologist’s discourse, which situates itself, from the start, on the side of literature. However, the stake is big: does the emotional state provided by a love encounter allow us to suspend, temporarily or durably, the effects of symbolic domination that structure social relations? Bourdieu is quite conscious of the huge dimension of the question, and he is also embarrassed a little bit, since he fears the ridicule to which a 68 years old man exposes himself when he talks about love. He moves thus with caution, but also with boldness, perhaps comforted by personal experiences that remain unknown to the reader. The short texts briefly refer to other works, written by Sacha Weitman and David Schneider, but the reader cannot know precisely what they did, since there is no footnote. Two situations are frontally opposed: first, amor fati, or the love of fate, where women are condemned to love their fate through the body of the man who was chosen for them; second, pure love, thought as a continued series of miracles. In the first case, the author refers to his two early fieldworks, Kabylia and Béarn, but also to the persistence of homogamy in contemporary societies: love is “accepted domination”. There is a short-cut here, since the non-choice of a partner does not necessarily imply that domination continues and that a real love is impossible. If one wants to give back to each one her own reasons, the question must be asked. The construction of an equalitarian relationship or of a reciprocal love is denied only to those that science condemns to the resignation of amor fati only because it ignores what is actually going on within the secret of beds. In the second case, Bourdieu draws on history and mythology and curiously chooses a gallery of fatal women who bewitch their masculine partners. Dominated woman on the one hand, dominating woman on the other hand. Cleopatra and Circe are there to evoke exceptions, but also to embody the dangers of feminine domination over the world order: men lose their mind but also their honor when they are under the grip of dominating women. Bourdieu appositely notes that those figures reinforce androcentric mythology.

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The landscape is well sketched. What follows is more difficult to understand, no doubt due to the fact that the sociologist is a bit embarrassed by his new object. Two successive paragraphs start with a but, something that he blamed students for when he read their papers. The first but brings in, without any empirical grounding, the idea according to which the opposition between two forms of love forbids to envisage the end of struggle and the interruption of domination, while “the suspension of seems constitutive of the experience of love and friendship” (Bourdieu 2001: 110). Here again, the instauration of peaceful and symmetrical relations is thought as a “miraculous truce”. The recourse to miracle, to magic and to alchemy is frequent in the whole oeuvre. It allows to get rid of sociological explanation and to access an emotional regime. The reader will know nothing about the truce: how does it come, how does it deteriorate, how does it end? Bourdieu simply alludes to the civilizing power of women: “women, it has many times been established, civilize by stripping social relations of their coarseness and brutality” (Bourdieu 2001: 110). Can a sociologist be content with that kind of stereotype, which is the main basis of the reasoning? It seems difficult, even when the reader steadily applies the principle of charity. The second “but” opens to another problem, which one could call the repetition of miracles in everyday life: love is not enough to sustain the miracle. True love is a continued miracle. The forces of the field cease to play when love appears. This is not only a suspension of domination, but also the fading away of sociology: love is insular and cut off from the world. Bourdieu evokes the “enchanted island” of love, this closed and wholly autarchic world that is the place for a continuous “series of miracles”. The closing of the loving circle is based on mutual recognition, on the capacity to build a true reciprocity in the relationship, but also on the absolute arbitrariness that Montaigne acknowledged to qualify his friendship with La Boétie. Love does not bother with sociological reasons. As it is an escape out of the social world and of the law of fields, one could say that loves puts an end to the sociological ambition of explaining social facts as objective things. It leads to a re-enchantment that is very costly for social theory. Bourdieu is hard to recognize in this text, just as if he wanted to take a break from determinism, as if he could not stand any longer the social world that he had described for most of his life. There is a huge gap between the model that he presents, based on disinterestedness and gift of the self, and the documented analysis of contemporary love markets offered by Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts? (Illouz 2012). There is an explanation for this: love according to Bourdieu is not for all. It is even an exceptional form, which was born rather late, in the mid-Nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, love is analogous to art for art’s sake and finds its

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best conditions of felicity in literature. “Pure love, the art for art’s sake of love, is a relatively recent invention, as is art for art’s sake, the pure love of art, with which it is bound up, historically and structurally” (Bourdieu 2001: 11). Here the sociologist is back: although he does not explicitly say it, the birth of pure love is less a miracle than the consequence of the autonomy of the literary field as it unfolded in the Nineteenth century. He is even clearer in an interview with the weekly Télérama. Answering a question on pure love, he explains: Pure means independent from the market, independent from interests. Pure love, it is the art for art’s sake of love, love that has no other end than itself. Love of art and pure love are social constructions born together in Nineteenth century. One always says that love dates back to the century of troubadours; it is not false. But romantic love, as we know it, is really an invention of bohemian life, and it is the whole topic of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education: the confrontation between pure love and ‘normal love’ ­(Bourdieu 1998c). Normal love is love reserved to all others. The structural homology between love and literature refers to a sociological theme, which seemed to have disappeared in the Post-scriptum of Masculine Domination. For the reader, there is permanent oscillation between literary love and love in general. Bourdieu maintains a form of confusion: he evokes a sort of social trend when he speaks about the contemporary fragility of love marriage, widely exposed to divorce, or when he asserts that women play a key role in the propagation and maintenance of this type of relationship. Pure love “exists sufficiently, despite everything, especially in women, to be instituted as a norm, or a practical ideal, worthy of being pursued for itself and for the exceptional experiences that he provides” (Bourdieu 2001: 111). Here one leaves exceptionality, or even aristocratism, of pure love to enter a world where the mystical dimension is not hidden. Fusion, communion, absolute sharing are its main features. Lovers can “lose themselves to each other, without being lost”, as Bourdieu writes. It is also a way of receding from the social world, not only getting rid of masculine domination, but also of all form of sociality external to the “loving dyad” that is defined as “an elementary social unit, indivisible and charged with a powerful symbolic autarky (…) endowed with the power to rival successfully all the consecrations that are ordinarily asked of the institutions and rites of “Society”, the secular substitute of God”(Bourdieu 2001: 112). At this point, “Society” disappears, provided with a pompous uppercase and bracketed: the social totality on which Durkheim based his scientific project vanishes.

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Bourdieu does not say more. This short text has a peculiar status and its mystical connotations make difficult an articulation with the whole oeuvre, apart from the evidence of the considerable power of loving emotion, albeit fragile and reserved to a minority. The sociologist has undoubtedly in mind the heterosexual relationship, in which he sees women playing an active and eminently civilizing role, erasing the properly hunting dimension of masculine sexuality. He talks of dyad too, excluding by principle reciprocal and autarkic relationships that might arise between more than two persons. Thus, he refers to a rather conventional situation, close to Nineteenth century fictions, rather far from what can be the representation of love shared by young generations today. To justify his excursion in the realm of feelings, Bourdieu had the occasion to say that he was tired of masculinity, and particularly of his own. His text is a plea for the advent of new relations between genders. Its shortness does not allow us to assess its real sociological content. Is pure love a substitute for political action, since he succeeds magically in suspending the domination effects and in producing emancipated agents, at least in the autarkic binding of the dyad? It is impossible to know to know how the form of love can be transported into the social world so that it acquires some importance in configuring relationships. One should leave literature and enter the social history of affective relations, as Eva Illouz does. What does remain of this fragment on love? Besides its subtle charm when confronted with the virile image of Bourdieu as a rugby-player never prone to effusions, as he describes himself in the Sketch for a Self-Analysis, it is the account of the importance of affects in social life. The interest in suffering and love raises the question of the articulation between society and psychology. The theory of habitus is undoubtedly an answer to the question: it permitted to overcome a certain amount of difficulties that Durkheimian sociology created by presupposing the primacy of the social and by suppressing the question of the practical incorporation of external constraint. Bourdieu borrows some resources from psychoanalysis to account for the processes and effects of symbolic domination. There is a meeting point between anthropology and psychoanalysis: the primacy of masculinity can be studied at two levels. The first concerns the study of the psychological work that leads to cut off the boy from the mother and to install the principle of a gendered division of the world. The second is the observation of ritual practices that give a symbolic shape to that division. One can talk at this point of a communality of objects, the grasp of which goes either through the reconstruction of buried psychic processes, or through the interpretation of public rituals. In Masculine Domination, although the issue of the link between sociology and psychoanalysis is not examined, the genetic sociology of the sexual “unconscious” is a key to the understanding of the articulation between

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i­ndividual psychology and social structures (Bourdieu 2001: 95). This is the only way of accounting for the multiplicity of scales by which domination is accomplished: the unconscious must be rooted in order to be reproduced in different social spheres. One could say that it is the outcome of incorporating the principles of division of the social world. As all the philosophers trained in his generation, Bourdieu lived in a psychoanalytic atmosphere. He borrowed a few of its terms from it (libido, denial, censorship, transgression, reality principle, repressed), and presented his own work as a “socio-analysis”, as a sociological form of self-analysis. There is an ambiance of psychoanalysis in the whole oeuvre. Talking of ambiance rather than of borrowings or analogies means that many references are allusive. The relationship to psychoanalysis is both explicit and dissimulated. Is sociology a form of psychoanalysis? What are the common features of two forms of knowledge that compete for the monopoly of the legitimate interpretation of society, particularly if one considers the ambition of Freud’s anthropological texts? Can one talk of a sociological cure that would have liberating or emancipatory effects, and would it be a possible alternative to political action, or a necessary component of it? The close reading of the oeuvre does not permit to give a definitive answer to those questions. Nevertheless, one can propose some leads. The overture of Distinction situates the sociological endeavor under the psychoanalytic banner: “Sociology is rarely more akin to social-psychoanalysis than when it confronts an object like taste, one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production” (Bourdieu 1984: 11). The reference here bears on the denial of the social expressed unconsciously in judgments of tastes. Social agents occult the social conditions in which these judgments are produce on behalf of a “pure” vision of art and culture. The sociologist’s work consists, for a large part, by using empirical procedures of objectification, in showing the expulsion of the social that guarantees the constitution of the artwork as such, and in shedding light on logics of distinction in processes previously considered as the manifestation of decontextualized individual preferences. This attitude is close to psychoanalysis as it is based on symbolic violence: the stake is to remove purity and nobility from artworks to show their social nature, which had been excluded from the start. Distinction, as The Interpretation of Dreams, creates a new object. Bourdieu tears out taste from the realm of aesthetic where it remained locked down. He accomplishes his act with a reductive energy that seems to leave aesthetic philosophy in shambles. The definition of art as social denial embarrasses even those who are totally convinced by the social stratification of cultural preferences. It inflicts serious narcissistic wounds to all those

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who are involved in the production and management of cultural goods: artists, but also curators, librarians and mediators. Although there are very few quotes from Freud in Bourdieu’s great anthropological texts, as The Logic of Practice, they do not play any significant role in theoretical construction. However, one may evoke a reference to hysteria in The Outline of a Theory of Practice, and reused, but with less clarity, in The Logic. Emotions and their somatic manifestations are highly interesting for the ethnologist; their model is hysteria “according to Freud who takes to the letter the spoken expression, feeling as reel the heartbreak or the slap that an interlocutor metaphorically speaks about” (Bourdieu 1990a: 290). In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Bourdieu is clearer about his uses of psychoanalysis. He offers a reading that associates social spaces and mental spaces and reveals the existence of notional trajectories that never exist only in a singular space. His critique of Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity (1945), in which the author “directly links the relevant traits of Heidegger’s philosophy to characteristics of the class fraction to which he belongs” (Bourdieu 1996c) is particularly trenchant: he is wrong because he jumps over a mediation. He provokes, so to speak, an interpretative short-circuit, as he is unable to grasp the way by which the proper ideological effect of philosophical discourse specifically operates. This effect is explicitly analyzed in psychoanalytical terms: Heidegger’s philosophy would be “the philosophical sublimation imposed by the specific censorship of the field of philosophical production”. What cannot be said in political terms is expressed in metaphysical terms. The analysis that grounds the analogical use of psychoanalytical notions is not very explicit, but it is obvious that they eased the appropriation of Bourdieu’s discourse beyond the circle of peers by locating sociology closer to a social psychoanalysis and attracting a new public to an austere discipline. This way of reading puts the question of the textual effect (or the proper efficiency of philosophical writing) at the center of investigation. This effect is inscribed in the dual position of Heidegger’s writings, which calls for a dual reading. It is valid for the ordinary reading of his philosophy, as the ideological effects can act upon the reader only if she is able to move spontaneously from one space to another, as well as for an enlightened sociological reading, which gets a method to mentally reenact the come and go that the ordinary reader does without even thinking about it. Here, there is an undiscussable proximity with psychoanalysis, as the sociologist redoes the itinerary of the social agent (here, Heidegger), but in a reflexive way, signaling all the forms of denial and censorship that transport the philosophical discourse into a separated space,  the principle of legitimacy of which must be looked for on the side of sublimation.

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George Steinmetz has proposed to reconstruct, after the fact, the relationship between Bourdieu and Freud’s psychoanalysis. This amounts to take absolutely seriously the set of analogies developed by Bourdieu and thus to systematize something that only exists in fragments (Gorski 2013: 108–130). Bourdieu’s constant ironic remarks regarding Jacques Lacan, very often reduced to the status of a comic, could be interpreted as a form of denial, partly erased by the emergence of a franker relationship to psychoanalysis in the late works, which are also closer to a wide public’s expectations, as The Weight of the World and Masculine Domination. The acknowledgement is not total, since George Steinmetz notes that all that concerns somatization within social relations could be presented in strictly Freudian terms. He adds that the denial of the feminine part of the male, which is one of the key points in the sociologist’s argument is the outcome of a taken for granted integration of the Freudian conception. The thesis is convincing, but only for Masculine Domination, and one can think that Freudian ideas are now in the common knowledge and that they can be tacitly reused. One can agree with George Steinmetz on the fact that Bourdieu always refused to raise explicitly the question of his relationship to Freud, contrary to a sociologist who was close to him, Francine Muel-Dreyfus, who clearly supported the idea according to which sociology was “a psychoanalysis of the social world” (Muel-Dreyfus 1983). Bourdieu never went that far, perhaps because he had a strong reticence toward Freud and his successors. In the reading of Masculine Domination, it was clear that individual psychology was derived from the incorporation of social structures. The complementarity between Lacan and Bourdieu is George Steinmetz’s smart idea, but it is totally counter-intuitive for a French reader. He calls for a clarification of the “micro-psychical foundations” of Bourdieu’s theory; this claim is valid only if one considers that the theory is incomplete. Here, I defend a different point of view: what should be elucidated is all that remains unspecified in the black box of habitus. On that point, psychoanalysis has not much to say. Steinmetz raises again the issue concerning the necessity to grasp social processes through a psychological configuration. However, Bourdieu undoubtedly remains on a Durkheimian position: the strength of the social imposes itself and there is no need to make room for individual psychology. Durkheim wrote: “Psychology is intended for renovation partly under the influence of sociological research”. If all social phenomena penetrate the individual from outside, there is an entire domain of individual consciousness that partly depends on social causes of which “psychology cannot make abstract without becoming non intelligible” (Durkheim 1975: 35). Bernard Lahire analyzed the difficulties triggered by that radical position (Lahire 2005): but

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abandoning it would be tolling the bell for sociological ambition as Durkheim and Bourdieu envisaged it. Something central is missing in the debate: the unconscious, which Bourdieu often referred to Durkheim rather than to Freud, through the reformulation of a sentence in The Evolution of Educational Thought in France: “The unconscious is history”. One could ask what the nature of the unconscious in the Outline of a Theory of Practice is as well as in later theoretical texts. While coming back to the phenomenological anchoring of Bourdieu’s conceptualization, Bruno Karsenti has developed a point of view that can be useful for the discussion: habitus refers to a non-thetic consciousness more than to a Freudian unconscious. “Contrary to what has been said and written in the vulgate, habitus is not properly speaking an unconscious. It is an infra-conscious, made of cognition and misrecognition, which is the condition of a certain type of cognition”. (Karsenti 2013: 249). Here again, through the description of practical knowledge in the logic of practice, Merleau-Ponty comes first before Marx and Freud. Wanting Bourdieu and Freud to mate would produce a sort of philosophical monster, as the unconscious has not the same significance, and the Freudian trilogy (id, ego, superego) cannot be found in the logic of practice. How can one deal with the dauting question of socio-analysis and its possible proximity to Freudian practice? First, it is more of an intention than of a real program. If the Weight of the World is placed under this banner, it is very hard to see how it could be used as a cure through extended interactions with social agents. Interviews with “suffering” people are not analogous to the cases studied by Freud. Moreover, one does not know whether the liberating effects must be thought among the interviewees or among all readers. The only tangible element susceptible to move the discussion forward is Bourdieu’s selfanalysis. He neglects all the elements relevant to his own psychism and even all that deals with his primitive relationship to the social world. He justifies his choice to start with the 1950s-he is then in his twenties, because this is the moment when he enters the philosophical field and is thus confronted for the first time with a space of possibilities. The second step concerns his entrance to a boarding-school at twelve and the trauma that follows. He does not go back earlier: the reader can only grasp glimpses of childhood, through his relationship to parents or his father’s work. He only uses traits relevant for sociological description, and he constantly very far from psychological investigation. The use of psychoanalytic vocabulary is very limited too. The master-word remains historicization, which prolongs the reference to the Durkheimian unconscious: the Sketch is just “the evocation of the historical conditions in which (his) work was elaborated” (Bourdieu 2008: 181). Bourdieu remains a sociologist and does

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not plead for a merge of psychoanalysis and sociology, in spite of the ambiguity of self-analysis. His endeavor is quite different: it can be entirely pursued within the realm of sociology. What should one do then with that residue of words rather than concepts, scattered in the oeuvre? Some hypotheses were presented above: the common and tacit generational knowledge that takes psychoanalysis for granted; the popularized dimension of psychoanalysis (libido, superego, repressed, denial are trivially used without any reference to their Freudian background); the claim for liberation, which theory, as it is devoted to the inventory of different species of necessity, does not easily handle. Improving Bourdieu after death is not a task for a scholar, who must only shed light on the logic and possible contradictions of a theory. The relationship to psychoanalysis is one of the most difficult points of genetic structuralism, and Bourdieu did not help much his readers on the way of elucidation. However, this aspect is not the Achille’s heel of the theory, if one accepts to put the metaphorical weaponry at its right place. The reference to socio-analysis has introduced the issue of the sociologist’s action in the world of knowledge as well as in other social spaces: to what extent can a scholar’s life shed light on his program and on disciplinary issues? That what is examined in the next and last chapter.

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A Hero’s Life The refusal of autobiography, so often claimed, is close to denial. Bourdieu never ceased to talk about himself, since social recognition made him a public character. The autobiographical dimension of the oeuvre is obvious. Anthropological work is closely connected to his personal trajectory. Kabylia and Béarn were not chosen by the scholar but were imposed to him. The core of the analytical construction developed through interactions with young progressive statisticians in Algiers: this work had feedbacks on the organization of national statistics during the two decades that followed the end of the Algerian war. Saying that any oeuvre contains an autobiographical part is banal. In Bourdieu’s case, this part is decisive, since the acuity of his sociological gaze is determined by the amplitude of his social trajectory, from very rural petitebourgeoisie to the consecration in Paris, when he became the intellectual par excellence. He carefully constructed, book after book, a life whose key is a paradox: the man who devoted his life to bringing to evidence social determinations, so that his adversaries could see in him the quintessence of philosophical determinism, managed to escape his promised fate, the one of an oblate, as he liked to say, who, owing all to the scholarly institution that had distinguished since primary school, would serve it without any discussion. When he refused a job in Toulouse to Georges Canguilhem, who wanted that he started a classical career of philosophy teacher, he showed the first sign of a role distance, as Goffman would say, an attitude that would develop later on. Bourdieu refused to accept the model of the provincial full of merit who devotes his life to an institution. He belonged to a generation that manifested, a few years after the end of World War Two, a high level of ambitions. The Algerian war concerned a large number of academics born around 1930 and was a difficult but exceptional occasion to mature and to affirm one’s personality, as the examples of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Nora show, among others. Economic and social growth in the early Fifth Republic offered many opportunities to talented young men. Far from being a handicap, Bourdieu’s multi-positionality was an asset: in a still widely opened space where any one can draw his route rather freely, while the institutional weakness of sociology invited scholars to build their own disciplinary habitat, he cumulated advantages and grasped his luck. “The practical incompatibility of the social worlds that his trajectory links” (Bourdieu 2008: 11), as he wrote in the Sketch, was not a real social stigma in a

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world that continued to give a privilege to scholarly competence over social competence, as his facility to make contacts and to publish clearly shows. He was supported by a network of people like him: provincial petit-bourgeois upwardly mobile who believed in the emancipatory virtues of education. Although he acknowledged, particularly in his self-analysis, that good fairies lied on his cradle, fairies who often were alumni from the Ecole normale supérieure, as he lucidly acknowledged, he tended to darken the picture of his social trajectory: it is neither miraculous, nor even exceptional. He belonged to a minority but was not absolutely different from many of his classmates, as it was already said. This is why close friends and faithful disciples were sometimes surprised by the official autobiography that he presented, without presenting it clearly, and that he wanted to keep control of. What was so obscure, or so deep, so difficult to name? “I cannot guarantee, he wrote at the beginning of his essay, as I am not sure myself that I can do it with sociological tools, that the reader will be able to hold the right gaze on the experiences that I will be led to evoke” (Bourdieu 2008: 5). Bourdieu’s autobiographical remarks are in sharp contrast with the luminous simplicity of his classmates, whose social origins are homologous, or even lower. This is the case with Paul Veyne’s memoirs, in spite of tragic episodes (Veyne 2014) or with Gérard Genette’s wonderful alphabet (Genette 2006). Both are able to distance themselves with some irony from the ups and downs of their trajectory. Bourdieu’s last years seem to be devoid of humor and irony. The dramatic circumstances of the writing of the Sketch in the last months of his life are not sufficient to explain this closing into seriousness. “There is no humor in this kind of book”, Günter Grass said when talking about The Weight of the World in a famous interview (Arte 1999). Bourdieu answered that the instructions were to be as positive as possible in order to give to all those stories their extraordinary, almost unbearable, violence”. He concluded: “We are said: you are not funny. But the times are not funny. Really, there is nothing to laugh about”. In spite of many suggestions from the writer, Bourdieu sternly refused the idea according to which humor can be a weapon against powerful people, as if the neoliberal offensive had render made laughter suspicious, as if the ongoing conservative revolution had led to consider the late 1990s as the darkest moment of human history, against all comparisons. It never came to his mind that perhaps the huge amount of pathos pouring out of empathic sociology was more an obstacle than an adjuvant to the social movement that he wanted to emerge. May be the sarcastic laughter inherited from picaresque literature and Enlightenment advised by Günter Grass could have been an alternative to miserabilism. He had forgotten what he said, smiling, in interactions with his collaborators: “Two augurs cannot look at each other without laughing”.

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The earliest members of his research center liked to recall that when they wrote The Inheritors, both authors shared huge laughter, locked in their office. Nobody could tell why they laughed. At the top of his reputation, Bourdieu said: no more laughter, while his saddened silence did not help the European social movement he was dreaming of. At this moment, the role distance that had led him to deviate from his academic trajectory was cancelled out: he was unable to develop a reflexive attitude toward the figure of prophetic intellectual that he adopted after he had dismissed it for a long time. In order to account for his dark mood and his prohibition of laughter, one needs to analyze the heroic model that led him from the founder of science to the prophet of anti-liberalism. Using the term hero refers to Randall Collins’ typology of sociological traditions (Collins 1996). In his view, sociologists’ intellectual networks are characterized by their social organization: “The most iconoclastic social movements acquire their own schemas of collective organization and everywhere their own traditions”. An intellectual tradition is defined neither by a content nor by a canon but by an established type of social relations within an intellectual collective. Four traditions are distinguished: loyalist traditions (oriented by heroes), anonymous traditions, aborted traditions and anti-traditions (like post-modernism). Traditions oriented by heroes are centered around a founder who commands disciples’ loyalty through the succession of generations. Its characteristics are the following: – the importance of debates on heresy, which confers a proximity with religion. – the temporal variation of the strength of traditions (example: there is a neoWeberianism but not, properly speaking, a neo-Durkheimism). – loyalty is not entirely contradictory with innovation. The founding hero’s celebration coexists with the struggle for the appropriation of scattered elements of tradition that can trigger fecund innovations in the process constituting a tradition of research. On the contrary, the anonymous tradition consists in a lineage of ideas and technics, while heroes and texts are not really interesting. The contemporary examples in sociology are rational choice theory, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, network analysis. Thus, with respect to rational choice, one can cite James Coleman, Gary Becker and Jon Elster as “remarkable individuals” but they are not heroes at all. One does not encounter a Colemanian, while a large number of researchers are full-time Bourdieuans. The multiplicity of roots and individual trajectories forbids the focus on a chief of lineage. What holds tradition together is the existence of controversies as organizational principle of the collective.

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Randall Collins raises the question of knowing what the respective chances of those traditions in the future of sociology are. The answer is unclear. If one considers that scholarly collectives are preferably more based on research techniques than on claims for orthodoxy, on can think that the future belongs to the anonymous tradition. But things are less simple that Collins’ explanation could lead us to think. The unconditional domination of standardized techniques in American structuro-functionalist sociology led to dead-ends that gave a new meaning to traditions oriented by heroes for younger generations. One can find here, albeit in other forms, the antagonism between individual creativity and impersonal bureaucracy. The routinization of anonymous tradition cannot be severed from the limited emotional commitment that it presupposes. Today, according to Collins, one observes a wider variety of research techniques (de-standardization, increasing competition, objectification and reflexivity of research protocols that “de-naturalize” sociological ­objects). While there is a higher probability to think that anonymous symbols will win over totemic founders, it is not unlikely that both will coexist in the future. This statement leads to look for the conditions of possibility of survival (or of resurgence) of totemic founders in a world regulated by scientific institutions. How can one define the scholarly hero? Is it only the remain of other worlds, particularly religious, and is it consequently a residual property of intellectual organization? Is it a deviation? How can some of us continue to believe in the existence of those heroes? How can heroes find so many servants in a scientific community moved by a democratic agenda? Those questions are seldom taken up by sociologists, but their treatment would allow us to know how “Bourdieu” was possible. In order to shed new light on the phenomenon, one should plan an inquiry on the exercise of charisma and admiration, including mutual admiration, so important in the constitution of groups in modern social sciences. The non-cumulative dimension of sociology and its paradigmatic instability have favored the periodic refoundation of the discipline. One of the most remarkable characteristics of sociology as a discipline lies in the fact that it never ceased to be re-founded since the multiple-and often uncertain- foundations. Any bold challenger entering the field can attempt to be a founding father, although she has more chances to end up as the source of an aborted tradition. Epistemological anxiety inherent to a knowledge devoted to forms of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) in which one looks for regularities and automatisms while paying attention to emergences and disruptions, has opened up a permanent space for a discussion of founding principles, of protocols of observations and analysis. The debate has extended toward the more or less explicit models of

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action that account for agents and institutions’ motivations or that free themselves from any reference to motives on behalf of social mechanisms. In this indefinite negotiation, one can acknowledge the proper site of the social sciences, as recurrent debates on the respective explanatory powers of structure and agency, particularly in English-speaking sociology. Thus, one must say, as Jean-Claude Passeron often did, that theoretical plurality is inherent to sociology. The regular renewal of founding fathers is a striking aspect of the discipline. Proposing one’s paradigm seems to be a crucial step in the sociologist’s cursus honorum, provided with she has good lexicographic dispositions. A sociologist first produces a vocabulary designed to exhibit the level of her conceptual creativity. There is no great career without a lexicon indexed on a proper name: middle-range theory and obliteration by incorporation for Robert Merton, field-habitus-capital for Bourdieu, justification-city-worth for Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, hairy and non-hairy objects, actor-network for Bruno Latour, among a truly amazing metaphoric store. It is remarkable that these idioms coexist without producing any Babel-type effect: all protagonists continue to perfectly understand each other, although they ostensibly speak antagonist languages. It would be quite interesting to make an inquiry on the deep changes undergone by the Weberian lexicon of legitimacy as intensified by Bourdieu: the vocabulary of justification and “artification” are rather faithful transpositions albeit in heterogeneous epistemological frames. Bourdieu first developed his work from methodological heroism. He engaged into a discipline that was particularly difficult, and his own way into it was even more so. For the authors of The Craft of Sociology, the sea of the social sciences is full of very insidious cliffs, demanding an exceptional epistemic vigilance since hazards are never mastered: for instance, the critique of ethnocentrism is endless, since its very denunciation may be its most sophisticated expression. It is difficult for the discipline to be a science as others because the sociologist is rooted in society. The question “is sociology a science?” is thus transported toward a sociology of sociology, able to define the optimal conditions of functioning for the scientific community and the social implications of epistemic control. While the two other authors, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron, soon abandoned the rhetoric of exploit, Bourdieu never ceased to use it. It can be found in all the published lectures at the Collège de France, with assertions of the type: “What I am going to do in front of you was never attempted”, or “I am now going to do something very difficult”. This is not only a demonstration discourse or a sort of boasting. Bourdieu was really convinced of doing something awfully difficult; his complex writing style is the consequence of all the decisions he took to avoid wrong readings of his

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work. The beginning of Pascalian Meditations, already quoted in Chapter 3, gives a very powerful idea of this feeling of urgency. The sociologist was constrained to occupy the site of philosophy: “If I have resolved to ask some questions that I would rather have left to philosophy, it is because it seemed to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not ask them” (Bourdieu 2000: 1). Sociology did not abandon its theoretical ambitions, far from it. Bourdieu assigned a new position to it: it became an intensification of philosophical questioning, a continuation of philosophy by other means. One might say that he saved philosophy from itself, or at least from its own errors. The endeavor is huge, and it permits to confront oneself with the greatest philosophers in history, particularly Kant: “I wanted to push the critique (in the Kantian sense) of scholarly reason to a point that questionings usually leave untouched (…)”. One can read Pascalian Meditations as a crescendo in which the author moves from a sheer humility to a feeling of hubris that leads him to take charge of the whole Western philosophy. As often, heroism is imposed upon him. The institutional decay leads him to act, often alone against all. The philosophical mobilization that the book shows is close to political mobilization: it springs from the incapacity of social democracy to minimally honor its commitments; it is not necessarily successful since the hurdles are so huge. The confrontation with philosophy is uneven: the sociologist must fight against “disproportionate social forces” that crystallized over centuries of history. The theme of the fight lost in advance can be found under diverse forms, in philosophy as well as in politics. Bourdieu seems sometimes to be alone against the institution, so that one ends up asking about the status of his own group in the fight and about the real consistency of the “collective intellectual” within which he always said that he developed his project. The last Bourdieu is a tragic one. While the first works deployed a conquering epistemic attitude, the last are pursued under a negative philosophy that may threaten the institution, but that is also very hazardous for the one who attempts to objectify it: “I had never felt with such intensity the strangeness of my project, a kind of negative philosophy that was liable to appear self-destructive” (Bourdieu 2000: 7). Heroism originates in the contradiction between two elements: first, the critical project of sociology aims to reveal both institutional secrets and domination effects hidden behind pretentions to work for justice or objectivity; second, the epistemic and sometimes social insecurity that is the researcher’s fate. There is no feint here, and no overestimation of anxiety; on the contrary, the assessment of the powers of critique over the very instigator of critique, which cannot remain unscathed in the process. The quest for university honors, often denied but obvious in the course of his

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c­ areer, was perhaps a means of reducing insecurity and avoiding a fall that his lack of social and cultural confidence made even more anxiogenic. Bourdieu dreamed of science for long and constructed his project in the folds of Bachelard’s epistemology. He wanted to make his discipline, which he often called “shelter” or “pariah”, a science as others, provided with regulated protocols of inquiry, a stabilized language of description and an apparatus for the appreciation of evidence. At some point, sociology as he practiced it seemed to be more of a science than others, a sort of meta-science that allowed him to englobe all types of knowledge since it had the ambition to be a science of science. If the ambition never faded away, it coexisted in the last years with the desire to be a writer. Along time, the analysis of society through literature, which had been strongly disavowed in textbooks, became a possible option. The literary temptation might be denied. Bourdieu still advised his collaborators in The Weight of the World not to do literature in order to have a better access to the emotional strength of literature, but, as soon as 1992, The Rules of Art put the figures of writer and artist on the frontstage. In the postface of Manet, Pascale Casanova rightly notes that: Bourdieu and Manet have many things in common that Bourdieu casually enumerates over the courses of his lectures. Implicitly, surreptitiously, they start to become identified with each other. They share much more than we could think at first glance. On the pretext of studying Manet, the whole series of lectures and the book constitute a subtle, repressed and (for the reader) unexpected way of writing a new kind of self-portrait (Bourdieu 2017: 493). This is surprising: the author always dismissed the interest of autobiography, reduced to the status of illusion of vain self-celebration. Pascale Casanova points out resemblances: Manet is “elegant” and a “smooth talker”; his studies were “brilliant” (Bourdieu compared them, curiously enough, since there is no real equivalence, to the preparatory classes and the elite school in went to). He is a “school leader”, charismatic chief of a group who is totally devoted to him. He is “insulted”. What do Manet and Bourdieu have in common? They both accomplished a “symbolic revolution”, which means a revolution that one does alone, contrary to political revolutions, since the group of disciples is only a little band of foot-soldiers with not much capital. The symbolic revolutionary needs a full mastery of the laws of the field in order to subvert it. The only challenger who has real chances to dislodge the dominants is the one who has as much capital as they have, but who can turn this capital against them.

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Pascale Casanova deliberately describes her rapprochement as an overinterpretation, and she adopts an admirative tone. However, her vision is right, for all those who have heard for years about the work wanted to do on Manet. There is nevertheless a considerable difference between them: class origin and geographical origin. Manet belongs to the upper Parisian bourgeoisie; his trajectory in the social space has no amplitude, contrary to Bourdieu’s: no rural childhood, no gloomy boarding-school, no preparatory class where he is always taken back to his social origins. “Never forget the father’s occupation”, Bourdieu used to warn his disciples. The sociologist’s feat is thus more considerable that the painter’s, well provided with all species of capital: he was able to reverse social prognosis. He was not among those philosophy teachers with a provincial accent like M. Beulier, who taught the discipline in Jean Santeuil, Marcel Proust’s unfinished novel, and pronounced niai-zeu-rie for niaiserie, since he had kept a strong Southwestern accent in Paris. His pupils admired him, although he did not write books. The oblivion of origins does not invalidate Pascale Casanova’s thesis, it modulates it. Bourdieu’s obsessive reference to his social trajectory is a way of increasing his own merits, with respect to his artistic models. Manet, Flaubert and Baudelaire are almost equivalent, as Christophe Charle shows it in the presentation of the lectures. The sociologist had a daunting handicap: his social background. He is the first symbolic revolutionary coming from the people, if one may say. Following his reasoning allows us to understand why the sociologist constantly majored his social handicap and made it a hapax in French academic history. If Bourdieu’s fate was to become Canguilhem, his ambition pushed him to refuse “the causality of the probable” that he had analyzed in an infinity of social situations. Declining a job in Toulouse was a way of keeping opened the possibility of a symbolic revolution, even when he was not in the situation to imagine that he could accomplish it. He was then 25 years old and showed reproductions of the Lunch of Grass and Bar at the Folies-Bergères to his pupils in Moulins (Allier), making comments that amazed them. Being revolutionary means mastering the rules of the field to such an extent that one escapes determinations. Revolution is only for the best provided:. “There are no self-taught revolutionaries, but there are naïve people who think that they could be” (Bourdieu 2017: 244), Bourdieu said to the Collège de France audience. He had before sketched the theme without speaking of revolution. In Homo Academicus, he had revealed a structural opposition between the reproducing institutional pole and the pole of “consecrated heretics”, oxymoron that allowed him to think his own position. Within that opposition, Georges Canguilhem, whom the sociologist saw as an “inspired prophet” or as a true “totemic

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figure” is most likely to be put in the category of reproduction, if one considers its objective characteristics: Although they are temporally-and temporarily-dominant, the holders of the positions of power most strictly founded on the institution and limited to the institution, such as board of examiners for higher competitive examinations or the Universities Consultative Committee, are subordinate from the viewpoint of intellectual renown (they are virtually never translated); crown with scholastic glory (they have been often prizewinners of the concours general, or placed first on the entrance examination for the Ecole normale or the agrégation), they are the ultimate product of the dialectic of acclaim and recognition which drew into the heart of the system those most inclined and able to reproduce it without distortion. In general terms, they are all the more determinedly attached to the institution, the more heavily dependent is their particular competence on the institutional conditions of its exercise-as in the case of philology or language teaching in general-and the more they owe to the institution, as is the case with the “oblates” of humble origins, or those born in the school milieu (as sons of primary teachers) (Bourdieu 1988: 83–84). Canguilhem presided the agrégation jury. He was fiercely attached to the institution. He was from humble origins. Nevertheless, he was not an oblate, although he was not much translated before his death. The author of The Normal and the Pathological was truly admired and intensely appropriated, while he was more of a conservative, by the most remarkable representatives of the anti-institutional mood of the 1960s, particularly Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser and his disciples. However, he remained, from a structural point of view, a philosophy teacher attached to the reproduction of the teaching body and of the discipline. Canguilhem’s figure makes a little bit more complicated the logic of fields, but it shows too the type of career that Bourdieu managed to escape after his studies, no doubt without being fully conscious of it. In her comments, Pascale Casanova insists on the affinities between Bourdieu and Manet, but does not raise the question of the reality of symbolic revolution. Can one say that both have accomplished revolutions? As we have seen, the revolution of modern art is a collective one, which supposes the articulation of multiples conditions. Manet’s choice, as well Bourdieu’s should be more precisely justified. What is exactly a “consecrated heretic”? This one is described as some one who opposes priests as he commits to heresy. Simultaneously, the repudiation of the Church does not condemn him to external darkness, as other channels of consecration exist in the system: with respect to the

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academic small world, the social reputation, the publishing world and also marginal but prestigious institutions, as, in France, the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales or the Collège de France, where Bourdieu made most of his career, institutions that offer a quite comfortable marginality, as there is neither need to grade papers nor overarching bureaucracy. The notion is ambivalent, since all “consecrated heretics” do not have the same quality as Manet or Bourdieu. Roland Barthes, whom Bourdieu did not value much, is presented in the English foreword of Homo Academicus as the best example of this intellectual type. This short text sheds a much-needed light on the notion, which some disciples believed to be reserved to their master to such an extent that they wrongly reproached Pierre Rosanvallon to use it in a self-description (Rosanvallon 2015). Presenting the notion to an anglophone audience, Bourdieu writes: “They appear like religious heretics, or, in other words, rather like freelance intellectuals installed within the university system itself, or at least, to venture a Derridean pun, encamped in the margins or the marginalia of an academic empire threatened on all sides by barbarian invasions” (Bourdieu 1988: xix). Associating the religious heretic and the freelance intellectual clearly shows the limitations of religious analogy, which Bourdieu got from Weber but used with less stringency. Thus, the consecrated heretic becomes a very fuzzy category, associating individuals who, detaining a very high level of different species of capital, come to contest established authorities and end up provoking a symbolic revolution, and others who, deprived from those resources, navigate in the margins of the institution, due to their structural properties. Both groups owe their position to the existence of non-academic consecrating institutions: at this point, things may become confusing. If every consecrated heretic escapes the peers’ judgement by definition, she must be recognized in another way. Here, the marginal institutions mentioned by Bourdieu are only a part of the process. The rather vague notion of a reputation conquered out of academia (abroad, in other professional worlds, through the press and other media) intertwines hyper-legitimate forms of assessment (like the Collège de France) and hypolegitimate forms (weekly magazines, television). The category of the consecrated heretic is then difficult to use, simply because the logics of consecration, which Bourdieu analyzes once again by the means of a religious analogy, are not the object of a processual analysis, but are only revealed by a rather limited statistical apparatus. The indicators of the capital of intellectual reputation produce a composite index that associates elements as disparate as being published in paperback, participating in tv shows, writing op-eds for the daily Le Monde, contributing to a set of intellectual journals. All those indicators share the paradoxical property of ­neutralizing

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the field effect. The structuralist choice reduces the weight of data and prevents from analyzing the processes to accessing recognition, as one can suppose that they are different with respect to the position in the field. The notion of consecrated heretic has thus a limited operative value. What should one think of the qualification “cursed sociologist” applied by preterition to Bourdieu, without accounting for the precocity of his identification as a promising talent, the strong institutional support that he benefited from upon his hiring at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, and his absolutely unheard of before public success, generally reserved in France to philosophers? The danger of spontaneous sociology is considerable in this domain: it leads the analysts provided with the best intentions to produce almost false representations of reality. On the contrary, the passage of time sheds light on the fact that Bourdieu had from the start an entrepreneurial strategy and that it his disciples accessed many positions in the sector of academic reproduction. One may say that the fate of any innovative oeuvre is to get institutionalized and to enter official curricula and scholarly routines in a rather aseptic form. Today, in France, the cursed sociologist would be rather Raymond Boudon, Bourdieu’s eternal rival, who seems to be in a purgatory. Has Bourdieu achieved a symbolic revolution, as Pascale Casanova claims? The sociological analysis of his production and his reception does not give a clear answer. As it appeared in the whole book, he played the card of the rupture; he put into relations observational practices and techniques of data processing that existed separately and he produced a series of innovations upon which a part of international sociology lives today. Rigorously, a symbolic revolution should lead to the final downgrading and the programmed extinction of old ways of doing sociology: in this case, all researchers should do their selfanalysis, use the geometric analysis of data and link their work to a condemnation of neoliberalism. This not the case at all. As all great sociologists, Bourdieu is great because he renovated a space of practice that is in the meantime a space of controversies. As Suicide or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Distinction has become a touchstone for the sociology of culture in the entire world, a huge machinery that can be contested by scientific arguments and that can trigger comparative work and methodological extensions; this is undoubtedly one of its greatest merits. Overestimating revolution rather weakens genetic structuralism and prevents it from confronting it with other forms of analysis that may give an answer to some of its limitations. Should the symbolic revolution make history regress to the point where only a gallery of great men would subsist? If sociology was reduced to that, it would not be worth an hour of pain. Limits to heroization should be developed. Disciples’ zeal may become destructive. More than a self-portrait, on

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should see in Manet a attempt, unevenly successful, to hold together diverse plans and diverse scales. How can morphological transformations be articulated with the construction of a transgressive space previously unknown in the artworld? The most interesting parts of the lectures are constituted by the confrontation of Bourdieu’s model, which is sometimes like a Procrustean bed, with the art historians’ analyses: he may approve them or gets infuriated and potters with monographs to convince us of the existence of a symbolic revolution. A lot of sociology remains in the book, which is not reducible to a selfportrait in disguise. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s will to paint himself as an artist in his last years is somewhat embarrassing. First, this will of art may lead to a form of self-devaluation: “If I had Thomas Bernhard’s talent, he said once on France-Culture, I would not have needed to write The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger” (Bourdieu 1990c). The fact that Bernhard was able to write a few gnashing texts on Heidegger does not diminish at all the exceptional interest of the sociological analysis, showing the philosopher’s ability to move simultaneously in the world of metaphysics and in the world of political ideology. In the same way, Bourdieu writes, in On Television, that his work is only a “last resort” (pis-aller) with respect to Jean-Luc Godard’s work on “the critique of image by image” (Bourdieu 1999b): in doing so, he abandons the empirical requirement of the social sciences. If one took him seriously, one would leave sociology and go to the movies. That is not what Bourdieu wants. Scientific research and artistic works have some common features, particularly on the cognitive side; their social strategies may be close, but they do quite different things, either with respect to the analysis of the social world, or of its critique. The coexistence of two definitions of sociology within the oeuvre is a fact: Bourdieu did not take off his scientist’s suit when he reached 60 and went slumming with artists. Until the end, he continued to the defend a Bachelard-type epistemology, as his last lectures at the Collège de France, Science of Science and Reflexivity clearly show. He still thought that science was threatened by a terrible regression and relentlessly fought relativism. In doing so, he did not perceive the contradiction between a defense and illustration of science as he did it, or as he believed he was doing, and the artistic mood unveiled by some of his writings. He often said in interviews that the craft of sociology permitted to have multiple lives at the same time: perhaps the waffling between science and art is the consequence of this sociological transmutation. Reflexivity, as illustrated in his last lectures, makes the exceptional character of the sociological hero, in Bourdieu’s sense. What is reflexivity?

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Understood as the effort whereby social science, taking itself for its object, uses its own weapons to understand and check itself, it is a particularly effective means of increasing the chance of attaining truth by increasing the cross-controls and providing the principles of a technical critique, which makes it possible to keep closer watch over the factors capable of biasing research. It is not a matter of pursuing a new form of absolute knowledge, but of exercising a specific form of epistemological vigilance, the very form that this vigilance must take in an area where the epistemological obstacles are first and foremost social obstacles (Bourdieu 2004: 89). Here one finds a definition of epistemic vigilance, which must be imposed on all sciences and not only the social sciences. The Craft of Sociology clearly explained that sociology was born with a heavy handicap to be vigilant, as it was immersed in the social world, and consequently more submitted to biases than natural sciences. While this status does not change in Science of Science and Reflexivity, it is completed by a new dimension that cancels the negative effects of the social situation of the social sciences. Reflexivity is not a system of preliminary or post factum controls that would take the shape of a checklist or a procedural code, but it must become “a constitutive disposition of the scientific habitus”, which totally differs from the narcissistic reflexivity. Many recommendations done by Bourdieu belong to the classical research for biases, which are not, in sociology, the consequence of weaknesses in controlling the experiment, as it does not exist in the discipline, but the unconscious action of preexisting categories over the construction and the interpretation of inquiries. What is to be mastered is the “subjective relationship to the object” that orients methodological and analytical choices. An unconscious anthropology is always at work in research practices: the goal of reflexivity is to reveal it. If one wants to understand Bourdieu’s uses of reflexivity, one must go back to the trajectory of the notion and to its meanings in sociology. Anchored in phenomenological philosophy and even earlier in Hegelian philosophy, the concept is used in diverse trivial ways, most on the time in the posterity of phenomenology, in the many and contradictory reuses of Husserl’s theory and his followers. US sociology was more precocious than the European one in appropriating it, either as a direct legacy in Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology or through a critical relationship to Marx as with Alvin Gouldner who coined the notion of “reflexive sociology”, before Bourdieu radically changed its meaning. One could say that the sociological concept of reflexivity is a non-reflective reenactment of phenomenology since Husserl. There is a dilemma of ­reflexivity:

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is it a “return on the lived experience”, through the means of retention, which allows to come back to a flux, select some elements (and consequently to produce a form of knowledge) or is it only another form of affectivity under the species of self-affection, which does not suppose a lag between the non-­ reflexive self and the reflexive one? Husserl programmed a social phenomenology starting from the notion of intersubjectivity. Harold Garfinkel and his disciples extended the idea while significantly reorienting it through what the author of Studies in Ethnomethodology called misreading, the capacity to develop a distorted but active reading. The Husserlian legacy was not the only contributor. Merleau-Ponty was used too. What does Garfinkel mean by reflexivity? John Heritage proposes an adequate definition: “As other actions, descriptions are reflexive in maintaining or altering the sense of activities and unfolding circumstances in which they occur” (Heritage 1984: 140). Interaction is susceptible to be modified by the account that we make of it as the observer modifies the observed interaction by taking part in it. All what an individual manages by speech can be redefined. The first definition of reflexivity lies in the plasticity of interaction that has a property: it can be permanently redefined by the accounts made about it. The concept expresses a feedback loop of the social object on itself. For instance, there is a line for a bus or a train: we see individuals who do the same thing. Those who are waiting are susceptible to understand questions like: “Are you waiting in line? Is it the line for?”. Garfinkel joins reflexivity with the possibility of understanding an activity and to account for it with language. Social life is a succession of “accounts of accounts”. Interpretation is reflexive because it presupposes a permanent adjustment between linguistic or non-verbal manifestations and significations usually attached to social behavior. Alvin Gouldner was the first to make reflexivity known in his monumental The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology: the knowledge about the social world cannot be considered independently from the knowledge that he acquires from his own position in the social world. The observer and the observed are in solidarity and undergo modifications by retroaction. The sociologist must acknowledge how it is important to consider his own habits in the same way as she deals with the habits of her objects. As Garfinkel said, the sociologist is a goldfish who looks at the other fish in the bowl. The question is then: does he know, or does he ignore that he is in the bowl, or does he think that he is a fish of another species than goldfish (a pike for instance) or does he ignore that he is a fish? The third moment of reflexivity in sociology was initiated by Anthony Giddens, starting from the notion of “double hermeneutics”, previously evoked. It was amplified by Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash in the 1990s when they developed

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the notion of “reflexive modernity” (Beck 1994). Reflexivity is present to some degree in every type of society, but contemporary society is characterized by a more intense form of consciousness, by a more acute capacity of self-affecting and self-auscultation. Our world is full of captors; our physical existences are more and more scanned and explored; we can observe our bodies by always more performing technologies; we produce increasingly sophisticated anticipations on our behavior. Reflexive modernization is ambivalent process, since it reverts the presupposition of the Enlightenment, which can be asserted in this way: the more we produce knowledge, the more the world is predictable and can be mastered; the more we know, the more we know ourselves and the more we produce certainty. On the contrary, in reflexive modernity, we increase the capacity of our captors without reducing the uncertainty of our future. Obviously, we believe that our future is uncertain. Giddens even evokes the manufacturing of uncertainty (Beck 1994: 154). There is an uncontestable return of contingency. In reflexive modernity, the resurrection of traditions coexists with their dissolution in a world of pastiches and collages. Ulrich Beck’s analysis of the ecological crisis in Risk Society remains the best illustration of this paradoxical reflexive modernity. Why have we made this excursus? Has Bourdieu something to do with the trajectory of reflexivity in the social sciences? The answer is positive. Garfinkel is present in Science of Science and Reflexivity: ethnomethodologists are blamed for having forgotten the second moment of sociological objectification: “Although they point out that the social world is constructed, they forget that the constructors themselves are socially constructed and that their construction depend on their position in the objective social space that science has to construct” (Bourdieu 2004: 93). He knows all those works, but he does not consider their potential value for the sociology of social agents: reflexivity is only accessible to scientists; he dispossesses social agents from the capacity, which constitutes a very heavy decision, since habitus cannot go beyond pre-reflexivity. This excludes the invention of modern art that brought in reflexivity in the practice and in the reception of works, as Bourdieu showed it in The Rules of Art. In fact, one can say that reflexivity can be applied to many more cases than modern art. Every culture, as classical anthropologists already noticed it, is provided with a pre-reflexive dimension. While it is true that Western modern art has made generalized reflexivity a major preoccupation, fed by the selfreferential character of most of the production, nobody would contest that a reflexive space is a constituent of any symbolic institution. The forms of distance and skepticism among the audience during the Avignon festival (Ethis 2008) were analyzed as extremely productive for the spectator’s experience:

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they can be found is traditional societies. For instance, Gérard Lenclud comes back to the Azandé’s classical example to show that skepticism about exorcists is quite spread, while Azandé society is unable to conceive a world without exorcists (Lenclud 2013: 196–197). The condition of contemporary humankind accentuates this aspect, particularly when we are confronted to cultural forms, but this is not a peculiar property. It would be interesting to reorient empirical studies on cultural practices, while Bourdieu’s sociology has given a privilege to their reproductive dimension. One would take advantage to pay more attention to the socio-cognitive aspects of cultural appropriation: it would shed new light on the reflexive forms undoubtedly present in the relationships to cultural objects. At this point, culture in a restricted sense (the culture of arts) may be a key to have a privileged access to the reflexive dimension of all symbolisms. By defining reflexivity in a too restrictive sense, Bourdieu certainly manages to save his naturalist epistemology. He can then systematically discard the advances of ethnomethodology and reflexive modernity, on behalf of a scientific approach that often amounts to epistemological police. His reflexivity is the other name of a phantasm of perfectly mastering of the scientific field, promise of an absolute knowledge. Strikingly enough, the book devoted to the sociology of sciences, which, as a main goal, aims to demolish science studies, which had a role as important as gender studies in the transformations of the social sciences, ends with a self-analysis, a rough drawing of the Sketch. At the end, he seems to reduce reflexivity to a pure personal experience, which is undoubtedly of uppermost importance: however, he does not tackle what we should expect from a reflection on reflexivity, reduced here to a little desperate form of self-control. The last lectures trigger some regret: as he wanted to attach his name to a closed system and the dream of incarnating alone a symbolic revolution deprived Bourdieu from confronting to other forms of sociological practice. His last works perfect the heroical discourse, but close it on itself too. The master of symbolic revolution is now alone onstage.

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Conclusion The reader must tell now whether the goal of the book was reached. It was dual: stepping out of the sterile confrontation between Bourdieu’s friends and foes; insert comments in a sociological perspective on intellectual life, a field that he contributed to renew more than any other. The oeuvre his considerable and it is impossible to offer an exhaustive view of it. The reading proposed in this book is not theoretical. It is radically different from philosophical readings, which are always welcome, but miss something: the project of elucidating social facts by means of empirical research. One of the great lessons of the author of The Logic of Practice is the dismissal of theory for theory’s sake: he immersed the effort of conceptualization in the whole of inquiry practices. Although he tended to lose sight of his goal along time, it remains essential for all those who think that sociology is worth one hour of pain. Can one peacefully speak of a great warrior, who took care so steadily to narrate his feats? The self-analytical project is ambivalent: one of its effects is the control of ulterior readings, necessarily divergent, which a great oeuvre inevitably triggers. Bourdieu condemns us to be for or against him: all the disciples who took their distances did it on the mode of radical break, as if they had no other choice. Their furor was ordinarily followed by silence and scientific sterility. Out of oblation or apostasy, there was no salvation! However, science is not religion, even if, as Durkheim noted, it comes in part from it. It is out of question to be overcome by what Bourdieu himself called the “daemon of analogy”. One can always discuss the limits of Bachelard’s epistemological space in which he lodged his first endeavor: at least, he had the merit of inscribing sociology in the perimeter of rationality. Bourdieu is the inheritor of a long rationalist tradition, of which was is called the history of sciences à la française, less uniform than one would think, constitutes the achieved form. If the sociology of intellectuals has a mission, it is clearly to contribute to the objectification of power relations within what can still be called a field, since, in spite of the failure of a general theory of fields, the notion of positional space as still a bright future. As Bourdieu frequently said it, particularly about Raymond Aron’s The Opium of Intellectuals, written at the hottest of the Cold War, the sociology of intellectual is often the sociology of one’s enemies. In order to do good sociology, it is necessary, at least as a methodological fiction, to get out of war for a moment. One must, I say it seriously, stop saying that “The ego must be hated”. Bourdieu only kept half of Pascal’s lesson, as he ended up believing that he was

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���1 | doi:10.1163/9789004442610_012 Jean-Louis

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the only protagonist of a symbolic revolution, by identifying himself to Manet against Courbet, and again the rest of the world. Can one do herself her analysis? I do not think so. Epistemic vigilance is necessarily a collective process: many things remain opaque to the most reflexive sociologist when she aims to objectify her condition as a preamble of the construction of her object. In believing that he had found the key to his absolute autonomy, Bourdieu was, as any other agent in the field, the plaything of its forces, which have nothing obscure: he substituted a form of pathos to his early rationalism. His move was in tune with a trend in sensibility that he had fought so regularly and that had little in common with the promise of his initial ambitions. There is no reason to suspect a man whose sincerity was always total. Against the malevolent point of view that considers him a scholar having finished his career among socialites, after having tossed his frock, I do think, as an indirect tribute to his theoretical construction, that he was pre-reflexive in the three quarters of his action: this is quite reassuring. The idea according to which an individual could, thanks to a sociological method, obtain a full self-lucidity is quite frightening. As many sociologists in my generation, I liked Bourdieu a lot. His premature death saddened me much more that I would have thought, since, due to the force of things, I had moved away from him. In 1970, I bought a copy of the daily Le Monde in the railways station of Landivisiau, in Brittany. I was on my way back from the “three days” that preceded the incorporation in the military service. In the newspaper that day, I read Frédéric Gaussen’s famous review of Reproduction. His two authors immediately look very sympathetic, as two elder brothers rather short but quite strong, indubitably Southerners but wellversed in philosophy, determined to confront themselves to the furor of the world while keeping the best of their scholastic education. Jean-Claude Chamboredon introduced me to Bourdieu: he was, as I expected, shining and brotherly. The encounter might have been described in sociological terms. The affinity between us was just an effect of the homology of habitus. We had many occasions to laugh, about philosophy, religion, Corsica. One day, he stopped laughing and he justified the seriousness of his new face, when he recorded the famous interview with Gunter Grass in Lübeck. The neoliberal plague imposed seriousness and sadness. At that time, Bourdieu strived to undo, or to believe that he was undoing, scholastic intellectualism: almost one hundred pages of Pascalian Meditations were devoted to the object. After that book, he developed a rather feverish polemic in many writings against the long tradition of the skholè, which makes a certain type of leisure the very condition of scholarly activity. It looked to me loaded with antinomies: can one simultaneously claim for a greater autonomy and a full

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r­ ecognition of science in society and contest the possibility of an autonomous activity of thought, favored by a relative detachment from the ordinary constraints of social life? Bourdieu raised to a point of extreme tension the inevitable contradiction between the will to produce a “royal” science that allows the sociologist to tell the definitive truth of the social and his care, ethically understandable, for being a common man. The two positions seem impossible to hold together for an academic. A sociologist-king who would never stop saying that the King is naked, but who would not believe, deep down inside himself, in such a devastating assertion: that is how Bourdieu appeared to me at the end of his life. I would like so much, once again, to laugh with him.

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Index of Names Abbott, Andrew 19, 84, 87 Adorno, Theodor W. 163 Althusser, Louis 175 Antoine, Gérald 61 Aron, Raymond 6, 8, 17, 37, 98, 117, 142, 143, 149, 150, 183 Bachelard, Gaston 4, 76, 112, 173, 183 Badiou, Alain 119 Barthes, Roland 175, 176 Bataille, Georges 2 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 30, 75, 174 Baudelot, Christian 67 Baxandall, Michael 30 Beaud, Stéphane 129 Beauvoir, Simone de 38, 142 Beck, Ulrich 180, 181 Becker, Gary 57, 62, 169 Benzécri, Jean-Paul 86 Berger, Bennett 3, 143 Bernhard, Thomas 88, 178 Bertin, Jacques 88 Bianco, Lucien 80 Boime, Albert 30 Boltanski, Luc 77, 171 Bonaparte, Mathilde 32 Bonnet, Philippe 86 Boudon, Raymond 37, 177 Bouillon, Jean-Paul 106 Boulez, Pierre 142 Bourricaud, François 98 Braudel, Fernand 13, 38, 40, 115, 142 Burawoy, Michael 72, 73, 74 Cabanel, Alexandre 31 Calhoun, Craig 103, 156 Callegaro, Francesco 119 Canguilhem, Georges 35, 36,38, 39, 151, 167, 174, 175 Carles, Pierre 130 Carnap, Rudolf 39 Casanova, Pascale 173, 174, 175, 177 Cassirer, Ernst 40 Castel, Robert 38 Castoriadis, Cornelius 98 Cézanne, Paul 108

Chabrol, Claude 31 Chamboredon, Jean-Claude 6, 171 Champagne, Patrick 128 Charle, Christophe 95, 107, 174 Chartier, Roger 95 Chomsky, Noam 42 Cicourel, Aaron 3, 85 Clark, Petula 90 Cohen, Albert 142 Coleman, James 57, 169 Collins, Randall 16, 169, 170 Comte, Auguste 77, 78, 99, 101, 145 Costey, Paul 48 Courbet, Gustave 107, 184 Cournot, Antoine 102, 103 Cousin, Victor 73 Crow, Thomas 31 Crozier, Michel 122 Cuvillier, Armand 145 Darbel, Alain 10, 22, 61, 82, 83, 86 De la Mare, Walter 141 Dejours, Christophe 154 Delaroche, Paul 31 Deleuze, Gilles 121 Déotte, Jean-Louis 41 Derrida, Jacques 40, 80167 Desan, Mathieu Hikaru 68, 71, 72 Descartes, René 121 Descola, Philippe 37 Desrosières, Alain 81, 82, 84 Dewerpe, Alain 50, 112, 113 Dewey, John 3 Dianteill, Erwan 22 Disney, Walt 47 Dubois, Jacques 74, 76 Duchamp, Marcel 107 Dufourq, Annabelle 36 Dumézil, Georges 142 Durand, Pascal 74, 76 Durkheim, Émile 5, 11, 12, 13, 15, 21, 23, 39, 45, 46, 47, 57, 68, 69, 70, 73, 77, 95, 96, 114, 119, 120, 125, 146, 147, 164, 165, 183 Elias, Norbert 13, 27, 69 Elster, Jon 169

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195

Index of Names Encrevé, Pierre 93, 131 Espinas, Alfred 37 Establet, Roger 38, 67 Etchegoyen, Marie-France 154 Ethis, Emmanuel 181 Fink, Eugen 54 Flaubert, Gustave 104, 174 Foucault, Michel 119, 120, 142, 175 Freud, Sigmund 47, 120, 162, 163, 165 Gallo, Robert 86 Garfinkel, Harold 179, 181 Garrigou, Alain 138, 139 Gaulle, Charles de 128 Gaussen, Frédéric 184 Gautier, Claude 9, 37 Genette, Gérard 80, 168 Giddens, Anthony 137, 140, 141, 180 Girard, Augustin 83 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 93, 128 Godard, Jean-Luc 31, 178 Goffman, Erving 15, 118, 121, 137, 154, 167 Goodman, Nelson 3 Gouldner, Alvin 179, 180 Grass, Günter 168, 184 Grignon, Claude 116, 129 Guattari, Félix 121 Gueroult, Martial 39 Guétary, Georges 90 Guevara, Ernesto « Che » 37 Gurvitch, Georges 40, 122 Halbwachs, Maurice 96 Heidegger, Martin 2,29, 30, 53, 152, 163, 178 Heinich, Nathalie 116 Heller, Clemens 115 Héran, François 54 Heritage, John 189 Herskovits, Melville 117 Hirigoyen, Marie-France Hobsbawm, Eric 95 Honneth, Axel 10 Huizinga, Johan 23 Husserl, Edmund 24, 36, 138, 139, 179, 180 Hyppolite, Jean 20 Illouz, Eva 156, 159, 161 Isaacson, Joel 106 Iser, Wolfgang 107

Jauss, Hans-Robert 107 Jeanpierre, Laurent 40 Joas, Hans 67 Kant, Emmanuel 73, 172 Karsenti, Bruno 111, 119, 165 Klossowski, Pierre 2 Knöbl, Wolfgang 67 Kocyba, Hermann 10 Kuhn, Thomas 125 La Boétie, Étienne de 159 Lacan, Jacques 142 Lachelier, Jules 37 Lahire, Bernard 12, 164 Lash, Scott 180 Latour, Bruno 171 Lazarsfeld, Paul 82 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 128, 139 Le Pen, Marine 139 Le Play, Frédéric 95 Le Roux, Brigitte 86 Lebaron, Frédéric 83, 86 Lefort, Claude 98 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 48, 53, 121 Lenclud, Gérard 182 Lenski, Gerhard 52 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 7, 20, 37, 39, 40, 142, 152 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 140, 141, 142, 143 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 70, 153 Lewin, Kurt 12 Lieberson, Stanley 87 Lindon, Jérôme 5 Linton, Ralph 117 Maget, Marcel 79 Mallarmé, Stéphane 31 Malraux, André 22 Manet, Édouard 2, 13, 22, 27, 75, 106, 107, 173, 174, 175, 178, 184 Mariano, Luis 90 Marx, Karl 12, 26, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 120, 165 Mary, Philippe Mauss, Marcel 37, 39, 41, 70, 152 Mayer, Nonna 128 Mendès France, Pierre 128 Mendras, Henri 122 Menger, Pierre-Michel 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 36, 152, 165, 180 Merton, Robert K. 3, 171 Jean-Louis Fabiani - 978-90-04-44261-0 Downloaded from Brill.com03/10/2023 11:46:19PM via Western University

196 Mitterrand, François 7 Molénat, Xavier 56 Montagnier, Luc 86 Montaigne, Michel de 135, 136, 137, 159 Montijo, Eugénie de 32 Morin, Edgar 98 Muel-Dreyfus, Francine 129, 164 Nétumières, Félicité des 87 Nicolas de Cues 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48 Nora, Pierre 167 Oeuvrard, Françoise 83 Panofsky, Erwin 40, 41, 43, 54, 69 Paris-Clavel, Gérard 127 Parisot, Laurence 115 Parmenides 138 Parsons, Talcott 4, 45, 46, 47 Pascal, Blaise 73, 134, 135, 137, 183 Passeron, Jean-Claude 4, 6, 10, 14, 35, 36, 37, 48, 60, 67, 78, 80, 91, 98, 99, 112, 124, 125, 129, 132, 150, 171 Perroux, François 57, 117 Plato 138 Popper, Karl 3, 143 Preti, Giulio 120 Proust, Marcel 174 Quine, Willard Van Orman 39 Rawls, Anne 119 Redfield, Robert 117 Reed-Danahay, Deborah 2, 80, 152 Renoir, Jean 132 Renouvier, Charles 73, 145 Revel, Jacques 95 Rivet, Jean-Paul 82 Rocard, Michel 7, 131 Rodin, Auguste 108 Rosanvallon, Pierre 176 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 46 Russell, Bertrand 39 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de 2

Index of Names Saint-Jacques, Denis 13, 14 Sallenave, Danièle 104 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8, 38, 104, 142, 143, 149, 152 Sayad, Abdelmalek 41, 129 Schneider, David 158 Schultz, Theodore 57 Schwibs, Bernd 10 Seibel, Claude 82, 83, 85 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 142 Sewell, William Jr. 112 Simiand, François 37, 96 Sollers, Philippe 140 Spinoza, Baruch 155 Steinmetz, George 164 Suger de Saint-Denis 54 Schwibbs, Bernd 10 Thévenot, Laurent 84, 171 Thompson, Edward P. 95, 99 Tillion, Germaine 117 Tocqueville, Alexis de 102 Touboul, Hervé 48 Tréanton, Jean-René 61 Truffaut, François 31 Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine 116 Veyne, Paul 168 Viala, Alain 13, 14, 32 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 5, 145, 146, 167 Vuillemin, Jules 39 Wacquant, Loïc 18 Weber, Max 6, 7, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 57, 68, 90, 93, 96, 114, 120, 124, 127, 143, 147 Weitman, Sasha 158 White, Cynthia 30 White, Harrison 30 Winkin, Yves 74, 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 73 Woolf, Virginia 88, 158 Wrong, Dennis 46, 47 Yacine, Tassadit 7 Zemmour, Éric 139 Zola, Émile 132

Jean-Louis Fabiani - 978-90-04-44261-0 Downloaded from Brill.com03/10/2023 11:46:19PM via Western University