1989. Wacquant. Towards a reflexive sociology. A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu.pdf

TOWARDS A REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGYA WORKSHOP WITH PIERRE BOURDIEU*

Loi'c J. D. WACQUANT

Department of Sociology, The University of Chicago

SOME NOTES ON THE RECEPTIONOF BOURDIEU'S WORK IN AMERICA

Over the last two decades, the work ofFrench sociologist Pierre Bourdieu hasemerged as one of the most innovative,wide-ranging, and influential bodies oftheories and research in contemporarysocial science.' Cutting deeply across thedisciplinary boundaries that delimit socio-logy, anthropology, education, culturalhistory, linguistics, and philosophy, as wellas across a broad spectrum of areas ofspecialized sociological inquiry (from thestudy of peasants, art, unemployment,schools, fertility, and literature to the

* The interview part of this text is based on a seriesof discussions with, and transcripts of talks by, PierreBourdieu, held alternately in French and in Englishover a period of several months in Chicago and Paris.The initial core of the article comes from remarksmade by Professor Bourdieu in debate with theparticipants to the Graduate Workshop on PierreBourdieu, a group of doctoral students at theUniversity of Chicago who studied his work intensivelyduring the Winter Quarter of 1987. These conversa-tions and "oral publications" were later complementedby written exchanges and subsequently edited (and inpart rewritten) by Loic J.D. Wacquant, who alsoadded the notes and references. We are grateful tothe Social Sciences Division of the University ofChicago for a small grant that made this Workshoppossible and to Professor Bourdieu for kindly agreeingto submit himself to a full day of intense questioning.Finally, I would like to thank Daniel Breslau, W.Rogers Brubaker, and Craig J. Calhoun for theirhelpful suggestions on an earlier draft of the intro-ductory notes (for which I alone bear responsibility)and Norbert Wiley for his friendly support of thewhole project.

' See the bibliographical references in fine for asample of recent discussions of Bourdieu's sociology.By far the best overview is Brubaker (1985). Severalbooks in English devoted to Bourdieu's work are inthe making. The Center for Psychosocial Studies inChicago recently organized a conference on "TheSocial Theory of Pierre Bourdieu" which drewtogether anthropologists, philosophers, sociologists,and linguists from the United States, France, GreatBritain, and Germany; a volume is planned under theeditorship of Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, andMoishe Postone.

analysis of classes, religion, kinship, sports,politics, law, and intellectuals), Bourdieu'svoluminous oeuvre^ presents a multi-facetedchallenge to the present divisions andaccepted modes of thinking of sociology.Chief among the cleavages it is striving tostraddle are those which separate theoryfrom research, sever the analysis of thesymbolic from that of materiality, andoppose subjectivist and objectivist modesof knowledge (Bourdieu 1973c, 1977a,1980a). Thus Bourdieu has for some timeforsaken the two antinomies which haverecently come to the forefront of theoreticaldiscussions, those of structure and actionon the one hand, and of micro- versusmacro-analysis on the other.^

In circumventing or dissolving these andother dichotomies (see Bourdieu 1987e,1988c, 1988e; also Brubaker 1985, pp.749-753), Bourdieu has been insistentlypointing to the possibility of a unifiedpolitical economy of practice., and especiallyof symbolic power, that fuses structuraland phenomenologically-inspired ap-proaches into a coherent, epistemologicallygrounded, mode of social inquiry of uni-versal applicability—an Anthropologie inthe Kantian sense of the term, but one thatis highly distinctive in that it explicitlyencompasses the activity of the socialanalyst who sets out to offer theoretical

^ Bourdieu is the author of some 25 books andapproximately 250 articles (not including translations)and it is impossible to even mention them all in thisessay. The References include a selection of hismajor publications, with a special emphasis on thoseavailable in English.

-* For reasons that will become obvious below, it isfundamentally mistaken to include Bourdieu amongthe proponents of "structuration theory," as Miinch(1989, p. 101) does, if only because his theory ofpractice predates Giddens' scheme (1979, 1984) by adecade and more. For a condensed statement of thedialectic of habitus and field, or position and dis-positions, by which the French sociologist dissolvesthe micro/macro opposition, see Bourdieu (1980dand 1981c).

TOWARD A REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY 27

accounts of the practices of others (Bour-dieu 1980b, 1982a, 1987a, 1988a). Bour-dieu's writings are also unique in that theycomprise and blend the full range ofsociological styles, from painstaking ethno-graphic accounts to sophisticated mathe-matical modelling to highly abstract meta-theoretical and philosophical arguments.''

Yet, curiously, this work which is socatholic and systematic in both intent andscope has typically been apprehended in"bits and pieces" and incorporated piece-meal. Garnham and Williams's (1980, p.209) warning that such "fragmentary andpartial absorption of what is a rich andunified body of theory and related empiricalwork across a range of fields. . .can lead toa danger of seriously misreading the theory"has proved premonitory. If a selectednumber of his theories and concepts havebeen used extensively, and sometimesquite effectively, by American social scien-tists working in specific areas of researchor theorizing,^ by and large, Bourdieu'swork in globo remains widely misunder-stood and misinterpreted, as the mutuallyexclusive critiques frequently addressed toit testify. The encyclopedic reach of hisparticular investigations has tended to hidethe underlying unity of Bourdieu's over-arching purpose and reasoning.

Perhaps more than in any other country,the reception of Bourdieu's work inAmerica, and to a comparable degree inGreat Britain,^ has been characterized byfragmentation and piecemeal appropriationsthat have obfuscated the systematic natureand novelty of his enterprise. Thus, to takebut a few instances of such partial andsplintered readings, specialists of educationquote profusely Reproduction in Educa-tion, Society and Culture (Bourdieu andPasseron 1977),̂ but seldom relate its

•* E.g., Bourdieu (1973d, 1979d); Bourdieu et al.(1966, pp. 115-128), Bourdieu and Darbel (1966),Bourdieu and de Saint Martin (1987); and Bourdieu(1979b, 1982a) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977,Book I) respectively.

•'' See Lamont and Larreau (1988) for a survey ofthe diverse uses of Bourdieu's concept of "culturalcapital" in American research and the bibliographythey cite.

*• See Robbins (1988) for a recapitulation of theearly English reception of Bourdieu.

' This book was recently pronounced a "Citation

more structural argument to the conceptionof action expounded in Outline of a Theoryof Practice (Bourdieu 1972, 1977a) thatunderlies it, or even to his prolific researchon the' genesis and social, efficacy ofsystems of classification and meaning ineducational institutions (e.g., Bourdieu,Passeron, and de Saint Martin 1965; Bour-dieu and de Saint Martin 1974; Bourdieu1967a, 1974b, 1981b). As a result, under-standing of Bourdieu's so-called "repro-duction theory," a staple in the sociologyof education, has been substantially ham-pered. Jay MacLeod's (1987) otherwiseexcellent ethnographic study of leveledaspirations among working-class youth inan American public housing project pro-vides us with an exemplary instance of suchsystematic misconstrual.

Because he relies nearly exclusively onthe theoretical expose sketched in the firstpart of Reproduction and, even more so,on secondary interpretations of Bourdieuby American commentators,^ MacLeod

Classic" by the International Scientific Institute whichputs out the Social Science Citation Index. Bourdieu(1989c) reflects upon this. His piece on "SocialReproduction and Cultural Reproduction" (Bourdieu1973b) is also frequently referred to as represeritativeof his sociology of education, if not of his wholesociology.

* For instance, MacLeod (1987, p. 11, my empha-sis), refers to Bourdieu as "a prominent Frenchreproduction theorist." Ignorance of Bourdieu's em-pirical research is so total that MacLeod (1987, p. 14)is able 3 quote approvingly Swartz's (1977, p. 553)statement that "many of [Bourdieu's] most interestinginsights and theoretical formulations are presentedwithout empirical backing." When discussing thesubstance of Bourdieu's concepts or propositions,MacLeod repeatedly quotes not from Bourdieu'sown writings but from positions attributed to him byGiroux (on school legitimation, p. 12; on the definitionof habitus, p. 138) and Swartz (on determinism in thecircular relationship between structure and practice,p. 14). This leads MacLeod to present as assessmentof Bourdieu that features as omissions and short-comings what have been the very core and strengthsof the latter's sociology: "Bourdieu underestimatesthe achievement ideology's capacity to mystify struc-tural constraints and encourage high aspirations" (p.126; compare with the critique of the meritocraticideology set out in Bourdieu and Passeron's [1979]The Inheritors, a book considered by many to havebeen the Bible of the student movement in May 1968,or with Bourdieu's development of the concepts ofmisrecognition and symbolic power [e.g., Bourdieu1979b]), and ignores "the cultural level of analysis"(p. 153)!

28 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

assigns to Bourdieu exactly the kind ofobjectivist, structuralist position that thelatter has discarded and self-consciouslyset himself the task of overcoming sincethe mid-sixties (e.g., Bourdieu, Boltanskiet al. 1965, pp. 17-23; Bourdieu 1968b and1973c; Bourdieu 1972, pp. 155-200). Un-apprised of the extensive and variedempirical work in which the French socio-logist has addressed the very issues hegrapples with (namely, why and howagents who occupy similar objective posi-tions in social space come to developdifferent, even opposite, systems of ex-pectations and aspirations; under whatconditions such aspirations turn out to bethe internalization of objective chances;how misrecognition and ideological dis-tortion induce the dominated to accepttheir exclusion as legitimate),^ MacLeodpresents a truncated snapshot of Bourdieuthat entrenches the deterministic misreadingof his work.^° Having thoroughly mis-rendered it, the author of Ain't Making Itthen finds it necessary to "reinvent" Bour-dieu's theory of habitus in an attempt toovercome the duality of. structure andagency and the dead-end of structuralcausation: the "theoretical deepening" ofthe concept he claims to effect (MacLeod1987, pp. 139-48) retraces, in a veryrudimentary fashion, some of the verysteps taken before him by Bourdieu" andthe new theoretical function he pretends to

' See, on French students, Bourdieu (1973b,1974b), Bourdieu and Passeron (1979); on this samedialectic of objective chances and subjective hopesamong Algerian proletarians, Bourdieu et al. (1963),Bourdieu (1973a, 1979c); on class strategies, Bourdieu(1978b), Bourdieu and Boltanski (1977), and thedetailed discussion in "Class Future and the Causalityof the Probable" (Bourdieu 1974a).

'" "His is a radical critique of a situation that isessentially immutable" (McLeod 1987, p. 14). Thisinterpretation resonates with those of Jenkins (1982)and Collins (1981), among others.

" McLeod (1987, p. 138 and 128) argues, forinstance, that the system of dispositions acquired byagents is shaped by gender, family, educational andoccupational history as well as residence and that thelimited social mobility allowed by liberal democraciesserves to legitimate inequality. Both of these pro-positions are elaborated by Bourdieu at great lengththroughout his work (see in particular Bourdieu andPasseron 1977 and 1979; Bourdieu 1974a and 1984a,especially pp. 101-114, 167-175).

assign to a revised theory of habitus—mediating between structure and practice—is that which has, from the outset, beenone of the French sociologist's foremostmotives behind his reactivation of this oldphilosophical notion (Bourdieu 1967b,1984a, 1985c, 1987a). The final irony,then, is that far from refuting Bourdieu's"theory" as he maintains, MacLeod'sethnography strongly supports it andundercuts the very distortions popularizedby critics like Swartz and Giroux on whichthis author bases his contentions.

If sociologists of education rarely extendthemselves beyond surface interpretationsof Reproduction to include Bourdieu'sempirical and anthropological undertakings,conversely, anthropologists refer liberallyto Outline of A Theory of Practice (Bour-dieu 1972, 1977a), which has acquired thestatus of a classic in their field, or toBourdieu's rich and penetrating ethno-graphies of Algerian peasants and urbanworkers (Bourdieu 1962a, 1964, 1965,1973a, 1973d, 1979c; Bourdieu and Sayad1964), but typically overlook his moresociological forays on school processes,intellectuals, class relations, and on theeconomy of cultural goods in advancedsocieties, forays that are directly germaneto, buttress, and amplify his anthropologicalarguments. The effect in this case has beento truncate both the empirical under-pinnings of Bourdieu's rethinking of thenature and limits of anthropological knowl-edge and to obscure the rationale thatunderlies his importation of materialist

'•̂ "The circular relationship Bourdieu posits be-tween objective opportunities and subjective hopes isincompatible with the findings of this book" (MacLeod1987, p. 138). See Bourdieu (1974a, 1980d, 1988c)and Harker (1984) for an effective refutation of the"circularity" thesis. Thus the French sociologist(Bourdieu 1974a, p. 5) warns that we "must avoidunconsciously universalizing the model of the quasi-circular relationship of quasi-perfect reproductionwhich is adequate only in those [particular] caseswhere the conditions of production of habitus and theconditions of its functioning are identical or homo-thetical." In fact, it is hard to think of anyone whowould agree more with the chief conclusion of Ain'lNo Makin' It that "social reproduction is a complexprocess" than Bourdieu, who has devoted a quarterof a century of intense research to documenting andpenetrating this complexity (e.g., Bourdieu 1987f and1989a, Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1987).


critique into the realm of culture (Bourdieu1986a, 1988c). Even recent discussions ofDistinction (Bourdieu 1984a), a summa ofresearch-cum-theorizing where the Frenchsociologist brings together many of thetopics and themes that exercised him andhis research team over the precedingfifteen years, rarely break out of thisnarrow vision: none of the major extendedreviews of the book (Douglas 1981, Hoff-man 1986, Berger 1986, Garnham 1986,Zolberg 1986) mentions either Outline orits companion volume Le sens pratique(Bourdieu 1980a),'^ in which Bourdieudraws out the more general anthropologicalconclusions of his research on class, cul-ture, and politics in contemporary France,and links them to his earlier investigationsof Kabyle rituals and peasant socialstrategies. ̂ ''

The reasons for such a limited andfractured understanding of a uniquelyunified scientific corpus that so forthrightlyquestions premature specialization andempirical balkanization are several, asBourdieu's own theory would lead us topredict. First, there are the divisions, atonce objective (into disciplinary niches,institutional specialties, and academic net-works and turfs) and subjective (in thecorresponding categories of perceptionand appreciation), that structure the fieldof U.S. social science and in turn shape thereception of foreign intellectual products.Thus American scholars typically seek toforce Bourdieu's sociology into the verydualistic alternatives (micro/macro, agency/structure, normative/rational, function/conflict, synchrony/diachrony, etc.) that itaims at transcending.'^ In the same way.

'̂ Again, the critical exception is Brubaker's(1985) comprehensive discussion of Bourdieu's soci-ology that very explicitly and extensively links thetwo works.

'•• In point of fact, these two volumes. Distinctionand Le sens pratique, are so intimately interwoven inBourdieu's mind that, shortly before they went toprint almost simultaneously, he inverted their con-cluding chapters so that each cannot be read in fullwithout tackling at least part of the other.

" Brubaker (1985, p. 771) aptly notes that "thereception of Bourdieu's work has largely been deter-mined by the same 'false frontiers' and 'artificialdivisions' (Bourdieu 1980b, p. 30, 35) that his workhas repeatedly challenged." Paradigmatic of this

as was hinted above, commentators oftenpidgeon-hole him in some empirical sub-specialty and limit their exegesis to thatportion of his research that falls within itspurview, ignoring the extensions, revisionsand corrections Bourdieu may have niadewhen studying similar processes in a differ-ent social setting. By seeking thus to"retranslate" Bourdieu's work into home-grown, or at least more familiar, theoreticalidioms (for instance, as a combination ofBlau and Giddens, with a touch of Goffmanand Collins)^* or to apportion or assimilatehim into standard empirical subfields (as asociologist of education, analyst of taste,class theorist, student of sports, critic oflinguistics, etc.), rather than to try tounderstand his work in its own terms (as isthe case with other major European socialtheorists),^^ they have created a largely

strategy of theoretical reductio is Elster's (1984a)effort to fit Bourdieu's analysis of distinction into theProcrustean bed of fuctional, causal, and intentionalexplanations. This allows him to declare it irretriev-ably flawed on "methodological" grounds—but at thecost of so total an initial distortion of Bourdieu'sthesis that its distinctive structure and content haveby then entirely disappeared anyway. This is pointedout by a fellow "analytical Marxist" who recognizesthat "even a quick look at [Bourdieu's] main theo-retical essay, and at concrete sociological explanationshe offers elsewhere, reveals a picture very differentfrom the strawmen erected here and there in Boudon'sand Elster's footnotes" (Van Parijs 1981, p. 309).

'* There are no doubt large areas of overlap andconvergence between the concerns of Bourdieu andthose of social theorists such as Giddens or Habermas.One immediate and critical difference between them,though, is that Bourdieu's theoretical advances arefully grounded in, and geared to return to, empiricalresearch. See infra for Bourdieu's views onthis.

" It is interesting to speculate why the works ofHabermas and Foucault, for instance, which, on facevalue, are just as alien as Bourdieu's to Americancategories of sociological understanding, have notsuffered from the same urge to read them intonational traditions and preconstructions. Arguably,the fact that they advertise themselves as philosophers(or philosopher-cum-sociologist in one case andphilosopher-cum-historian in the other), whereasBourdieu forthrightly takes up the mantle of soci-ology, has given them a warrant for legitimate"otherness" and helped shield them from suchextreme ethnocentric reduction (see Merquior [1985]for an analysis of the academic success of Foucaultalong those lines, i.e., as a product of his affiliation tothe mixed genre of "litero-philosophy"). Anotherreason for such differences in treatment may alsohave to do with the fact that, in contradistinction to


fictitious Bourdieu made up of a congeriesof seemingly unrelated and incomprehen-sibly dispersed inquiries with little apparentconnection beyond that of the identity oftheir author.

This intellectual ethnocentrism—the in-clination to refract Bourdieu through theprism of native sociological lenses—^^ hasbeen strongly fortified by the erratic, in-complete, and lagged flow of translations,which has not only disrupted the sequencein which his investigations were conductedand articulated, but has also kept a numberof key writings out of the reach of hisAmerican audience. The exigencies oftranslation have led to a confusing com-pression of the chronology of Bourdieu'swork (reinforced by the author's owntendency to rework his materials endlesslyand to publish with years of delay) or evento a reversal for English-speaking readers. ̂ ^The fact that the genuinely open andcollective nature of Bourdieu's enterpriseclashes with the deeply entrenched Ameri-can stereotype of the French "patron" and

Habermas's for instance, Bourdieu's work is rich andprecise in empirical content and can thus fall prey toboth theoretical and empirical retranslation. Finally,there is the content of their respective theories:Bourdieu's sociology contains a radically disenchantingquestioning of the symbolic power of intellectualsthat sits uneasily with Habermas'_ and Foucault'scomparatively more prophetic stances.

'* All academic fields tend to be ethnocentric. Inthe case of the United States, however, this isaggravated by the "blindness of the dominant" due tothe hegemonic status of American social scienceworldwide. American intellectual myopia functionsas the opposite of that of smaller sociologies, such asDutch sociology (cf. Heilbron 1988): while the lattercannot see themselves, the former does not seeothers and tends to see itself everywhere.

'* Only 7 of Bourdieu's books are presentlyavailable in English (compared to 11 in German). Atleast 5 more are currently being translated. Twoexamples: the English version of the 1964 monographThe Inheritors came out in English in 1979, two yearsafter the 1970 book Reproduction which was basedupon it. The pivotal volume Le metier de sociologue(Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1968) inwhich Bourdieu and his associates lay out the tenetsof the revised "applied rationalism" that supplies theepistemological foundations of his entire project,remains untranslated to this day. As a result, readerswho are not conversant with the work of Bachelardand of the French school of the history of science(notably Koyr6 and Canguilhem) are left in the darkabout the critical-historicist theory of knowledge thatunderlays Bourdieu's sociology.

"circle" (popularized by Terry Clark [1973]and Lemert [1981,1982,1986]) constitutesyet another obstacle. To an extent, suchquasi-concepts born from the uncontrolledprojection, onto the French intellectualuniverse, of the foreign observer's relationto it, as in Lemert's hydra-like tout Paris,have obscured the real functioning of theFrench sociological field from view and,most notably, the striking parallels, bothinstitutional and intellectual—some ofthem crescive, many others arrived at bydesign—between Bourdieu's research teamand the Durkheimian school. Consequently,the sprawling mass of empirical studiespublished in the journal founded in 1975by Bourdieu, Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales, by himself and others, isalmost never consulted by Americanreaders, just as the ongoing work by hiscolleagues and current or former associatesat the Center for European Sociology inParis are regularly overlooked.^"

The Anglophone reception of Bourdieuhas also been considerably affected by thegeneral unfamiliarity of American socialscientists with the Continental traditions ofsocial theory and philosophy which formthe backdrop of his endeavor, most ofwhich do not partake of the "horizon ofexpectations" (Jauss 1982) of mainstreamAmerican sociology. This, of course, ispartly true of other major European strandsof social-cultural theory, including Haber-mas, Foucault, phenomenology, and struc-turalism, as Wuthnow et al. (1984, p. 7)point out. However, a grasp of the nexusof antagonistic and competing positionswithin and against which the French socio-logist developed his own stance^^ is par-

^° Among those and other writings closely influ-enced by Bourdieu, one should site at minimumBoltanski (1987, 1984a), Boltanski and Thfivenot(1983), Verdes-Leroux (1978,1983), Grignon (1971),Maresca (1983), Viala (1985), Castel (1988), Muel-Dreyfus (1983), Charles (1987), de Saint Martin(1971), Suaud (1978), Moulin (1987), Boschetti(1988), Bozon (1984), Isambert (1984), Pingon (1987),Pinto (1984), Viala (1985), Zarca (1987), Caro(1982), and Chamboredon et Pr^vot (1975). See alsothe bibliographic references for a selection of articlesfrom Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales thatdraw upon, apply, or extend Bourdieu's scheme.

^' Among others, the opposition between Sartrianphenomenology and Levi-Straussian structuralism.


ticularly crucial because Bourdieu is anunusually self-conscious writer who reflectsincessantly and intensely upon the intellec-tual and social determinants that bear onhis enterprise.^^ Furthermore, much of histhinking was shaped by a definite reactionboth against the positivist model of socialscience imported into France by the firstgeneration of America-trained social scien-tists in the fifties and sixties (Stoetzel,Boudon, and Crozier among others),^^and against the "literaro-philosophical"tradition (Merquior 1985) that reignedover the French intellectual universe of the1950s. A good many aspects of his sociologyremain largely unscrutable unless one hasa definite idea of the streams of thoughtthat influenced him, whether positively ora contrario, and of the images of theintellectual that formed the "regulativeidea" of his Beruf—balancing uneasilybetween the ambivalent rejection of the"total intellectual," as he put it in a tributeto Sartre who symbolized it (Bourdieu1980e), and a deeply political oppositionboth to the "soft humanism" of Christianphenomenologists and to the epistemo-logical haughtiness implied in the structur-alist conception of practice and knowledge(a twin set of attitudes that was no doubtexacerbated by Bourdieu's first-hand ex-

which Bourdieu (1980a: Preface) regarded, veryearly on, as the embodiment of fundamental scientificoptions; the subtle influence of Merleau-Ponty, Hus-serl and Heidegger; the desire to undercut the claimsof structural Marxism; the mediation of Mauss; orBourdieu's early appropriation of Cassirer, Saussure,Schutz, and Wittgenstein, etc. It is also important tonote what germane traditions of thought Bourdieudrew relatively little upon (for example the Frankfurtschool) or ignored almost entirely (most promimentlyGramsci, whom he admits to having read very late,cf. Bourdieu 1987a, p. 39). For an account byBourdieu of the transformation of the French in-tellectual field in the post-War era, and of hissituation and trajectory within it, see Bourdieu andPasseron (1968), Bourdieu (1979b, 1986a, 1987a) andHonneth, Kocyba and Schwibs (1986).

^̂ Witness the mix of fiery passion and coldanalytic persistence he puts into neutralizing a wholearray of potential misreadings of Homo Academicus(1988a, chapter. 1, "A 'Book for Burning'?"). AlsoBourdieu (1980a, 1980b, 1987a).

^ Bourdieu was alone among the notable Frenchsociologists of his generation conspicuously not toattend Lazarsfeld's famed seminars at the Sorbonnein the sixties.

perience of the constraints and ambiguitiesof the role of the intellectual in thedramatic circumstances of the Algerianwar).

This has been compounded by the factthat what recent French social theoryAmerican sociologists have paid attentionto—Derrida's "deconstruction," Lyotard's"post-modernism," and Barthes' or Bau-drillard's semiology—stands poles apartfrom Bourdieu, in spite of superficialsimilarities. The recent fad of "post-" or"super-structuralism" (Harland 1987)̂ "has tended to divert attention from Bour-dieu's less glamourous and media-consciousclaims or, worse, to enshroud him in thehalo of theoretical currents he has un-ceasingly combatted since their emer-gence. Last but not least, there is theextreme difficulty of Bourdieu's style andprose. The idiolect he has created in orderto break with the common-sense under-standings embedded in common language,the nested and convoluted configuration ofhis sentences designed to convey theessentially relational and recursive charac-ter of social processes, the density of hisargumentation have not facilated his intro-duction into the discourse of Anglo-American social science.^^ All of these

^* A label, it should be noted in passing, which isused strictly by English-speaking exegetes and has nocurrency in France, even among those it presumablydesignates, cf. Descamps (1986), Montefiore (1983).

^ In this respect, while it shares with all (post-)structuralisms a rejection of the Cartesian cogito,Bourdieu's project differs from them in that itrepresents an attempt to make possible, through areflexive application of social-scientific knowledge,the historical emergence of something like a rational(or a reasonable) subject. It is highly doubtful,therefore, that "Bourdieu would gladly participate insplashing the corrosive acid of deconstruction on thetraditional subject" as Rabinow (1982, p. 175) claims.See Bourdieu (1984a, pp. 569, 494-500, 1987d) onBaudrillard and Derrida respectively. Bourdieu andPasseron's (1963) critique of the "sociologists ofmutations" and "massmediology" in the early sixties(mainly Edgar Morin and Pierre Fougeyrollas) wouldseem to apply mutatis mutandis to much of theBaudrillardian writings of today.

^' Although it has not prevented it altogether. SeeLight et al. (1989) for an example of distillation ofBourdieu into introductory textbook material. Thetwo volumes by Accardo (1983) and Accardo andCorcuff (1986) have attempted to do much the samething in French in a more systematic fashion. Again,


factors have combined and reinforced oneanother to prevent American social scien-tists from fully grasping the originality, scope,and systemacity of Bourdieu's sociology.

The recent publication in English ofHomo Academicus (Bourdieu 1988a) andof Language and Symbolic Power (Bour-dieu 1989a), as well as a string of otherpapers in American journals (Bourdieu1987b, 1987c, 1987d, 1987g, 1988c, 1988d,1988e, 1988f, forthcoming),^'' offers anopportunity to begin to redress this situ-ation. With these books, two nodes ofissues that have preoccupied Bourdieuover a number of years become accessibleto an English-speaking audience: theanalysis of intellectuals and of the objecti-fying gaze of sociology; the study oflanguage and linguistic practices as aninstrument and an arena of social power.Both imply very directly, and in turn restupon, a self-analysis of the sociologist as acultural producer and a reflection on thesocial-historical conditions of possibility ofa science of society. Both of these themesare also at the center of Bourdieu's meticu-lous study of Heidegger's Political Ontology(1988b) and of the recent collection ofessays entitled Choses dites (1987a) inwhich the French thinker turns his methodof analysis of symbolic producers uponhimself. Exploring the intent and impli-cations of these books provides a route forsketching out the larger contours of Bour-dieu's intellectual landscape and for clari-fying key features of his thought. Beyondillustrating the open-ended, diverse, andfluid nature of his scientific project betterthan would a long exegesis, the followingdialogue, loosely organized around a seriesof epistemic displacements effected byBourdieu, brings out the underlying

one must wonder whether incessant complaints overBourdieu's style and syntax are not a symptom of amuch deeper difficulty—or of a reluctance to embracea style of thought that makes one squirm as it cutsthrough the mist of one's enchanted relationship tothe social world and to one's condition as anintellectual—since other "difficult" writers (Haber-mas, Foucault or even Weber come to mind) do notelicit nowhere near the same level of protestation asthe author of Distinction does.

" See the other recent English-language writingslisted in the selected bibliography at the end of thisarticle.

connections that unify his empirical andtheoretical work. In so doing, it shouldhelp clear out some of the obdurateobstacles that stand in the way of a moreadequate and more fruitful appropriationof his sociology in America.

FROM THE SOCIOLOGY OFACADEMICS TO THE SOCIOLOGYOF THE SOCIOLOGICAL EYE

Loic J.D. Wacquant: In Homo Academicus(Bourdieu 1988a), you offer a sociology ofyour own universe, that of French intellec-tuals. But clearly your aim is not simply towrite a monograph on the French universityand its faculty, hut to make a much morefundamental point ahout the "sociologicalmethod." Can one speak of a "surfaceohject" and a "true ohject" in this investi-gation?

Pierre Bourdieu: My intention in doingthis study—which I began in earnest in themid-sixties, at a time when the crisis of theacademic institution which was to climaxwith the student movement of '68 wasrampant but not yet so acute that thecontestation of academic "power" hadbecome open—was to conduct a sort ofsociological experiment about sociologicalpractice itself. The idea was to demonstatein actu that, contrary to the claims of thosewho pretend to undermine sociologicalknowledge or seek to disqualify sociologyas a science on the grounds that (asMannheim insisted, and before him Weberand Marx) the sociologist is socially situ-ated, included in the very object he or shewishes to objectivize, sociology can escapeto a degree from this historicist circle, bydrawing on its knowledge of the socialuniverse in which social science is producedto control the effects of the determinismswhich operate in this universe and, at thesame time, bear on social science itself.

So you are entirely right, throughoutthis study, I pursue a double goal andconstruct a double object: the naive,apparent object of the French university asan institution, which requires an analysisof its structure and functioning, of thevarious species of power that are efficientin this universe, of the trajectories and


agents who come to take up positions in it,of the "professorial" vision of the world,etc.; and the deeper object of the reflexivereturn entailed in objectifying one's ownuniverse: that which is involved in objecti-fying an institution socially recognized asfounded to claim objectivity and universalityfor its own objectifications.

LW: This device—using the university,that is, the taken-for-granted setting ofyour own daily life, as a pretext forstudying the sociological gaze—is one youhad previously used when, in the earlysixties, you conducted an investigation ofmarriage practices in your own villagein Southwestern France (Bourdieu 1962h,1962c, 1977b) after completing one ofsimilar practices among Algerian peasants(Bourdieu 1972, 1980a).

PB: Yes. Homo Academicus representsthe culmination, at least in a biographicalsense, of a very self-conscious "epistemo-logical experiment" I started in the earlysixties when I set out to apply to my mostfamiliar universe the methods of investi-gation I had previously used to uncoverthe logic of kinship relations in a foreignuniverse, that of Algerian peasants andsubproletarians.

The "methodological" intent of thisresearch, if we may call it that, was tooverturn the natural relation of the observerto his universe of study, to make themundane exotic and the exotic mundane,in order to render explicit what, in bothcases, is taken for granted and to offer avery concrete, very pragmatic, vindicationof the possibility of a full sociologicalobjectivation of the object and of thesubject's relation to the object—what Icall participant objectivation (Bourdieu1978a). This required resisting a temptationthat is no doubt inherent in the posture ofthe sociologist, that of taking up theabsolute point of view upon the object ofstudy—here to assume a sort of intellectualpower over the intellectual world. So inorder to bring this study to a successfulissue and to publish it, I had to discoverthe deep truth of this world, namely, thateverybody in it struggles to do what thesociologist is tempted to do. I had toobjectivize this temptation and, more pre-

cisely, to objectivize the form that it tookat a certain time in the sociologist PierreBourdieu.

LW: Throughout your work, you haveemphasized this need for a reflexive returnon the sociologist and on his/her universe ofproduction, insisting that it is not merely aform of intellectualo-centrism but has realscientific consequences. What is the signifi-cance of this return from an epistemologicalor theoretical point of view? And whatdifference does it make, concretely, to do areflexive sociology of the kind you advocate?

PB: Indeed, I believe that the sociologyof sociology is a fundamental dimension ofsociological epistemology. Far from beinga specialty among others, it is the necessaryprerequisite of any rigorous sociologicalpractice. In my view, one of the chiefsources of error in the social sciencesresides in an uncontrolled relation to theobject which results in the projection ofthis relation into the object. What distressesme when I read some works by sociologistsis that people whose profession it is toobjectivize the social world prove so rarelyable to objectivize themselves and fail sooften to realize that what their apparentlyscientific discourse talks about is not theobject but their relation to the object—itexpresses ressentiment, envy, social con-cupiscence, unconscious aspirations orfascinations, hatred, a whole range ofunanalyzed experiences of and feelingsabout the social world.

Now, to objectivize the objectivizingpoint of view of the sociologist is somethingthat is done quite frequently, but in astrikingly superficial, if apparently radical,manner. When we say "the sociologist isinscribed in a historical context," wegenerally mean "the bourgeois sociologist"and leave it at that. But objectivation ofany cultural producer involves more thanpointing to—and bemoaning—his classbackground and location, his race or hisgender. We must not forget to objectivizehis position in the universe of culturalproduction, in this case the scientific oracademic field. One of the contributions ofHomo Academicus is to demonstrate that,when we carry out objectivations a laLukacs (and after him Lucien Goldmann,


to take one of the most sophisticated formsof this very commonplace sociologisticreductionism), that is, brutally put indirect correspondence cultural objects andtheir producers (or their public, as when itis said that such a form of English theaterexpresses "the dilemma of a rising middleclass"), we commit what I call the short-circuit fallacy (Bourdieu 1988d): by seekingto establish a direct link between verydistant terms, we omit the crucial mediationprovided by the relatively autonomousspace of the field of cultural production.

But to stop at this stage would still leaveunexamined the most essential bias, whoseprinciple lies neither in the social position-ing, nor in the specific position of thesociologist in the field of cultural production(i.e., his or her location in a space ofpossible theoretical, substantive, ormethodological stances), but in the invisibledeterminations inherent in the intellectualposture itself, in the scholarly gaze, that heor she casts upon the social world. As soonas we observe (theorein) the social world,we introduce in our perception of it a biasdue to the fact that, to study it, to describeit, to talk about it, we must retire from itmore or less completely. This theoreticistor intellectualist bias consists in forgettingto inscribe, into the theory we build of thesocial world, the fact that it is the productof a theoretical gaze, a "contemplativeeye." A genuinely reflexive sociology mustavoid this "ethnocentrism of the scientist"which consists in ignoring everything thatthe analyst injects in his perception of theobject by virtue of the fact that he is placedoutside of the object, that he observes itfrom afar and from above. Just like theanthropologist who constructs a genealogyentertains a relation to "kinship" that isworlds apart from that of the Kabyle headof clan who must solve the very practicaland urgent problem of finding an appro-priate mate for his daughter, the sociologistwho studies the American school system,for instance, is motivated by preoccu-pations and has a "use" of schools thathave little in common with those of afather seeking to find a good school for hisdaughter.

The upshot of this is not that theoreticknowledge is worth nothing but that we

must know its limits and accompany allscientific accounts with an account of thelimits and limitations of scientific accounts:theoretic knowledge owes a number of itsmost essential properties to the fact thatthe conditions under which it is producedare not that of practice.

LW: In other words, an adequate science ofsociety must construct theories which com-prise within themselves a theory of the gapbetween theory and practice.

PB: Precisely. An adequate model ofreality must take into account the distancebetween the practical experience of agents(who ignore the model) and the modelwhich enables the mechanisms it describesto function with the unknowing "com-plicity" of agents. And the case of theuniversity is a litmus test for this require-ment, since everything here inclines one tocommit the theoreticist fallacy. Like anysocial universe, the academic world is thesite of a struggle over the truth of theacademic world and of the social world ingeneral. (Very rapidly, we can say that thesocial world is the site of continual strugglesto define what the social world is; but theacademic world has this peculiarity todaythat its verdicts and pronouncements areamong the most powerful socially.) Inacademe, people fight constantly over thequestion of who, in this universe, issocially mandated, authorized, to tell thetruth of the social world (e.g., to definewho and what is a delinquent, where theboundaries of the working class lie, whethersuch and such a group exists and is entitledto rights, etc.). To intervene in it as asociologist naturally carried the temptationof claiming for oneself the role of neutralreferee, of the judge, to distribute rightsand wrongs.

In other words, the intellectualist andtheoreticist fallacy (which, in anthropologytakes the form of the epistemocratic claimthat "I know better than my informant")was the temptation par excellence forsomeone who, being a sociologist, andthus party to the ongoing struggle overtruth, set out to tell the truth of this worldof which he is a part and of the opposedperspectives that are taken on it. Thenecessity of the reflexive return is not the


expression of a sort of epistemological"sense of honor" but a principle that leadsto constructing scientific objects into whichthe relation of the analyst to the object isnot unconsciously projected. The fact thatI had explicitly assigned myself the purposeof scrutinizing the object (the University)but also the work of construction of theobject allowed me, I believe, to sidestepthe intellectualist trap. I was aware fromthe outset that my task involved not simplytelling the truth of this world, as can beuncovered by objectivist methods of ob-servation, but also showing that this worldis the site of an ongoing struggle to tell thetruth of this world.

This temptation to crush one's rivals byobjectifying them, which was ever-presentin the objectivist phase of this research, isat the roots of serious technical mistakes. Iemphasize "technical" here to stress thedifference between scientific work andpure reflection. For everything that I havejust said translates into very concreteresearch operations: variables added ortaken out of correspondence analyses,sources of data reinterpreted or rejected,new criteria inserted into the analysis, etc.For instance, anticipating the hostile re-actions that such questions would triggeramong intellectuals, I knew that I couldnot resort to direct interviewing; I had toresign myself, in the manner of historians,to prosopography, and to using strictlypublic and published information. Everysingle indicator of intellectual notoriety Iuse required an enormous amount of workto construct because, in a universe whereidentity is made largely through symbolicstrategies and by collective belief, the mostminor piece of information (is so and so anagregel) had to be independently verifiedfrom different sources.

LW: This return upon the generic relationof the analyst to his object and npon theparticular location he or she occupies in thespace of scientific production would bewhat distinguishes the kind of reflexivityyou advocate from that of Gouldner (1970)or Garfinkel (1967)?

PB: Yes. Garfinkel is content withexplicating only things that are very general,universal, tied to the status of the agent as

a knowing subject; his reflexivity is strictlyphenomenological in this sense. In Gould-ner, reflexivity remains more a program-matic slogan than a veritable program ofwork. What must be objectivized is not theindividual who does the research in hisbiographical idiosyncracy but the positionhe occupies in academic space and thebiases implicated in the stance he takes byvirtue of being "out of the game" (horsjeu). What is lacking most in this Americantradition, no doubt for very definite socio-logical reasons (among which the lesserrole of philosophy in the training of re-searchers and the weaker presence of acritical poUtical tradition can be singledout) is a truly reflexive and critical analysisof the academic institution and, moreprecisely, of the sociological institution,conceived not as an end in itself but as the.condition of scientific progress.

This is to say, in passing, that the kind of"sociology of sociology" that I advocatehas little in common with this kind ofcomplacent and intimist return upon theprivate person of the sociologist^^ or with asearch for the intellectual Zeitgeist thatanimates his or her work (as, for instance,in Gouldner's [1970] analysis of Parsons inThe Coming Crisis of Sociology), or yetwith this self-fascinated, and a bit com-placent, observation of the observer'swritings which has recently become some-thing of a fad among some Americananthropologists (e.g., Marcus and Fisher1986, Geertz 1987) who, having becomeblase with fieldwork, turn to talking aboutthemselves rather than about their objectof research. This kind of falsely radicaldenunciation of ethnographic writing as"poetics and politics" (Clifford and Marcus1986) which becomes its own end opens

. the door to a form of thinly-veiled nihilisticrelativism (of the kind that one finds alsoin some versions of the "strong programme"in the sociology of science, notably inLatour's [1987] recent work) that stands asthe polar opposite to a truly reflexivesocial science.

^ Bourdieu's (1988a) elaboration of the importantdistinction between "epistemic individual" and "em-pirical individual" is relevant here. Also Bourdieu(1987c).


LW: What is your response to the criticismthat may be levied that Homo Academicusdeals exclusively with a particular case,that of France, which poses problems forgeneralization, and that furthermore thedata are twenty-years old?

PB: Inasmuch as the real object of theanalysis goes well beyond the apparentone, the historical specificity of the Frenchcase in no way invalidates or limits theimplications of the inquiry. But I would gofurther: one of the goals of the book is toshow that the opposition between theuniversal and the unique, between nomo-thetic analysis and ideographic description,is a false antinomy. The relational andanalogical mode of reasoning fostered bythe concept of field enables us to graspparticularly within generality and generalitywithin particularity, by making it possibleto see the French case as a "particular caseof the possible" as Bachelard says. Better,the specific historical properties of theFrench academic field—its much higherdegree of centralization and institutionalunification, its well-delimited barriers toentry, if we contrast it with the Americanhigher education system for instance—make it a uniquely suited terrain foruncovering some of the universal laws thattendentially regulate the functioning of allfields.

Likewise, the criticism—which was al-ready raised against Distinction by some ofmy American commentators—that the dataare old entirely misses the mark inasmuchas one of the purposes of the analysis is touncover transhistorical invariants, or setsof relations between structures that persistwithin a clearly circumscribed but relativelylong historical period. In this case, whetherthe data are 5 or 15 years old matters little.Proof is that the main opposition thatemerges, within the space of disciplines,between the college of arts and sciences onthe one hand and the schools of law andmedicine on the other, is nothing otherthan the old opposition, already describedby Kant in The Conflict of the Faculties,between the faculties that directly dependupon temporal powers and owe theirauthority to a sort of social delegation andthe faculties that may be labelled "pure,"self-founded, whose authority is premised

upon scientificity (the faculty of sciencesbeing typical of this category).

And I recently carried out yet anotherexperimental verification of this principleof the durability of fields as relationalconfigurations by showing that the structureof the field of French Grandes Ecoles,conceived as a set of objective positionaldifferences and distances among elitegraduate schools, and between them and 'the social positions of power which lead tothem and to which they in turn lead, hasremained remarkably constant, nearlyidentical in fact, over the twenty-yearperiod from 1968 to the present (Bourdieuand de Saint Martin 1987; Bourdieu 1987fand 1989a).

LW: Precisely, several commentators (e.g.,Collins 1981, Jenkins 1982, Sulkunen 1982,Connell 1983, Wacquant 1987) have criti-cized your models for being static and"closed", leaving little room for resistance,change, and the irruption of history. Doesn'tHomo Academicus answer this concern byputting forth an analysis of May '68 which,in effect, dissolves the opposition betweenstructure and history and between struc-tural history and event history?

PB: I must say that I find many of thesecriticisms strikingly superficial; they revealthat those who make them may have paidmore attention to the titles of my books(most blatantly in the case of Reproduction)than to the actual analyses they contain. Ihave repeatedly denounced both what Icall the "functionalism of the worst case"and the dehistoricizing that follows from astrictly structuralist standpoint (e.g.,Bourdieu 1968b and 1987a, pp. 56ff.).Likewise, I cannot begin to comprehendhow relations of domination, whethermaterial or symbolic, could possiblyoperate without implying, activating resist-ance. The dominated, in any social uni-verse, can always exert a certain force,inasmuch as to belong to a field means bydefinition that one is capable of producingeffects in it (if only to elicit reactions ofexclusion on the part of those who occupythe dominant positions), thus of puttingcertain forces into motion.

In Homo Academicus, I try to account,as completely as possible, for the crisis of


May '68 and, at the same time, to put forthsome of the elements of an invariantmodel of crises or revolutions. In thecourse of the analysis of this specific event,I discovered a number of properties whichhave me wondering if they are not verygeneral. First I tried to show that the crisisinternal to the university was the productof the meeting of two partial crises pro-voked by separate, autonomous evolutions.On the one hand we have a crisis amongthe faculty triggered by the effects of therapid and massive swelling of the ranks ofprofessors and by the resulting tensionsbetween the dominant and subordinatecategories of teachers. On the other hand,we find a crisis of the student body due to awhole range of factors, including theoverproduction of graduates, the devalu-ation of credentials, etc. These partial,local crises converged, providing a base forconjunctual alliances. The crisis then spreadalong lines which were very determinate,toward instances of symbolic production inparticular (radio, TV, the church, and soon), that is, all those universes in whichthere was a conflict of legitimacy betweenthe established holders of the legitimacy ofdiscourse and the new contenders whopreached the ministry of the universal.

LW: More generally, could you clarify theplace of history in your thinking?

PB: Obviously, this is an immenselycomplex question and I can only outline itsresolution in the most general terms.Suffice it to say that the separation ofsociology and history is a disastrous divisionand one totally devoid of epistemologicaljustification: all sociology should be his-torical and all history sociological. In pointof fact, one of the functions of the theoryof fields that I propose is to make theopposition between reproduction andtransformation, statics and dynamics, orstructure and history, vanish. As I tried todemonstrate practically in my research onthe French literary field in Flaubert's timeand on the artistic field around Manet'stime (Bourdieu 1983d, 1987i, 1988d), wecannot grasp the dynamics of a field if notby a synchronic analysis of its structureand, simultaneously, we cannot grasp thisstructure without a historical, or genetic.

analysis of its constitution, and of thetensions that exist between positions, aswell as between this field and other fields,and especially what I call the field ofpower.

In the present state of the social sciences,however, I think that the history of thelongue duree, the kind of "macro-history"most sociologists practice when they tackleprocesses of rationalization, bureaucrat-ization, modernization, etc., continues tobe one of the last refuges of a thinly-masked social philosophy. What we needto do, rather, is a form of structural historythat is rarely practiced, which finds in eachsuccessive state of the structure underexamination both the product of previousstruggles to maintain or to transform thisstructure and the principle, via the contra-dictions, the tensions, and the, relations offorce which constitute it, of subsequenttransformations.

The intrusion of pure historical events,such as May '68 or any other great historicalbreak, becomes understandable only whenwe reconstruct the plurality of "indepen-dent causal series" of which Cournotspoke to characterize chance {le hasard),that is, the different and relatively auto-nomous historical concatenations that areput together in each universe and whosecollision, through synchronization, deter-mines the singularity of historical happen-ings. But here I will refer you to theanalysis of May 68 that I developed in thelast chapter of Homo Academicus andwhich contains the embryo of a theory ofsymbolic revolution that I am presentlydeveloping.

FROM STRUCTURE TO FIELD

LW: In the preface to the English edition ofHomo Academicus, you write that thishook "tacitly refutes the notion of pro-fession." What is it in the notion of profes-sion, or in the sociology of occupations as itis practiced in the U.S. in particular, thatyou find objectionahle? What separates ananalysis conducted in terms of field fromone conducted in terms of profession?

PB: The notion of profession is dangerousbecause it has all appearances of false


neutrality in its favor. Profession is a folkconcept which has been uncriticallysmuggled into scientific language and whichimports in it a whole social unconscious. Itis the product of a historical work ofconstruction and representation of a groupwhich has slipped into the very science ofthis group. This is why this "concept"works so well, or too well: the category ofprofession refers to realities that are, in asense, "too real" to be true, since it graspsat once a mental category and a socialcategory, socially produced only by super-seding or obliterating all kinds of differ-ences and contradictions.

All this social work of construction ofthe category must be undone and analyzedso that a rigorous sociological constructcan be built that accounts for its success.Everything becomes different, and muchmore complicated if I take seriously thework of agregation and symbolic impositionthat was necessary to produce the "aca-demic profession" and if I treat it as a field,that is, a space of social forces andstruggles.^^ The first question that arisesis: How to draw up a representativesample in a field? If, following the canondictated by orthodox methodology, youtake a random sample, you mutilate thevery object you have set out to construct.If, in a study of the field of lawyers, forinstance, you do not draw the President ofthe Supreme Court, or if, in an inquiryinto the French intellectual field of the1950s, you leave out Jean-Paul Sartre, orPrinceton University in a study of Americanacademics, your field is destroyed, insofaras these personas or institutions alonemark a crucial position—there are posi-tions in a field which command the wholestructure.•"' Moreover, there is an ongoingstruggle over the limits of the field ofacademics, over who belongs to it and whodoes not. This is a question that the mostdaring of positivists solve by what they callan "operational definition," by arbitrarily

^̂ See Boltanski (1987) for an in-depth examinationof the organizational and symbolic invention of thecategory of "cadres" in French society.

"̂ How Sartre both dominated, and was in turndominated by his own domination in, the Frenchintellectual field is shown in detail by Boschetti(1988) and Bourdieu (1980e, 1984b).

deciding who is included and who is not.Again, this empirist surrender has allappearances for itself, since it abandons tothe social world as it is, to the establishedorder of the moment, the most essentialoperations of research, thereby fulfilling adeeply conservative function of ratificationof the doxa.

Naturally, if you adopt the notion ofprofession as an instrument—rather thanas an object—of analysis, none of thiscreates any difficulty. As long as you takeit as it presents itself (as in the halloweddata of positivist sociologists), no professionis difficult to apprehend. What groupwould turn down the sacralizing andnaturalizing recording of the social scientist?What "profession" would take exceptionto a sociological report that gives objective,that is public, reality to their subjectiverepresentation of their collective being?As long as you remain within the realm ofsocially constituted and socially sanctionedappearances—and this is the order towhich the notion of "profession" belongs—you will have all appearances in yourfavor, even the appearance of scientificity.

In other words, to accept the precon-structed notion of profession is to lockoneself up in the alternative of celebration(as do many American studies of "pro-fessions") and partial objectivation. Byreconceptualizing it as a field, as I do inHomo Academicus, it becomes possible tobreak with the notion of profession and toreintegrate it within a model of the fullreality it pretends to capture.

LW: The notion of field is, together withthose of habitus and capital, the centralorganizing concept of your work, particu-larly your more recent work, which includesstudies in the fields of artists and intellec-tuals, classes, lifestyles, Grandes Ecoles,religion, the field of power, of law, ofhousing construction, etc.''' You use the

'̂ On the intellectual and artistic field, see interalia Bourdieu (1971a, 1975b, 1975c, 1983a, 1983d,1988a); on the field of classes and class lifestyles,Bourdieu (1978b, 1984a, 1987b); on cultural goods,Bourdieu (1980h, 1985d) and Bourdieu and Delsaut(1975); on the religious field, Bourdieu (1971b,1987h), Bourdieu and de Saint Martin (1982); on thescientific field (1981d, 1987e, forthcoming); on the


notion of field in a highly technical andprecise sense which is perhaps partly hiddenbehind its common-sense meaning. Couldyou explicate in a few words where thenotion comes from (for Americans, it islikely to evoke the "field theory" of KurtLewin), what you put under it and what itstheoretical purposes are?

PB: To think in terms of field is to thinkrelationally. The relational (rather thanmore narrowly "structuralist") mode ofthinking is, as Cassirer demonstrated inSubstanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, thehallmark of modern science and one couldshow that it lies behind scientific enterprisesapparently as different as those of Marx,of the Russian formaUst Tyrianov, of KurtLewin, of Norbert Elias, and of thepioneers of structuralism in anthropology,linguistics and history, from Levi-Straussto Jakobson to Dumezil. (If you check,you will find that both Lewin and Eliasdraw explicitly on Cassirer, as I do, tomove beyond the Aristotelian essentialismthat spontaneously impregnates socialthinking.) I could twist Hegel's famousword and say that the real is the relational:what exist in the social world are relations,not interactions between agents or inter-subjective ties between individuals, butobjective relations which exist "indepen-dently of individual consciousness andwill," as Marx said.

I define a field as a network, or aconfiguration, of objective relations be-tween positions objectively defined, intheir existence and in the determinationsthey impose upon their occupants, agentsor institutions, by their present and poten-tial situation (situs) in the structure of thedistribution of species of power (or capital)whose possession commands access to thespecific profits that are at stake in the field,as well as by their objective relation toother positions (domination, subordination,homology, etc.). Each field presupposes,and generates by its very functioning, thebelief in the value of the stakes it offers.

juridical field and the field of power, Bourdieu(1986c, 1987g, 1981a, 1989a), Bourdieu and de SaintMartin (1978, 1982, 1987), respectively; the field ofprivate housing construction is explored in Bourdieuet al. (1987).

In highly differentiated societies, thesocial cosmos is made up of a number ofsuch relatively autonomous social micro-cosms, i.e., spaces of objective relationswhich are the site of a logic and of anecessity that is specific and irreducible tothose which regulate other fields. Forinstance, the artistic field, or the religiousfield, or the economic field all followspecific logics: while the artistic field hasconstituted itself by refusing or reversingthe law of material profit (Bourdieu 1983d),the economic field has emerged, historically,through the creation of a universe withinwhich, as we commonly say, "business isbusiness," where the enchanted relationsof phylia, of which Aristotle spoke, offriendship and love, are excluded.

LW: How does one determine the existenceof a field and its boundaries, and what isthe motor cause of its functioning?

PB: The question of the limits of thefield is always at stake in the field. Partici-pants to a field, say, economic firms, highfashion designers, or novelists, constantlywork to differentiate themselves fromtheir closest rivals in order to reducecompetition and to establish a monopolyover a particular sub-sector of the field.Thus the boundaries of the field can onlybe determined by an empirical investigation.Only rarely do they take the form ofjuridical frontiers, even though they arealways marked by more or less institution-alized "barriers to entry." The limits of thefield are situated at the point where theeffects of the field cease.

The principle of the dynamics of a fieldlies in the form of its structures and, inparticular, in the distance, the gaps, be-tween the various specific forces thatconfront one another. The forces that areactive in the field—and thus selected bythe analyst as pertinent because theyproduce the most relevant differences—are those which define the specific capital.A capital does not exist and function but inrelation to a field: it confers a power overthe field, over the materialized or embodiedinstruments of production or reproductionwhose distribution constitutes the verystructure of the field, and over the regu-larities and the rules which define the


ordinary functioning of the field, andthereby over the profits engendered in thisfield.

As a space of potential and activeforces, the field is also afield of strugglesaimed at preserving or transforming theconfiguration of these forces. Concretely,the field as a structure of objective relationsof force between positions undergirds andguides the strategies whereby the occupantsof these positions seek, individually orcollectively to safeguard or improve theirposition, and to impose the principle ofhierarchization most favorable to theirown products. The strategies of agentsdepend on their position in the field, thatis, in the distribution of the specific capital.

LW: What difference is there between afield and an apparatus?

PB: An essential difference: strugglesand thus historicity! The notion of apparatusis the Trojan horse of "pessimistic func-tionalism:" it is an infernal machine, pro-grammed to accomplish certain purposesno matter what, when, or where. Theschool system, the State, the church,political parties or unions are not appar-atuses but fields. In a field, agents andinstitutions constantly struggle, accordingto the rules constitutive of this space ofgame, with various degrees of strength andtherefore diverse probabilities of success,to appropriate the specific products atstake in the game. Those who dominate ina given field are in a position to make itfunction to their advantage, but they mustalways contend with the resistance, "poli-tical" or not, of the dominated.

Now, under certain historical conditions,which must be examined, a field may startto function as an apparatus. When thedominant manage to crush and annul theresistance and the reactions of the domi-nated, when all movements go exclusivelyfrom the top down, the effects of domi-nation are such that the struggle and thedialectic which are constitutive of the fieldcease. There is history only as long aspeople revolt, resist, act. Total institutions—asylums, prisons, concentration camps—or totalitarian states are attempts to insti-tute an end to history. Thus apparatusesrepresent a pathological state, what we

may consider to be a limiting case, offields.

LW: Very briefly, how does one conductthe study of a field, what are the necessarysteps in this type of analysis?

PB: An analysis in terms of field involvesthree necessary and internally connectedmoments. Firstly, one must analyse theposition of the field vis-a-vis the field ofpower. In the case of the "society" of artistsand writers (Bourdieu 1983d), we find thatthe literary field is contained within thefield of power where it occupies a domi-nated position. (In common, and muchless adequate, parlance: artists and writers,or intellectuals more generally, are a"dominated fraction of the dominantclass"). Secondly, one must map out theobjective structure of the relations betweenthe positions occupied by the agents orinstitutions who compete for the legitimateform of specific authority of which thisfield in the site. And, thirdly, one mustanalyze the habitus of agents, the systemof dispositions they have acquired byinternalizing a determinate type of socialand economic condition and which find ina definite trajectory within the field underconsideration a more or less favorableopportunity to become actualized.

The field of positions is methodologicallyinseparable from the field of stances orposition-takings {prises de position), i.e.,the structured system of practices andexpressions of agents. Both spaces, that ofobjective positions and that of stances,must be analyzed together, treated as "twotranslations of the same sentence" asSpinoza put it. It remains neverthelessthat, in situation of equilibrium, the spaceof positions tends to command the space ofposition-takings. Artistic revolutions, forinstance, are but the result of transform-ations of the relations of power constitutiveof the space of artistic positions which arethemselves made possible by the meetingof the subversive intentions of a fraction ofproducers with the expectations of a frac-tion of the audience, thus by a transform-ation of the relations between the intellec-tual field and the field of power. Needlessto say, what is true of the artistic field,applies to other fields. One can observe


the same "fit" between positions within theacademic field on the eve of May 1968 andthe pohtical stances taken by the variousprotagonist of these events, as I show inHomo Academicus.

What must be emphasized is, firstly, thatthe external determinations that bear onagents situated in a given field (intellectuals,artists, politicians, or construction com-panies), never apply on them directly, butonly through the specific mediation of thespecific forms and forces of the field, afterhaving undergone a re-structuring that isall the more important the more auto-nomous the field, that is, the more it iscapable of imposing its specific logic, thecumulative product of its specific history.(This is what Baudelaire expressed whenhe exclaimed: "If there is one thing moreabominable and worst than the bourgeois,it is the bourgeois artist").

Secondly, we can observe a whole rangeof structural and functional homdlogiesbetween the field of class relations, thepolitical field, the Uterary field, etc.: eachhas its dominant and its dominated, itsstruggles for usurpation or exclusion, itsmechanisms of reproduction, and so on.But every one of these characteristicstakes on a specific, irreducible, form ineach field (a homology may be defined as aresemblance within a difference). Thus,being contained within the field of power,the struggles that go on in the philosophicalfield, for instance, are always overdeter-mined and tend to function in a doublelogic. They have political effects and fulfillpolitical functions by virtue of the homologyof position that obtains between such asuch a philosophical contender and suchand such political or social group in thefield of class relations.

To sum up, the chief merit of the notionof field, in my eyes, is that it allows us totranscend a whole series of methodologicaland theoretical antinomies: between in-ternal reading, or tautegoric analysis asSchelling called it, and external or allegoricanalysis; between efficient and final causes;between the individual and the society;between the normative discourse of cele-bration and the positive, or positivist,discourse, often animated by an iconoclastintent, which overlooks the specificity of

local determinations; and between theanalysis of essence as the universalizationof a given case and historicist immersioninto particularity.

INTEREST, HABITUS, ANDRATIONALITY

LW: Your use of the notion of interest hasoften called forth the charge of "economism"(e.g., Caille 1981, 1987, Joppke 1986).What theoretical role does interest play inyour mode of analysis?

PB: Building upon Weber, who utilizedthe economic model to develop a materialistsociology of religion and to uncover thespecific interests of the great protagonistsof the religious game, priests, prophetsand sorcerers (Bourdieu 1987h), I intro-duced the notion of interest—I prefer touse the term illusio since I always speak ofspecific interest, of interests that are bothpresupposed and produced by the function-ing of historically delimited fields—in myanalysis of cultural producers in reactionto the dominant vision of the intellectualuniverse, to call into question the ideologyof the freischwebende Intelligenz. Thenotion of interest as I use it, which,paradoxically, as you indicate, has broughtforth the accusation of economism againsta work which, from the very outset (Icould refer here to my first ethnographicpieces on the sense of honor among theKabyles [Bourdieu 1965 and 1979d]) wasconceived in opposition to economism, isthe means of a deliberate and provisionalreductionism which allows me to bring thematerialist mode of questioning into thecultural sphere from where it was expelled,historically, when the modern notion of artwas invented and the field of culturalproduction won its autonomy (Bourdieu1980h, 1987d).

This is to say that the concept of interestas I construe it has nothing in commonwith the naturalistic, trans-historical, anduniversal interest of utilitarian theory. (Itwould be otiose to show that Adam Smith'sself-interest is nothing more than an un-conscious universalization of the form ofinterest required and engendered by acapitalist economy.) Far from being an


anthropological invariant, interest is ahistorical arbitrary, a historical constructionthat can be known only through historicalanalysis, ex post, through empirical obser-vation, and not deduced a priori fromsome fictitious^and so naively Eurocentric—conception of "Man."

LW: This would imply that there are asmany "interests" as there are fields, thateach field simultaneously presupposes andgenerates a specific form of interest that isincommensurable with those that havecurrency elsewhere.

PB: Absolutely. There are as manypractical understandings of the game, andthus interests, as there are games. Eachfield calls forth and gives life to a specificform of interest, a specific illusio as tacitrecognition of the value of the stakes ofthe game and as practical mastery of itsrules. Furthermore, this specific interestimplied by one's participation in the gamespecifies itself according to the positionoccupied in the game (dominant vs. domi-nated, or orthodox vs. heretic) and withthe trajectory that leads each participantto this position. Anthropology and com-parative history show that the properlysocial inagic of institutions can constitutealmost anything as an interest, and as arealistic interest, i.e., as an investment (inthe double meaning the word has ineconomics and in psychoanalysis) that isobjectively paid back by an "economy."

LW: Beyond interest and investment, youhave "imported" from economic language anumber of other concepts, such as marketand capital (e.g., Bourdieu 1985d, 1986b),all of which evoke the economic mode ofreasoning. What sets your theoreticalapproach apart from the "economic ap-proach" to social action?

PB: The only thing I share with neo-marginalist economists are the words.Take the notion of investment. By invest-ment I mean the propensity to act which isborn out of the relation between a fieldand a system of dispositions adjusted tothe game it proposes, a sense of the gameand of its stakes which implies both aninclination and an ability to play the game.The general theory of the economy of

fields which emerges progressively fromgeneralization to generalization (I ampresently working on a multi-volume bookin which I try to isolate, at a more formallevel, the general properties of fields)enables us to describe and to specify thespecific form taken by the most generalmechanisms and concepts such as capital,investment, interest, within each field, andthus to avoid all kinds of reductionisms,beginning with economism, which recog-nizes nothing but material interest and thesearch for the maximization of monetaryprofit.

Thus my theory owes nothing, despiteappearances, to the transfer of the eco-nomic approach. And, as I hope to demon-strate fully one day, far from being thefounding model, economic theory (andRational Action Theory which is its socio-logical derivative) is probably best seen asa particular instance, historically datedand situated, of field theory.

LW: Would the notion of habitus be theconceptual lynchpin by which you rearticu-late these apparently economic notions intoa model of action that is radically differentfrom that of economics?

PB: In double opposition to the objec-tivism of action "without an agent" of theAlthusserians and to the subjectivism whichportrays action as the deliberate pursuit ofa conscious intention, the free project of aconscience positing its own ends and maxi-mizing its utility through rational compu-tation, I have put forth a theoi"y of practiceas the product of a practical sense (Bourdieu1980a), of a socially constituted "sense ofthe game." Against positivistic material-ism, the theory of practice as practiceposits that objects of knowledge are con-structed, and not passively recorded. Andagainst intellectualist idealism, it remindsus that the principle of this construction ishabitus, the system of structured andstructuring dispositions which is constitutedby practice and constantly aimed at prac-tical—as opposed to cognitive—functions.In order to sidestep objectivism without

relapsing into subjectivism and its demon-strated incapacity to account for the neces-sity immanent in the social world, it isnecessary to return to practice as the locus


of the dialectic between opus operatumand modus operandi, between the objecti-fied and the embodied products of historicalaction, structures and habitus.

I could show that the concept of habitus,like that of field, is relational in that itdesignates a mediation between objectivestructures and practices. First and fore-most, habitus has the function of over-coming the alternative between conscious-ness and the unconscious and betweenfinalism and mechanicalism. Following theprogramme suggested by Marx in theTheses on Feuerbach, it aims at makingpossible a materialist theory of knowledgewhich does not abandon to idealism theidea that all knowledge, be it mundane orscholarly, presupposes a work of construc-tion, but a work which has nothing incommon with intellectual work, a practicalactivity which sets into motion the practicalars inveniendi of habitus. (All those whoused this old concept or similar onesbefore me—from Hegel's ethos to Husserl'sHabitualitdt to Mauss's hexis—were in-spired by a theoretical intention akin tomine, which was to escape from under thephilosophy of the subject without doingaway with the agent).

In order to capture the gist of socialaction, we must recognize the ontologicalcomplicity, as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty suggested, between the agent (whois neither a subject or a consciousness, northe mere executant of a role or the Tragerof a function) and the social world (whichis never a mere "thing" even if it must beconstructed as such in the objectivist phaseof research). Social reality exists, so tospeak, twice, in things and in minds, infields and in habitus, outside and inside ofagents. And when habitus encounters asocial world of which it is the product, itfinds itself "as fish in water," it does notfeel the weight of the water and takes theworld about itself for granted.

LW: All of this puts you in a frontalopposition to this wide, if heterogenous,current that has recently been gainingstrength across the social sciences underthe label of Rational Action Theory orRational Choice Theory.

PB: Without the shadow of a doubt.

Forgetting all the abstractions it has toeffect in order to produce its theoreticalartefact. Rational Action Theory (RAT)typically substitutes the scientist for thepractical habitus. It slips from the model tothe reality and does as if the action that itsmodel accounts for had this model as itsprinciple. The social actor of RAT isnothing but the imaginary projection ofthe sujet savant (knowing subject) into thesujet agissant (acting subject).^^

Note also that this "imaginary anthro-pology" has nothing to tell us about thesocial genesis of historically varying formsof interests since it postulates ex nihilo theexistence of a universal, preconstitutedinterest. Just as it ignores the individualand collective history of agents throughwhich structures are formed and reproducedand which "live" in them. In reality, farfrom being posited as such in an explicit,conscious project, the strategies suggestedby habitus as a "feel for the game" aim, onthe mode of "protension" so well character-ized by Husserl in Ideen, towards the"objective potentialities" immediately givenin the immediate present. Must we talk of"strategy," then? The word is stronglyassociated with the intellectualist andsubjectivist tradition which, from Descartesto Sartre, has dominated Western philo-sophy and which is now again on theupswing with RAT, a theory so well-suitedto satisfy the spiritualist point d'honneur ofintellectuals. This is not a reason not to useit, however, with a totally different theor-etical intention, to designate the objectivelyorientated lines of action which socialagents continually construct.

Moreover, the theory of habitus explainswhy the finalism of Rational Choice Theory,although anthropologically false, mayappear as empirically sound. Individualistfinalism, which conceives action as deter-mined by the conscious aiming at explicitlyposed goals, is a well-founded illusion: thesense of the game which implies an antici-pated adjustment of habitus to the necessi-ties and to the probabilities inscribed inthe field does present itself under the

" See Bourdieu (1980a, pp. 71-86) for a thoroughcritique of Sartrian phenomenology and Elster'sbrand of Rational Choice Theory along these lines.


appearance of a successful "aiming at" afuture. Likewise, the structural affinity ofhabituses belonging to the same class iscapable of generating practices that areconvergent and objectively orchestratedoutside of any collective "conspiracy" orconsciousness. In this fashion it explainsmany of those phenomena of quasi-tele-ology which can be observed in the socialworld, such as those forms of collectiveaction or reaction which pose such insuper-able dilemmas to RAT.

But the efforts of the proponents ofsome or other version of Rational ActionTheory remind me of Tycho Brahe tryingto salvage the Ptolemaic paradigm afterCopernicus: it is the anthrological postu-lates of RAT concerning the nature ofsocial action that are, in my view, irretriev-ably flawed. Both the kind of finalismrepresented by RAT, which wants to seenothing but choice (if under constraints:limited rationality, irrational rationality,"weakness of the will," etc., the variationsare endless—here again, anyone who re-calls Sartre's analysis of bad faith or ofoaths will quickly recognize the intellectualcontortions of an Elster [1984b] in Ulyssesand the Sirens as the mediocre remake of awell-known show), and the mechanisticdeterminism taken to its extreme by struc-tural Marxists equally mutilate the intrin-sically double reality of human existenceas a thing of the world for which there arethings, a fundamental anthropologicalreality that Pascal captured brilliantly whenhe said: "Le monde me comprend etm'aneantit comme un point mais je lecomprends" (in short, the world en-compasses me but I understand it).

The proper object of social science,then, is neither individuals, this em realis-simum naively crowned as the paramount,rock-bottom reality by all "methodologicalindividualists," nor groups as sets of con-crete individuals sharing a similar locationin social space, but the relation betweentwo realizations of historical action, inbodies (or biological individuals) and inthings. It is the double and obscure relationbetween habitus, i.e., the durable andtransposable system of schemes of per-ception, appreciation, and action that resultfrom the institution of the social in the

body, and fields, i.e., systems of objectiverelations which are the product of theinstitution of the social in things, or inmechanisms that have the quasi-reality ofphysical objects; and, of course, of every-thing that is born out of this relation, thatis, social practices and representations, orfields as they present themselves in theform of realities perceived and appreciated.

LW: What is the nature of this relationshipof "ontologicai complicity" between habitusand field and how does it work itself outmore precisely?

PB: The relation between habitus andfield operates in two ways. On one side, itis a relation of conditioning: the fieldstructures the habitus, which is the productof the embodiment of the immanent neces-sity of a field (or of a hierarchicallyintersecting set of fields). On the otherside, it is a relation of knowledge orcognitive construction: habitus contributesto constituting the field as a meaningfulworld, a world endowed with sense andwith value, in which it is worth investingone's energy. Two things follow: firstly,the relation of knowledge depends on therelation of conditioning that precedes itand fashions the structures of habitus;secondly, social science is necessarily a"knowledge of a knowledge" and mustmake room for a sociologically groundedphenomenology of the primary experienceof the field or, to be more precise, of theinvariants and variations of the relationbetween different types of fields anddifferent types of habitus.

In short, the specificity of social sciencelies in the fact that its object of knowledgeis a reahty which includes agents who havethis very reality as an object of knowledge.The task becomes, then, to construct atheory of practice as practice and a theoryof the practical mode of knowledge that isimplied in it. Thus, if it is indispensable tobreak with the spontaneous knowledge ofthe social world, it is no less necessary toinclude in our theory the practical knowl-edge against which scientific knowledge isconstructed and which continues to orientpractices. The relation of practical knowl-edge is not that between a subject and anobject constituted as such and perceived as


a problem. Habitus being the social in-corporated, it is "at home" in the field itinhabits, it perceives it immediately asendowed with meaning and interest. Prac-tical action may be described by analogywith the orthe doxa of Plato in Meno, asthe "right opinion:" the coincidence be-tween dispositons and position, betweenthe "sense of the game" and the game,explains that the agent does "what he orshe has to do" without posing it explicitlyas a goal, below the level of calculationand even consciousness, beneath discourseand representation.

The theory of habitus, again, allows usto overcome a whole series of antinomiesinto which the theory of action routinelylocks itself, those of consciousness and the"thingness" of social facts, of mechanicalismand finalism, of subjective teleology (as inall so-called theories of ."rational choice")and objective teleology (which personalizescollectives, "the State," the "Bourgeoisie,"etc., and endows them with intentions andprojects).

LW: Does the theory of habitus rule outstrategic choice and conscious deliberationas one modality of action?

PB: Not at all. The immediate fit betweenhabitus and field is only one modality ofaction, if the most prevalent one ("We areempirical," said Leibniz, by which hemeant practical, "in three quarters of ouraction"). The lines of action suggested byhabitus may very well be accompanied bya strategic calculation of costs and benefitswhich tends to carry out at a consciouslevel the operations which habitus carriesout in its own way. Rational choice mayeven become a metier, a profession, as inthe trade of the historian, the economist,or the scientist. Times of crises, in whichthe routine adjustment of subjective andobjective structures is brutally disrupted,constitute a class of circumstances whenindeed "rational choice" often appears totake over. But, and this is a crucialproviso, it is habitus itself that commandsthis option. We can always say that indivi-duals make choices, as long as we do notforget that they do not choose the principleof these choices.

LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY, ANDSYMBOLIC DOMINATION

LW: In Language and Symbolic Power(Bourdieu 1982b, 1989b), you develop asweeping critique of structural linguistics,or what one might call the "pure" study oflanguage. You put forth an alternativemodel whicb, to simplify greatly, makeslanguage an instrument or a medium ofpower relations, rather than simply ameans of communication, that must bestudied within the interactional and struc-tural contexts of its production and actual-ization. Could you summarize the gist ofthis critique?

PB: What characterizes "pure" linguisticsis the primacy it accords to the synchronic,internal, structural perspective over thehistorical, social, economic, or external,determinations of language. I have sought,especially in Le sens pratique (Bourdieu1980a, pp. 51-70), to draw attention to therelation to the object and to the theory ofpractice implicit in this perspective. TheSaussurian point of view is that of the"impartial spectator" who seeks under-standing as an end in itself and thus leadsto impute this "hermeneutic intention" tosocial agents, to construe it as the principleof their practices. It takes up the postureof the grammarian, whose purpose is tostudy and codify language, as opposed tothat of the orator, who seeks to act in andupon the world through the performativepower of the word. Thus by treating it asan object of analysis rather than using it tothink and to speak with, it constituteslanguage as a logos, by opposition to apraxis, as a telos without practical purposeor no purpose other than that of beinginterpreted, in the manner of the work ofart.

This typically scholastic opposition is aproduct of the scholarly apperception andsituation—another case of the scholasticfallacy we talked about earlier. This schol-arly epoche neutralizes the functions impliedin the ordinary usage of language. Languageaccording to Saussure, or in the herme-neutic tradition, is constituted into aninstrument of intellection and into anobject of analysis, a dead language (writtenand foreign as Bakhtine points out), a self-


contained system completely severed fromits real uses and denuded from its practical—and political—functions (as in Fodor'sand Katz's pure semantics). The illusion ofautonomy of the "purely" linguistic orderwhich is asserted by the privilege grantedthe internal logic of language at theexpense of the social conditions of itstimely usage opens the way to all subse-quent theories which proceed as if thetheoretical mastery of the code sufficed toconfer practical mastery of socially appro-priate usages,

LW: By that, do you mean to assert,contrary to the claims of structural linguis-tics, that the meaning of linguistic utter-ances cannot be derived, or deduced, fromthe analysis of their formal structure?

PB: Yes, and to put it more strongly,that grammaticality is not the necessaryand sufficient condition of the productionof meaning, as Chomsky (1967) wouldlead us to believe by overlooking the factthat language is made not for linguisticanalysis, but to be spoken and to bespoken a propos. (The Sophists used to saythat what is important in learning a languageis to learn the appropriate moment, kairos,for saying the appropriate thing,) All thepresumptions, and all the subsequent diffi-culties, of all structuralisms (and this istrue both of anthropology and sociology)are contained in nutshell in this initialoperation which reduces the speech act toa mere execution. It is this primevaldistinction between language and itsrealization in speech, that is in practiceand in history, which is at the root of theinability of structuralism to think therelation between two entities other than asthe model and its execution, essence andexistence, and which amounts to puttingthe scientists, keeper of the model, in theposition of a Leibnizian God to whom theobjective meaning of practices is given.

In challenging this posture, I am tryingto recover the lost foundations of linguisticexchanges and, again, to Overcome theshortcomings of both the economic andthe purely linguistic analysis of language.What is it that they both forget? Essentially,to sum up a long and difficult demonstrationin one sentence, that linguistic relations

are always relations of power {rapports deforce) and, consequently, cannot be eluci-dated within the compass of linguisticanalysis alone.•'̂ Even the simplest linguisticexchange brings into play a complex andramifying web of historical power relationsbetween the speaker, endowed with aspecific social authority, and an audience,which recognizes this authority to varyingdegrees, as well as between the groups towhich they respectively belong. What Ihave sought to show is that a very importantpart of what goes on in verbal communi-cation, even the content of the messageitself, remains unintelligible as long as onedoes not take into account the totality ofthe structure of power relations that under-lay the exchange.

Let me take a simple example, that ofcommunication between settlers and nativesin a colonial or post-colonial context. Thefirst question that arises, and one typicallyoverlooked by linguists, is: what languagewill they use? Will the dominant embracethe language of the dominated as a tokenof his newly-found concern for equality? Ifhe does, there is a good chance that thiswill be done through what I call a strategyof condescension (cf, Bourdieu 1984a, pp,472-473): by temporarily but ostentatiouslyabdicating his dominant position in orderto "reach down" to his interlocutor, thedominant profits from this relation ofdomination, which continues to exist, bydenying it. Symbolic denegation (in theFreudian sense of Verneinung), i.e., thefictitious bracketting of the relation ofpower, exploits this relation of power inorder to produce the recognition of therelation of power that abdication elicits.Let us turn now to the situation, which infact is by far the most frequent one, whereit is the dominated who is obliged to adoptthe language of the dominant—and herethe relation between standard, whiteEnglish and black American provides aparadigm. In this case, the dominatedspeaks a broken language, as WilliamLabov (1973) has shown, and his linguisticcapital is more or less completely devalued,

•" See Bourdieu and Boltanski (1975), Bourdieu(197.'ia, 1977c, 1983b) and Bourdieu (1980b, pp, 95-112, 121-142) for further developments.


be it in school, at work, or in socialencounters. What conversation analysisleaves out too easily, in this case, is thatevery linguistic interaction between whitesand blacks is constrained by the encom-passing structural relation between theirrespective appropriations of English, andby the power imbalance which sustains itand gives the arbitrary imposition of "white"English its air of naturalness.

To push this analysis further, one wouldneed to introduce all kinds of positionalcoordinates, such as gender, level of edu-cation, class origins, residence, etc. Allthese variables intervene at every momentin the determination of the objectivestructure of "communicative action," andthe form taken by linguistic interaction willhinge substantially upon this structure,which is unconscious and works almostwholly "behind the backs" of locutors. Inshort, if a French person talks with anAlgerian, or a black American to a WASP,it is not two persons who speak to eachother but, through them, the colonialhistory in its entirety, or the whole historyof the economic, political, and culturalsubjugation of blacks (or women, orworkers, etc.) in the United States.

LW: You also denounce the "illusion oflinguistic communism" (Bourdieu andBoltanski 1975) according to which thesocial competence to speak is equally givento all.

PB: Any discourse is the product of theencounter of a linguistic habitus, that is, acompetence at once technical and social,and a market, i.e., a system of relations offorce which determine the price of linguisticproducts and thus helps fashion linguisticproduction. The anticipation of the pricethat my discourse will fetch contributes todetermining the shape and content of mydiscourse, which will be more or less"tense," more or less censored, sometimesto the point of annulment—as in thesilence of intimidation.

This means that not all linguistic utter-ances are equally acceptable and not alllocutors equal. Saussure says that languageis a "treasure" and he describes the relationof individuals to language as a sort ofdemocratic participation to the common

treasure. The illusion of "linguistic com-munism" is the illusion that everyoneparticipates in language as they enjoy thesun, the air or water—in a word, thatlanguage is not a rare good. In fact, accessto language is quite unequal and thetheoretically universal competence liberallygranted to all by linguists is in realitymonopolized by some. Certain categoriesof locutors are deprived of the capacity tospeak in certain situations (and oftenacknowledge this deprivation in the mannerof this agriculturalist who explained thathe never thought of running for mayor ofhis small township by saying: "But I don'tknow how to speak!").

Inequalities of linguistic competencereveal themselves on the market of dailyinteractions, that is, in the chatter betweentwo persons, in a public meeting, in aseminar, and on the radio or TV. Com-petence effectively functions differentiallyand there are monopolies on the market oflinguistic goods just as on the market ofeconomic goods. This is most visible inpolitics, where spokespersons, beinggranted a monopoly over the legitimatepolitical expression of the will of a collec-tive, speak not only in favor of thosewhom they represent but also in theirplace (Bourdieu 1985b, 1981a).

LW: Your analysis of language, then, is notan accidental "incursion" into the domainof linguistics but, rather, an extension, to anew empirical realm, language and speech,or discursive practices more generally (in-cluding those of linguists), of the method ofanalysis you have applied to other culturalproducts.

PB: Yes, I think that the divisionbetween linguistics and sociology is un-fortunate and deleterious to both disci-plines. I have spent my entire life fightingsuch arbitrary boundaries, which are pureproducts of academic reproduction andhave no epistemological foundation what-soever, between sociology and anthro-pology, sociology and history, sociologyand linguistics, the sociology of art and thesociology of education, the sociology ofsport and the sociology of culture, etc.Here again is a situation where "tres-


passing," as Albert Hirschman would say,is a prerequisite for scientific advance.

LW: If I could try to summarize what youare saying: the meaning and social efficacyof a message is only determined within agiven field (e.g., journalism or philosophy),itself nested in a network of hierarchicalrelations with other fields (such as the fieldof power, of law, of class relations, etc.).Without an understanding of the full struc-ture of objective relationships that definepositions in this field, of the specific formsof censorship they imply, and withoutknowledge of the trajectories and linguisticdispositions of those who occupy them, it isimpossible to fully explicate processes ofcommunication, why something is said, ornot said, by whom, what is meant, what isunderstood, and with what effects, i.e.,what can be "done with words," to borrowAustin's (1962) formula.

PB: This is exactly what I tried todemonstrate in my study on The PoliticalOntology of Martin Heidegger (Bourdieu1975c and 1988b). Indeed, it is the logic ofmy research on language and on the notionof field which led me to concern myselfwith Heidegger. The work of Heidegger(with which I became intimately familiarvery early on, at a time of my youth when Iwas preparing a book on the pheno-menology of affective life and of temporalexperience) appeared to me as a "strategicresearch site," to use Merton's expression,to verify my hypotheses on the effect ofcensorship exerted by fields of cultural pro-duction: Heidegger is a master—I aminclined to say, the master—of double talkor, if you wish, of polyphonic discourse.He manages to speak simultaneously intwo keys, that of scholarly philosophicallanguage and that of ordinary language.This is particularly visible in the case of theapparently "pure" concept of Fursorgewhich plays a central role in the Heideg-gerian theory of time and which, in theexpression soziale Fursorge, social security,refers to the political context and to thecondemnation of the welfare state, of paidvacations, of health insurance, etc. ButHeidegger interested me also as the ex-emplary incarnation of the "pure philo-sopher" and I wanted to show, in what was

apparently the most unfavorable case forthe sociology of cultural works as I conceiveit, that the method of analysis I proposecould not only account for the sociopoliticalconditions of production of the work butalso lead to a better understanding of thework itself, that is, in this case, of thecentral thrust of Heidegerrian philosophy,namely, the ontologization of historicism.

This being said, I used the controversywhich recently erupted around the work ofHeidegger, '̂* and in which certain philos-ophers (Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotardnotably) displayed more clearly than everbefore their profound political irresponsi-bility, to highlight the politically ambiguousimplications of a certain way of conceivingphilosophy which has spread in Francesince the 1960s: a vision of philosophy,especially through the exaltation of theworks of Nietzsche or Heidegger, thatleads to an aestheticism of transgression, toa "radical chic," as some of my Americanfriends put it, that is extremely ambiguousintellectually and politically. Under thisangle, my work—I think in particular ofL'amour de I'art (Bourdieu et al. 1966)̂ ^or Distinction—stands as the very anti-thesis of the supreme philosophical rolewhich, since Sartre, has always entailed anaesthetic dimension: the critique, not ofculture, but of the social uses of culture asa capital and an instrument of symbolicdomination, is incompatible with theaestheticist entertainment often concealedbehind a scientific front, as in Barthes orTel Quel (not to mention even more trivialmanifestations such as Baudrillard's CoolMemories), of those French philosopherswho have taken the degree of aestheticiz-ation of philosophy to a degree hithertounequalled. Derrida is, on this point, no

-'"' The publication of Farias" (1987) study docu-menting Heidegger's support of and involvement inNazi politics triggered a heated and politically chargedintellectual controversy into which all the "heavy-weights" of the French intellectual field were drawn.It was the occasion of a vigorous exchange betweenDerrida and Bourdieu in the pages of the dailyLiberation. For a sample of this debate in France andin Germany, see Davidson (1989).

" Bourdieu's work on the social production anduses of art also includes Bourdieu, Boltanski, Casteland Chamboredon (1965), and Bourdieu (1968a,1971c, 1980h, 1985d, 1987d).


doubt the most skilled and the mostambiguous insofar as he manages to givethe appearance of a radical break to thosesemi-ruptures which extend the game oficonoclast destruction into the realm ofculture. His analyses always stop short ofthe point where they would fall into"vulgarity," as I showed in the post-scriptum of Distinction (1984a, pp. 485-500); situating himself both inside andoutside the game, on the field and on thesideline, he plays with fire by brushingagainst a genuine critique of philosophicalimposture without ever completing it, andfor good reason.

Thus the "Heidegger affair" was for mean opportunity to show that philosophicalaestheticism is rooted in a social aristo-cratism which is itself at the base of acontempt for the social sciences that ishighly unlikely to facilitate a realisticvision of the social world and which,without necessarily determining political"mistakes" as monstrous as Heidegger'sgrosse Dummheit, have very serious im-plications for intellectual life and, indirectly,for political life. It is no happenstance ifthe French philosophers of the sixties, andin particular Derrida and Foucault, whosephilosophical project was formed in afundamentally ambivalent relation withthe "human sciences" and who never fullyrepudiated the privileges of caste associatedwith the status of philosopher, have givena new life, throughout the world butespecially in the United States, to the oldphilosophical critique of the social sciencesand fueled, under the cover of "decon-struction" and the critique of "texts," athinly-veiled form of irrationalist nihilism.

LW: Your analysis of Heidegger, and of thesocial production and functioning of philo-sophical discourse more generally, thuspresupposes, and calls forth, an analysis ofthe objective position of sociology in relationto philosophy.

PB: Since the second half of the 19thcentury, European philosophy has con-stantly defined itself in opposition to the

*̂ Further analyses of philosophy as an institutionand as a discourse are found in Bourdieu (1975a,1975b, 1975c, 1980f, 1982b, 1983a, and 1983c).

social sciences, against psychology andagainst sociology in particular, and throughthem, against any form of thought that isexplicitly and immediately directed at the"vulgar" realities of the social world. Therefusal to derogate by studying objectsdeemed inferior or by applying "impure"methods, be it statistical survey or eventhe simple historiographic analysis ofdocuments, castigated at all times byphilosophers as "reductionist," "positivist,"etc., goes hand in hand with the refusal toplunge into the fleeting contingency ofhistorical things that prompts those philos-ophers most concerned by their statutorydignity always to return (often through themost unexpected routes, as Habermasstestifies today), to the most "universal"and "eternal" thought.

A good number of the specific character-istics of French philosophy since the 60scan be explained by the fact that, as Idemonstrate in Homo Academicus, theuniversity and intellectual field came, forthe first time, to be dominated by specialistsin the human sciences (led by Levi-Strauss,Dumezil, Braudel, etc.). The central focusof all discussions at the time shifted tolinguistics, which was constituted into theparadigm of all the human sciences, andeven of such philosophical enterprises asFoucault's. This is the origin of what Ihave called the "-logy effect" to designatethe desperate efforts of philosophers toborrow the methods, and to mimick thescientificity, of the social sciences withoutgiving up the privileged status of the "freethinker:" thus the literary semiology ofBarthes (not to mention Kristeva andSollers), the archeology of Foucault, thegrammatology of Derrida, or the attemptof the Althusserians to pass the "pure"reading of Marx off as a self-sufficient andself-contained science (of. Bourdieu 1975b).

THE REFUSAL OF "THEORETICALTHEORY"

LW: Since we are talking "theory," let mebring up a puzzle. You are frequentlybilled, and certainly read, as a "socialtheorist" (and, as you well know, this is avery definite type in the gallery of possible


sociological personas in the United States).Yet I keep being struck by bow seldom, inyour work, you make purely "tbeOretical"statements or remarks. Instead, you keepreferring to particular researcb problemsand mundane dilemmas you encounteredwbile gatbering, coding, or analyzing data,or tbinking tbrougb a substantive issue.Even in your researcb seminar at tbe Ecoledes Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales inParis, you warn your audience upfront tbattbey shall not get from tbis course "neatpresentations on babitus and field." Youare also extremely reluctant to discuss theconcepts that you have coined and use inyour work in isolation from their empiricalsupports. Could you explicate the placethat theory occupies in your work?

PB: Let me say outright and very force-fully that I never "theorize," if by that wemean engage in the kind of conceptualgobbledygook (laius) that is good fortextbooks and which, through an extra-ordinary misconstrual of the logic of science,passes for Theory in much of Anglo-American social science. I never set out to"do theory" or to "construct a theory" perse, as the American expression goes. Andit is a complete misapprehension of myproject to believe that I am attemptingsome kind of "synthesis of classical theory"a la Parsons. There is no doubt a theory inmy work, or, better, a set of thinking toolsvisible through the results they yield, but itis not built as such.

The ground for these tools—the notionof cultural capital,^'' for instance, that Iinvented in the early 60s to account for thefact that, after controlling for class origins,students from more cultured families havenot only higher rates of academic successbut exhibit different modes and patterns ofcultural consumption and expression in awide gamut of domains—lies in research,in the practical problems and 'puzzlesencountered and generated in the effort toconstruct a phenomenally diverse set ofobjects in such a way that they can be

^' See Bourdieu (1979a) on the "three forms"(embodied, objectified and institutionalized) of cul-tural capital, and Bourdieu (1986b) on the relationsbetween cultural, social, economic, and symboliccapital.

treated, thought of, comparatively or,more precisely, analogically. The threadwhich leads from one of my works to thenext is the logic of research, which is in myeyes inseparably empirical and theoretical.I readily confess that I feel very little incommon with the kind of rhetorical exer-cises in "theoretical theory" that are socommon on your side of the Atlantic.

LW: What is the difference between "tbeo-retical theory" and scientific theory as youconceive it?

PB: For me, theory is not a sort ofprophetic or programmatic discourse whichoriginates by dissection or by amalgamationof other theories for the sole purpose ofconfronting other such pure "theoreticaltheories." (I need not give examples ofthese endless and unassailable "conceptualmelting pots" of neologisms, refurbishedcategories, and pseudo-theorems, generallyclosed by a call for future research orempirical application, preferably by others—Glaser and Strauss [1967] speak some-where of "theoretical capitalists," perhapsrentiers would be a better image—whoseparadigm remains, a decade after hisdeath. Parsons' AGIL scheme that sometoday are trying to resurrect.) Rather,scientific theory as I conceive it emerges asa program of perception and of action—ascientific habitus, if you wish—which isdisclosed only in the empirical work whichactualizes it. It is a temporary constructwhich takes shape for and by empiricalwork.^^ Consequently, it has more to gainby confronting new objects than by en-gaging in theoretical polemics that do littlemore than fuel a perpetual, self-sustaining,and too often vacuous meta-discoursearound concepts treated as intellectualtotems. There is nothing more sterile thanepistemology or theory when it becomes atopic for society conversation and a substi-tute for research.

To treat theory as a modus operandiwhich practially guides and structuresscientific practice obviously implies givingup the somewhat fetishistic accommodative-ness that "theoreticians" usually establish

-''*' See Bourdieu and Hahn (1970) and Bourdieu etal. (1968, part I) for elaborations.


with it. It is for this reason that I never feltthe urge to retrace the genealogy of theconcepts I have coined or reactivated, likethose habitus, field, or symbolic capital.Not having been bom of theoretical partho-genesis, these concepts do not gain muchby being resituated vis-a-vis previoususages. Their construction and use emergedin the practicalities of the research enter-prise and it is in this context that they mustbe evaluated. The function of the conceptsI employ is first and foremost to designate,in stenographic manner, within the researchprocedure, a theoretical stance, a principleof methodological choice, negative as wellas positive. Systematization necessarilycomes ex post, as fruitful analogies emergelittle by little, as the useful properties ofthe concept are successfully tried andtested.^'

Unfortunately, the socially dominantmodel of sociology today is still predicatedon a clear-cut distinction, and a practicaldivorce, between research (I think here inparticular of this "science without a scien-tist" epitomized by public opinion researchand of this scientific monster called"methodology") and the "theory withoutobject" of pure theoreticians, presentlyexemplified by the trendy, and mostlyempty, discussion raging around the so-called "micro-macro link" (e.g., Alexanderet al. 1987). This opposition between thepure theory of the lector devoted to thehermeneutic cult of the scriptures of thefounding fathers (if not of his own writings),on the one hand, and survey research andmethodology on the other is an entirelysocial opposition. It is inscribed in theinstitutional and mental structures of thesociological profession, rooted in theacademic distribution of resources, posi-tions, and competencies, as when wholeschools (e.g., conversation analysis or

•'̂ For instance, it is only after utilizing the notionof "social capital" for a good number of years and in awide variety of empirical settings, from the matri-monial relations of peasants to the symbolic strategiesof research foundations to designers of high fashionto alumni associations of elite schools (see, respec-tively, Bourdieu 1977b, 1980a, 1980b, 1981b; Bourdieuand Delsaut 1975), that Bourdieu wrote a paperoutlining some of its generic characteristics (Bourdieu1980c).

Status attainment research) are based al-most entirely on one particular method,and reinforced by the political demand forinstruments of rationalization of socialdomination—and it must be rejected. Icould paraphrase Kant and say that re-search without theory is blind and theorywithout research is empty.

The trick, if I may call it that, is tomanage to combine imrhense theoreticalambition with extreme empirical modesty.The summum of the art, in social science,is, in my eyes, to be capable of engagingvery high "theoretical" stakes by means ofvery precise and often very mundaneempirical objects. We tend too easily toassume that the social or political import-ance of an objeet suffices in itself to grantimportance to the discourse that deals withit. What counts, in reality, is the rigor ofthe construction of the object. I think thatthe power of a mode of thinking nevermanifests itself more clearly than in itscapacity to constitute socially insignificantobjects into scientific objects (as Goffmandid of the minutiae of interaction rituals)"*"or, what amounts to the same thing, toapproach a major socially significant objectin an unexpected manner—something Iam presently attempting by studying theeffects of the monopoly of the state overthe means of legitimate symbolic violenceby way of a very down-to-earth analysis ofwhat a certificate (of illness, invalidity,schooling, etc.) is and does. For this, onemust learn how to translate very abstractproblems into very concrete scientificoperations.

PROGRESS AND PROSPECTS FORSOCIOLOGY

LW: In a paper published in 1968 in SocialResearch (Bourdieu and Passeron 1968, p.212), you expressed the hope that, "just asAmerican sociology was able, for a time, byits empirical rigor, to act as the scientifichad conscience of French sociology," Frenchsociology might, "by its theoretical strin-gency, become the philosophical bad con-

'"' See the eulogy written by Bourdieu (1983) forLe Monde upon Goffman's sudden death.


science of American sociology." Twentyyears later, where does this wish stand?

PB: I think that it is the very distinctionbetween theory and research implied bythis statement that must be challenged. IfFrench sociology is to become the scientificbad conscience of American sociology,then it must succeed in overcoming thisseparation by putting forth a new form ofscientific practice founded at once upon agreater theoretical exigency and upongreater empirical rigor. The programme ofwork that I recently completed on Frenchelites schools in the field of power attempts,in its own partial way, to contribute to thematuring of such a form of research. In thebook entitled The State Nobility (Bour-dieu 1989a) which grew out of it, I try tobring together the results of nearly 20years of in-depth investigations, not of onebut of some twenty Grandes Ecoles and ofsome 200 corporations and their CEOs,based on surveys, direct observation, inter-views of students, archival documents, etc.;a reflection on methods, including the prob-lem of theoretical sampling; a phenomen-ology of the experience of being selectedin or out of the elite; and a structuraltheory of modes of reproduction. Ofcourse, I have no illusions that this workreaches all the lofty goals I just set but Ibelieve that it does represent a genuineattempt at truly marrying theoretical andempirical rigor.

LW: In what sense can we speak ofprogress then? Can we say that sociologyhas moved forward, or are we still hattUngwith the same evils of Grand Theory andAbstracted Empiricism as C.-Wright Mills(1959) expressed it in the late r950s?

PB: Instead of progress, I would ratherspeak of obstacles to progress, and ofmeans of overturning these obstacles.There is undoubtedly progress, and soci-ology is* a considerably more advancedscience than observers, even its practi-tioners, are willing to grant. The reasonsfor this distrust of the scientific status ofsociology are more social than epistemo-logical: a truly scientific sociology, that is,a science of society that rejects the socialdemand for legitimation or manipulation,is a practice that is highly improbable

sociologically speaking—and perhaps nioreso in the United States than in many othercountries. Sociology is an especially difficultscience because it uncovers things that arehidden and sometimes even repressed, andbecause its objects are the stakes ofstruggles in social reality itself."^ Sociologydenaturalizes, and thereby de-fatalizes theworld, and the knowledge it produces isliable to exert a political efficacy everytime it reveals the laws of functioning ofmechanisms that owe part of their ownefficacy to being misrecognized, i.e., everytime it reaches into the foundations ofsymbolic violence.

I have repeated often that one of thenecessary conditions for progress is theautonomy of the scientific field (Bourdieu,1981d, forthcoming). But this does notmean that each national sociology mustremain aloof, on the contrary. We need toengage in a collective refiection on theinstitutional conditions of rational com-munication in the social sciences. (It is anopportunity for such a reflection that Isought to promote in accepting to organize,along with James Coleman, the conferenceon "Social Theory and Emerging Issues ina Changing Society" to be held at theUniversity of Chicago in April of 1989).What social scientists on both sides of theAtlantic must do is work to build andstrengthen institutional mechanisms againstisolationism, against all forms of scientificintolerance, mechanisms capable of pro-moting fair communication and a moreopen confrontation of ideas, theories, andparadigms. More than the positive andnegative developments which have takenplace in each national sociology in the lasttwenty years, what matters is the establish-ment of relations between American andContinental social scientists that makepossible a greater unification of the field ofworld sociology and, most importantly, aunification respectful of diversity.

If there exist, pace Habermas, no trans-historical universals of communication,there certainly exists forms of social organ-ization of communication that are liable tofoster the production of the universal. We

•" See especially "Une science qui derange" and"Le sociologue en question" in Bourdieu (1980b, pp.19-60) for an elaboration of this point.


cannot rely on moral exhortation to abolish"systematically distorted" communicationfrom sociology. Only a true Realpolitik ofscientific reason can contribute to trans-forming structures of communication byhelping to change both the modes offunctioning of those universes where scienceis produced and the dispositions of theagents who compete in these universes,and thus the institution that contributesmost to fashion them, the University.

LW: Isn't one of the conditions of scientificprogress, then, to be capable of liberatingoneself from the constraints of traditions ofthought (and especially national traditions),which in turn presupposes a kind of "anti-nomic attitude" towards one's discipline:on the one hand you need concepts andtheories to construct objects, thus you needto absorb and trust its heritage* But, on theother hand, these intellectual tools them-selves are already (pre) constructions thatcarry over the accepted wisdom of ourpredecessors and create blinders whichmay hide as much as they reveal.

PB: Indeed, the sociologist is inescapablyand endlessly faced with a sort of doublebind, strapped in a Catch-22 situation ofthis sort. Without the intellectual instru-ments he owes his scholarly tradition, heor she is nothing more than an amateur, aself-taught, spontaneous sociologist—andcertainly not the best equipped of all laysociologists, given the generally limitedspan of the social experiences of academics.But, at the same time, there is the ever-present danger that he will simply substituteto the naive doxa of lay common sense theno less naive doxa of scientific commonsense which parrots, in the technical jargonand under the official trappings of scientificdiscourse, the discourse of common sense,which retranslates it in this terrible, half-concrete, half-abstract linguo that histraining and the censorship of the socio-logical establishment impose on him.

It is not easy to escape the horns of thisdilemma, this alternative between thedisarmed ignorance of the autodidact de-void of instruments of rigorous scientificconstruction and this half-science whichunknowingly accepts categories of per-ception directly borrowed from the social

world. It is the task of research pedagogyto make students acutely aware of thisdouble bind and to train them to resist itsnegative effects. (In this respect, I restconvinced that one of the chief obstacles toprogress in the social sciences today lies inthe ordinary teaching of sociology, andgraduate students are no doubt its numberone victim.) And it is the role of thereflexive return, of the social history ofscientific practices, in a word, the objec-tivation of tools of objectivation, to remindus of it.

This being said, the social dispositionsone brings into academia evidently play acrucial role here. Those best armed toavoid this dilemma are people who bringtogether an advanced mastery of scientificculture with a certain revolt against, ordistance from, this culture (often rooted inan estranged experience of the academicuniverse which pushes one 'not to "buy it" atface value), or, quite simply, a politicalsense which intuitively leads one to rejector to resist the asepticized and derealizedvision of the social world offered by thesocially dominant discourse in sociology.'*^Needless to say, the more you consciouslycommand the principles that lead you tochallenge the accepted preconceptions ofan intellectual tradition, the greater yourchances of fully mastering your ownthought and scientific products—in sum,to be the true subject of the problems thatcan be posed about the social world.

LW: Since you evoked the process ofbecoming a sociologist, perhaps I couldbring this conversation to a close by askingyou a more practical question: what advicewould you give to young, aspiring sociol-ogists, say, graduate students who arelearning their trade and wish to escape this

"̂ For instance, Skocpol (1988) shows that therecent rebirth of macrohistorical sociology in theU.S. and its unique sensitivity to issues of conflict,power, and social transformation, are in part aneffect of the academic maturing of an "uppitygeneration" of students trained during, the rebellioussixties who came to academia with an experience ofsocial and political activism that made it difficult, ifnot impossible, for theni to believe in the consensualand falsely neutral vision of society promoted bystructural functionalism and modernization theory.


sterile opposition between "empty theory"and "blind research"?

PB: First and foremost: have fun! Thecraft of the sociologist is one of the mostpleasant and enriching activities one canindulge in, spanning the whole gamut ofintellectual practices and skills, from thoseof the novelist laboring to create emotionsand character to those of the mathematicianstriving to capture the world in abstractmodels and equations. We must repell anyunilateral, undimensional and mono-maniacal definition of sociological practice,and resist all attempts to impose one.

Consequently, and this would be mysecond point, apprentice sociologists needto question and constantly challengemethodological prescriptions and interdicts.Social research is something much tooserious and much too difficult that we canallow ourselves to mistake scientific rigidity,which is the nemesis of intelligence andinvention, for scientific rigor, and thus todeprive ourselves of this or that resourceavailable in the full panoply of traditionsof our disciphne—and of the sister disci-plines of anthropology, economics, history,etc. In such matters, I would dare say thatone rule only applies: "it is forbidden toforbid." So watch out for methodologicalwatchdogs! Of course, the extreme libertyI advocate here (and which, let me hastento add, has nothing in common with thekind of relativistic epistemological laissezfaire which seems to be much in vogue insome quarters) has its counterpart in theextreme vigilance that we must accord tothe conditions of use of analytical tech-niques and to ensuring their fit with thequestion at hand. Instead of arbitrarilyimposing this or that technology of measure-ment or analysis as the penultimate badgeof scientificity, we must, whenever possible,mobilize and put to work all of thetechniques which are relevant and practi-cally usable given the definition of theproblem under investigation. As the mostrudimentary sociology of sociology reveals,methodological indictments are often nomore than a disguised way of making avirtue out of necessity, of feigning todismiss, to ignore in an active way whatone is ignorant of in fact.

Thirdly, get your hands dirty in the

kitchen sink: do not settle for the cozy andderealized experience of the social worldfostered by those bureaucratic machineriesof survey research that create a hugebuffer between the social analyst and theuniverse he or she claims to dissect. Directcontact with the object not only has thevirtue of helping preserve you from thefetishization of concepts and theories; itwill also make you more attentive to thedetails of research procedures, to the built-in assumptions and consequences ofapparently innocuous technical choicesthat are generally made unthinkingly. Mostof all, you must adopt an active andsystematic posture vis-a-vis "facts." Tobreak with empiricist passivity, which restscontent with ratifying the preconstructionsof common sense, without relapsing intothe vacuous discourse of grand "theorizing,"you must tackle a very concrete empiricalcase with the goal of building a model(which need not be mathematical to berigorous), by linking the relevant data insuch a manner that they function as a self-propelling program of research capable ofgenerating systematic questions liable tobe given systematic answers, in short, toyield a coherent system of relations whichcan be tested as such. To be intelligent inthe scientific sense is to put oneself in asituation that automatically generates trueproblems and true, productive, difficulties.

Fourthly, beware of words. Languageposes a particularly acute problem for thesociologist because it carries along a "spon-taneous" social philosophy which consti-tutes one of the most formidable "epis-temological obstacles" to a rigorous scienceof society, to speak like Bachelard (1938).Common language is the repository of theaccumulated common sense of past gener-ations, both lay and scientific, as crystallizedin occupational taxonomies, names ofgroups, concepts (think of all the ideologicalbaggage bore by the apparently innocuouscouple of "achievement" and "ascription,"or consensus and confiict, or even indivi-dual and society), and so on. The mostroutine categories that sociologists borrowfrom it (e.g., young and old, "middleclass" and "upper-middle class") are natur-alized preconstructions which, when theyare ignored as such, function as unconscious


and uncontrolled instruments of scholarlyconstruction. One of the most powerfulinstruments of rupture with the doxaembedded in words lies in the socialhistory of problems, concepts, and objectsof inquiry. By retracing the collective workthat was necessary to constitute such andsuch issue (the feminization of the workforce, the growth of the welfare state,teenage pregnancy, or religious funda-mentalism) into a visible, scientificallylegitimate problem, the researcher canshelter him or herself from the socialimposition of problematics. For a soci-ologist more than any other thinker, toleave one's own thought in a state ofunthought (impense) is to condemn one-self to be nothing more than the instrumentof what one claims to think.

This is why, in my view, the history ofsociology, understood as an exploration ofthe scientific unconscious of the sociologistthrough the explication of the genesis ofproblems, categories of thought, and in-struments of analysis, constitutes an abso-lute prerequisite for scientific practice.And the same is true of the sociology ofsociology: I believe that if the sociology Ipropose differs in any significant way fromthe other sociologies of the past and of thepresent, it is above all in that it continuallyturns back onto itself the scientific weaponsit produces. It is fundamentally refiexive inthat it uses the knowledge it gains of thesocial determinations that may bear uponit, and particularly the scientific analysis ofall the constraints and all the limitationsassociated with the fact of occupying adefinite position in a definite field at aparticular moment and with a certaintrajectory, in an attempt to master andneutralize their effects.

Far from undermining the foundationsof social science, the sociology of the socialdeterminants of sociological practice is theonly possible ground for a possible freedomfrom these determinations. And it is onlyon condition that he avails himself the fullusage of this freedom by continually sub-jecting himself to this analysis that thesociologist can produce a rigorous scienceof the social world which, far from sen-tencing agents to the iron cage of a strictdeterminism, offers them the means of a

potentially liberating awakening of con-sciousness.'*^APPENDIX: SOME BIBLIO-GRAPHICAL TIPS ON HOW TOREAD BOURDIEU

For the novice, finding an entry intoBourdieu's work poses the thorny problemof where to start. The following strategyreflects my personal preferences and whatsome of the participants to the Workshopon Pierre Bourdieu I organized foundpractical (only English-language writingsare included and short pieces are givenpreference over longer ones). The order oflisting, from the more (meta-)theoreticaland conceptual to the more empirical, issomewhat arbitrary since Bourdieu rarelyseparates epistemology, theory, and em-pirical work, but it is useful as a practicalindication of the emphases of the papers.In general, it is recommended to withholdjudgment until you have read a great deal;particularly, one must read across empiricaldomains and alternate more theoretical.and more empirically-oriented pieces.Most of all, the style and the substance ofhis arguments being intimately linked,seek to understand Bourdieu in his ownterms before "translating" him into morefriendly lexicons.

Begin with Bourdieu's "Social Spaceand Symbolic Power" (this issue) and withBrubaker's (1985) excellent overview, thenmove on to the article "On symbolicpower" (Bourdieu 1979b) for a densestatement of Bourdieu's work in relationto various strands of classical sociologyand philosophy (Hegel, Kant, Cassirer,Saussure, L^vi-Strauss, Durkheim, Marx,Weber, etc.), and to the 1986 interviews(Honneth, Kocyba and Schwibs 1986;Bourdieu 1986a) which help situate it

.more fully on the French and internationalintellectual scene. Although somewhatdated, "The Three Forms of TheoreticalKnowledge" (Bourdieu 1973c) is a usefulsummary of what the French sociologistsees as the respective strengths and weak-nesses of three fundamental forms oftheorizing: subjectivist, objectivist, andpraxeological (the transcendence of these

^^ The empirical 'demonstration of this argumentis, of course. Homo Academicus (Bourdieu t988a).


two). This piece also serves as a usefulintroduction to Outline of a Theory ofPractice (Bourdieu 1972, 1977a).

Next, read "Men and Machines," a tersepiece where Bourdieu (1981c) outlines hisconceptualization of the dialectic, or"ontological complicity," between socialaction incarnate in bodies (habitus, dis-positions) and in institutions (fields, posi-tions), and by which he proposes to over-come the dichotomies of action andstructure and micro- and macro-analysis."The Forms of Capital" (Bourdieu 1986b)presents Bourdieu's conception of themain species of capital or power: economic,cultural, social, and symbolic, and thespecific effects and properties of each, aswell as typical strategies and dilemmas ofconversion. "Social Space and the Genesisof Groups" (Bourdieu 1985a) is a majorstatement of Bourdieu's concept of socialspace and of his theory of group formation,including the role of symbolic power andpolitics in the constitution of social collec-tives. "The Economy of Linguistic Ex-changes" (Bourdieu 1977c) extends thismodel to the analysis of language andleads into Language and Symbolic Power(1982b, 1989b).

Bourdieu's view on the classificationstruggles through which correspondencesbetween cultural and economic power areestablished, and which constitutes the linkbetween Reproduction and Distinction, isexpressed succinctly in Bourdieu and Bol-tanski (1981). "Changes in Social Structureand Changes in the Demand for Education"(Bourdieu and Boltanski 1977) analyzesthe structure and functioning of the systemof class strategies of reproduction."Marriage strategies as Strategies of Re-production" (Bourdieu 1977b) takes thisanalysis into the realm of kinship. Bourdieuand de Saint Martin's (Appendix, in Bour-dieu 1988a, pp. 194-225) exploration ofthe "Categories of Professorial Judgment"provides an extraordinarily vivid empiricalillustration of the operation and mutualreinforcement of social and academicclassifications.

An early empirical specification of thecentral concept of field is found in "TheSpecificity of the Scientific Field" (Bourdieu1981d), where Bourdieu also provides the

basis for a sociological theory of scientificprogress and develops a sociological epis-temology. "The Field of Cultural Pro-duction" (1983d) exemplifies Bourdieu'sapproach to culture and power and hisuses of the concept of field, habitus,interest, structural homology, etc., in thecontext of a detailed study of the Frenchliterary scene of the late 19th century."The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology ofthe Juridical Field" (Bourdieu 1987g) is anapplication of Bourdieu's framework tothe legal domain and outlines a sociologicaltheory of law and its specific bearing uponsociety. "The Philosophical Establishment"(Bourdieu 1983a) does the same for theinstitution of philosophy.

Readers of a more empirical bent mightwant to begin with "The Categories ofProfessorial Judgment" and work theirway backwards to the more conceptualpieces, then read Bourdieu's studies offields. Once all of this is digested, onemust read together Distinction (Bourdieu1984a) and Outline of a Theory of Practice(Bourdieu 1977a), before tackling HomoAcademicus (1988a). Bourdieu's best and,arguably, most important book Le senspratique (1980a) is forthcoming in Englishunder the title The Logic of Practice (byPolity Press and Stanford University Press).

REFERENCES

Writings by Pierre Bourdieu""

Bourdieu, Pierre. [1958] 1962a. The Algerians. Boston:Beacon Press.

. 1962b. "Celibat et condition paysanne." Etudesrurales 5-6 (April): 32-136.

. 1962c. "Les relations entre les sexes dans lasoci6t6 paysanne." Les temps modemes 195(August): 307-331.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1963."Sociologues des mythologies et mythologies desociologues." Les temps modernes 211 (December):998-1021.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel, Jean-Pierre Rivetand Claude Seibel. 1963. Travail et travailleurs enAlgirie. Paris and The Hague: Mouton.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1964. "The Attitude of the AlgerianPeasant Toward Time." Pp. 55-72 in Mediterranean

** These references were tracked with the help ofYyette Delsaut's Bibliographie des travaux de PierreBourdieu, 1958-1988 (Paris, Centre de SociologieEuropgenne du College de France, 1989, mimeo,39 p.), to whom I am thankful.


Countrymen. Edited by Jesse Pitt-Rivers. Paris andThe Hague: Mouton.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad. 1964. Lederacinement. La crise de I'agriculture tradition-nelle en Alg^rie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1965. "The Sentiment of Honour inKabyle Society." Pp. 191-241 in Honour andShame: The Values of Mediterranean Society.Edited by J.G. Peristiany. London: Weidenfeldand Nicholson.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel andJean-Claude Chamboredon. 1965. Un art moyen.Essai sur les usages de la photographie. Paris:Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Passeron and Moniquede Saint Martin. 1965. Rapport pedagogique etcommunication. Paris and the Hague: Mouton.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Alain Darbel. 1966. "La find'un malthusianisme." Pp. 135-154 in Le partagedes benefices, expansion et inegalites en France.Edited by Darras. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Darbel and DominiqueSchnapper. 1966. L'amour de I'art. Les museesd'art europeens et leur public. Paris: Editions deMinuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1967a. "Systems of Education andSystems of Thought." Social Science Information14-3: 338-358.

. 1967b. "Postface." Pp. 136-167 in ErwinPanofsky. Architeture gothique et pensee scholas-tique. Trans, by Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: Editionsde Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1967."Sociology and Philosophy in France Since 1945:Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy WithoutSubject." Social Research 34-1 (Spring): 162-212.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1968a. "Outline of a SociologicalTheory of Art Perception." International SocialScience Journal 10 (Winter): 589-612.

. 1968b. "Structuralism and Theory of Soci-ological Knowledge." Social Research 35-4(Winter): 681-706.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon andJean-Claude Passeron. 1968. Le metier de soci-ologue. Prealables ipistemologiques. Paris and TheHague: Mouton.

Bourdieu, Pierre and O. Hahn. 1970. "La th6orie."VH 70/2 (Summer): 12-21.

Bourdieu, Pierre. [1966] 1971a. "Intellectual Fieldand Creative Project." Pp. 161-188 in MichaelF.D. Young (ed.). Knowledge and Control: NewDirections for the Sociology of Education. London:Collier-Macmillan.

. 1971b. "Gendse et structure du champ religieux."Revue frangalse de sociologie 12-3: 294-334.

. 1971c. "Disposition esth^tique et competenceartistique." Les temps modernes 295 (February):1345-1378.

. 1972. Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique.Precedee de trois etudes d'ethnologie kabyle. Geneva:Droz.

.[1962] 1973a. "The Algerian Subproletariate."Pp. 83-89 in Man, State, and Society in theContemporary Maghrib. Edited by I.W. Zartman.London: Pall Mall Press.

.[1971] 1973b. "Cultural Reproduction and

Social Reproduction." Pp. 71-112 in Knowledge,Education, and Cultural Change. Edited by RichardBrown. London: Tavistock.

.1973c. "The Three Forms of TheoreticalKnowledge." Social Science Information 12-1: 53-80.

. [1970] 1973d. "The Berber House." Pp. 98-110in Rules and Meanings. Edited by Mary Douglas.Harmondsworth: Penguin.

. 1974a. "Avenir de classe et causalitd du prob-able." Revue frangaise de sociologie 15-1 (January-March): 3-42.

. [1966] 1974b. "The School as a ConservativeForce: Scholatic and Cultural Inequality." Pp. 32-46 in Contemporary Research in the Sociology ofEducation. Edited by John Eggleston. London:Methuen.

. 1974c. "Les fractions de la classe dominante etles modes d'appropriation de l'oeuvre d'art."Social Science Information 13-3: 7-32.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin.[1970] 1974. "Scholastic Excellence and the Valuesof the Educational System." Pp. 338-371 in Con-temporary Research in the Sociology of Education.Edited by John Eggleston. London: Methuen.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1975a. "La critique du discourslettre." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales5/6: 4-8.

. 1975b. "La lecture de Marx: quelques re-marques critiques a propos de 'Quelques remarquescritiques a propos de "Lire le Capital".'" Actes dela recherche en sciences sociales 5/6: 65—79.

. 1975c. "L'ontologie politique de MartinHeidegger." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 5/6: 109-156.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Luc Boltanski. 1975. "Lef6tichisme de la langue." y4c(e.j de la recherche ensciences sociales 2: 95-107.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Yvette Delsaut. 1975. "Lecouturier et sa griffe. Contribution a une thfiorie dela magie," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales1: 7-36.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977a. Outline of A Theory ofPractice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. [1972] 1977b. "Marriage Strategies as Strategiesof Social Reproduction." Pp. 117-144 in Familyand Society: Selections from the Annales. Edited byR. Foster and O. Ranum. Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins University Press.

. 1977c. "The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges."Social Science Information 16—6: 645—668.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Luc Boltanski. [1973] 1977."Changes in Social Structure and Changes in theDemand for Education." Pp. 197-227 in Contem-porary Europe: Social Structures and CulturalPatterns. Edited by Scott Giner and MargaretScotford-Archer. London: Routledge and KeganPaul.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. [1970]1977. Reproduction in Education, Society andCulture. London: Sage.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1978a. "Sur I'objectivation partic-ipante. R6ponses a quelques objections." Actes dela recherche en sciences sociales 20-21: 67-69.

. 1978b. "Classement, d^classement, reclasse-ment." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 24:


2-22 (trans, as "Epilogue" in Bourdieu and Pas-seron, 1979).

Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin.1978. "Le patronat." Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 20/21: 3-82.

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1979a. "Les trois etats du capitalculturel." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales30: 3-6.

. [1977] 1979b. "Symbolic Power," Critique ofAnthropology 13/14 (Summer): 77-85.

. 1979c. Algeria 1960. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

. 1979d. "The Sense of Honor." Pp. 95-132 inAlgeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. [1964]1979. The Inheritors: French Students and theirRelation to Culture. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980a. Le sens pratique. Paris:Editions de Minuit.

. 1980b. Questions de sociologie. Paris: Editionsde Minuit.

. 1980c. "Le capital social." Actes de la rechercheen sciences sociales 31: 2-3.

. 1980d. "Le mort saisit le vif. Les relations entrel'histoire incorpor^e et l'histoire reifiee." Actes dela recherche en sciences sociales 32-33: 3-14.

. 1980e. "Sartre." London Review of Books 2-20(October 20): 11-12.

. 1980f. "Le Nord et le Midi: contribution a uneanalyse de I'effet Montesquieu." Actes de la re-cherche en sciences sociales 35: 21-25.

. 1980g. "L'identitS et la representation. Elementspour une reflexion critique sur I'idee de region."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35: 63-72.

.[197?] 1980h. "The Production of Belief: Con-tribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods."Media, Culture and Society 2 (July): 261-293.

. 1981a. "La representation politique. Elementspour une th6orie du champ politique." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 37: 3-24.

. 1981b. "Epreuve scolaire et consecration sociale.Les classes pr^paratoires aux Grandes Ecoles."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 39: 3-70.

. 1981c. "Men and Machines." Pp. 304-317 inAdvances in Social Theory and Methodology:Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. Edited by Karen Knorr-Cetina andAaron V. Cicourel. London and Boston: Routledgeand Kegan Paul.

. [1975] 1981d. "The Specificity of the ScientificField and the Social Conditions of the Progress ofReason." Pp. 257-292 in French Sociology: Ruptureand Renewal Since 1968. Edited by Charles C.Lemert. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Luc Boltanski. [1975] 1981."The Educational System and the Economy: Titlesand Jobs." Pp. 141-151 in French Sociology:Rupture and Renewal Since 1968. Edited by CharlesC. Lemert. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1982a. Legon sur la legon. Paris:Editions de Minuit.

. 1982b. Ce que parler veut dire. Paris: ArthemeFayard.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin. 1982.

"La sainte famille. L'episcopat frangais dans lechamp du pouvoir." Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 44/45: 2-53.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983a. "The Philosophical Estab-lishment." Pp. 1-8 in Philosophy in France Today.Edited by Alan Montefiore. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

. 1983b. "Vous avez dit 'populaire'?" Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 46: 98-105.

. 1983c. "Les sciences sociales et la philosophie."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 47/48: 45-52.

. 1983d. "The Field of Cultural Production, orthe Economic World Reversed." Poetics 12(November): 311-356.

. [1945] 1983e. "Erving Goffman, Discoverer ofthe Infinitely Small." Theory, Culture, and Society2-1: 112-113.

. [1979] 1984a. Distinction: A Social Critique ofthe Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press.

. 1984b. "Prefazione." In Anna Boschetti. L'im-presa intellectuale. Sartre e "Les Temps Modernes".Bari: Edizioni Dedalo.

. [1984] 1985a. "Social Space and the Genesis ofGroups." Theory and Society 14-6 (November1985): 723-744.

. [1984] 1985b. "Delegation and Political Fetish-ism." Thesis Eleven 10/11 (November): 56-70.

. 1985c. "The Genesis of the concepts of 'Habitus'and 'Field'." Sociocriticism 2-2: 11-24.

. [1971] 1985d. "The Market of Symbolic Goods."Poetics 14 (April): 13-44.

.[1985] 1986a. "From Rules to Strategies."Cultural Anthropology 1 (February): 110-120.

. [1983] 1986b. "The Forms of Capital." Pp. 241-258 in Handbook of Theory and Research for theSociology of Education. Edited by John G. Richard-son. New York: Greenwood Press.

. 1986c. "Habitus, code et codification." Actes dela recherche en sciences sociales 64: 40—44.

. 1987a. Choses dites. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

. 1987b. "What Makes a Social Class? On theTheoretical and Practical Existence of Groups."Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32: 1—18.

. [1986] 1987c. "The Biographical Illusion."Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center forPsychosocial Studies, n. 14. Chicago: Center forPsychosocial Studies.

. 1987d. "The Historical Genesis of a PureAesthetics." The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, Special issue (ed. Schusterman): 201-210.

. 1987e. "Scientific Field and Scientific Thought."Paper read at the Annual American Anthropo-logical Association Meetings, Chicago, October.

. 1987f. "Variations et invariants. Elements pourune histoire structurale du champ des grandesecoles." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales70: 3-30.

. [1986] 1987g. "The Force of Law: Toward aSociology of the Juridical Field." Hastings Journalo/tavf 38: 201-248.

.[1971] 1987h. "Legitimation and StructuredInterests in Weber's Sociology of Religion." Pp.119-136 in Max Weber, Rationality, and Modernity.

TOWARD A REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGYEdited by Sam Whimster and Scott Lash. London:Allen and Unwin.

. 1987i. "L'institutionalisation de i'anomie."Cahiers du Musee national d'arl moderne 19-20(June): 6-19.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Monique de Saint Martin.1987. "Agregation et segregation. Le champ desgrandes ecoles et le champ du pouvoir." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 69: 2-50.

Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1987. Elements d'une analysedu marchi de la maison individuelle. Paris: Centrede Sociologie Europ^enne, mimeo, 104pp.

Bourdieu, Pierre. [1984] 1988a. Homo Academicus.Cambridge: Polity Press; Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press.

. 1988b. L'ontologie politique de Martin Hei-degger. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

. 1988c. "On Interest and the Relative Autonomyof Symbolic Power." Working Papers and Proceed-ings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies, n. 20.Chicago: Center for Psychosocial Studies.

. 1988d. "Flaubert's Point of View." CriticalInquiry 14 (Spring): 539-562.

. 1988e. "Vive la crise! For Heterodoxy in SocialScience." Theory and Society 17-5 (September): inpress.

. 1988f. "Program for a Sociology of Sport." TheSociology of Sport Journal 5-2 (June): 153-161.

. 1989a. La noblesse d'Etat: Grandes Ecoles etesprit de corps. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

. [1982] 1989b. Language and Symbolic Power.Edited and with an introduction by John B.Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

. 1989c. "How Schools Help Reproduce theSocial Order." Current Contents/Social and Be-havioral Science 21-8 (February 20): 16.

. forthcoming. "The Peculiar History of ScientificReason." Sociological Forum.

Selected recent writings on Pierre Bourdieu

Accardo, Alain. 1983. Initiation a la sociologie deI'illusionnisme social. Lire Bourdieu. Bordeaux:Editions Le Mascaret.

Accardo, Alain and Philippe Corcuff (eds.). 1986. Lasociologie de Pierre Bourdieu. Textes choisis etcommences. Bordeaux: Editions Le Mascaret.

Acciaiolo, Gregory L. 1981. "Knowing What YouAre Doing: Pierre Bourdieu's 'Outline of a Theoryof Practice'." Canberra Anthropology 4-1 (April):23-51.

Adair, Philippe. 1984. "Review of 'Ce que parlerveut dire'." Sociologie du travail 26-1: 105-114.

Archer, Margaret. 1983. "Review of 'La reproduc-tion'." Archives europeennes de sociologie 24-1:196-221.

Bentley, G. Carter. 1987. "Ethnicity and Practice."Comparative Studies in Society and History 29-1:24-55.

Berger, Bennett. 1986. "Taste and Domination."American Journal of Sociology 91-6 (May): 1445-1453.

Bidet, Jacques. 1979. "Ouestions to Pierre Bourdieu."Critique of Anthropology 13/14 (Summer): 203-208.

59Boschetti, Anna. 1985. "Classi reali e classi costruite."

Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 26-1 (January-March): 89-99.

Bredo, E. and W. Feinberg. 1979. "Meaning, Power,and Pedagogy." Journal of Curriculum Studies 11-4: 315-332.

Brubaker, Rogers. 1985. "Rethinking ClassicalSocial Theory: The Sociological Vision of PierreBourdieu." Theory and Society 14-6 (November):745-775.

Caille, Alain. 1981. "La sociologie de l'intdret est-elle interessante?" Sociologie du travail 23-3: 257-274.

. 1987. Critique de Bourdieu. Lausanne: Univer-sity de Lausanne, Institut d'anthropologie et desociologie ("Cours, seminaires et travaux," n. 8).

Certeau, Michel de. 1984. "Foucault and Bourdieu."Pp. 45-60 in The Practice of Everyday Life.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Collins, Randall. 1981. "Cultural Capitalism andSymbolic Violence." Pp. 173-182 in SociologySince Mid-Century: Essays in Theory Cumulation.New York: Academic Press.

. 1985. Three Sociological Traditions. New York:Oxford University Press.

Connell, R.W. 1983. "The Black Box of Habit on theWings of History: Reflections on the Theory ofReproduction." Pp. 140-161 in Which Way is Up?Essays on Sex, Class, and Culture. London: GeorgeAllen and Unwin.

Dal Lago, Alessandro. 1985. "II sociologo nontemperato." Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 26-1(January-March): 79-89.

Dennis, Shirley. 1986. "A Critical Review andAppropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's Analysis ofSocial and Cultural Reproduction." Journal ofEducation 16-2 (Spring): 96-112.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1979. "Review Essay on PierreBourdieu." American Journal of Sociology 84-6(May): 1460-1474.

Douglas, Mary. 1981. "Good Taste: Review of PierreBourdieu, 'La distinction'." The Times LiterarySupplement, February 13: 163-169.

Earle, William James. 1988. "Bourdieu's 'Habitus'."Unpublished paper. Department of Philosophy,Baruch College, City University of New York.

Foster, Steven W. 1986. "Reading Pierre Bourdieu."Cultural Anthropology 1-1: 103-110.

Garnham, Nicholas. 1986. "Extended Review:Bourdieu's 'Distinction'." The Sociological Review34-2 (May): 423-433.

Garnham, Nicholas and Raymond Williams. 1980."Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture."Media, Culture, and Society 2—3 (Summer): 297-312.

Gorder, K.L. 1980. "Understanding School Know-ledge: A Critical Appraisal of Basil Bernstein andPierre Bourdieu." Educational Theory 30-4: 335-346.

Grossetti, Michel. 1986. "Metaphore ficonomique eteconomie des pratiques." Recherches sociologiques17-2: 233-246.

Harker, Richard K. 1984. "On Reproduction, Habitusand Education." British Journal of Sociology andEducation 5-1 {iunty. 117-127.

Heran, Frangois. 1987. "La seconde nature de


rhabitus. Tradition philosophique et sens commundans le langage sociologique." Revue frangaise desociologie 28-3 (July-September): 385-416.

Hoffman, Stanley. 1986. "Monsieur Taste." NewYork Review of Books 33-6 (April): 45-48.

Honneth, Axel. 1986. "The Fragmented World ofSymbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu'sSociology of Culture." Theory, Culture, and Society3: 55-66.

Honneth, Axel, Hermann Kocyba and Bemd Schwibs.1986. "The Struggle for Symbolic Order: AnInterview with Pierre Bourdieu." Theory, Culture,and Society 3: 35-51.

Inglis, Roy. 1979. "Good and Bad Habitus: Bourdieu,Habermas and the Condition of England." TheSociological Review 27-2: 353-369.

Jenkins, Richard. 1982. "Pierre Bourdieu and theReproduction of Determinism." Sociology 16-2(May): 270-281.

Joppke, Christian. 1986. "The Cultural Dimension ofClass Formation and Class Struggle: On the SocialTheory of Pierre Bourdieu." Berkeley Journal ofSociology 31: 53-78.

Lamont, Michele et Annette P. Larfeau. 1988."Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps, and Glissandosin Recent Theoretical Developments." SociologicalTheory 6-2 (Fall): 153-168.

Lemert, Charles C. 1986. "French Sociology: Afterthe 'Patrons', What?" Contemporary Sociology15-5 (September): 689-692.

Lienard, Georges and Emile Servais. 1979. "PracticalSense: On Bourdieu." Critique of Anthropology13/14 (Summer): 209-219.

Miller, Don and Jan Branson. 1987. "Pierre Bourdieu:Culture and Praxis." Pp. 210-225 in CreatingCulture: Profiles in the Study of Culture. Edited byDiane J. Austin-Broos. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Mueller, Hans Peter. 1986. "Kultur, Geschmack undDistinktion. Grundzuge der Kultursoziologie PierreBourdieus." Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie undSozialforschung, Supplement: 162-170.

Nash, Roy. 1986. "Educational and Social Inequality:The Theories of Bourdieu and Boudon withReference to Class and Ethnic Differences in NewZealand." New Zealand Sociology 1-2 (November):121-137.

Ostrow, James M. 1981. "Culture as a FundamentalDimension of Experience: A Discussion of PierreBourdieu's Theory of the Human Habitus." HumanStudies 4-3 (July-September): 279-297.

Paradeise, Catherine. 1981. "Sociabilite et culture declasse." Revue frangaise de sociologie 21—4 (October- December).

Passeron, Jean-Claude. 1986. "La signification destheories de la reproduction socioculturelle." Inter-national Social Science Journal 38-4 (December):619-629.

Rasmussen, David. 1981. "Praxis and Social Theory."Human Studies 4-3 (July-September): 273-278.

Rittner, Volker. 1984. "Geschmack und Naturlich-keit." Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozial-forschung 36-2: 372-378.

Robbins, Derek, 1988. "Bourdieu in England."Unpublished typescript. School for IndependentStudy, North-East London Polytechnic.

Sanchez de Horcajo, J.. 1979. La cultura, reproducio

o cambia: el analysis sociologico de P. Bourdieu.Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas,Monograph 23.

Schatzki, Theodore Richard. 1987. "Overdue Analysisof Bourdieu's Theory of Practice." Inquiry 30-1/2(March): 113-136.

Sulkunen, Pekka. 1982. "Society Made Visible: Onthe Cultural Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu." ActaSociologica 25-2: 103-115.

Swartz, David. 1977. "Pierre Bourdieu: The CulturalTransmission of Social Inequality." Harvard Edu-cational Review 47 (November): 545-554.

. 1981. "Classes, Educational Systems and LaborMarkets." European Journal of Sociology 22-2:325-353.

Thompson, John B. 1984. "Symbolic Violence: Lan-guage and Power in the Sociology of PierreBourdieu." Pp. 42-72 in Studies in the Theory ofIdeology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Wacquant, Loic J.D. 1987. "Symbolic Violence andthe Making of the French Agriculturalist: AnInquiry Into Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology." Aus-tralian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 23-1(March): 65-88.

Willis, Paul. 1983. "Cultural Production and Theoriesof Reproduction." In Race, Class, and Education.Edited by L. Barton and S. Walker. London:Croom-Helm.

Zolberg, Vera. 1986. "Taste as a Social Weapon."Contemporary Sociology 15-4 (July): 511-515.

Selection of articles from Actes de Is recherche ensciences sociales

Boltanski, Luc. 1975. "La constitution du champ dela bande dessinee." Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 1: 37—59.

. 1979. "Taxinomies sociales et luttes de classes.La mobilisation de 'la classe moyenne' et l'inventiondes 'cadres'." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 29: 75-105.

Boltanski, Luc with Yann Dare and Marie-AngeSchiltz. 1984b. "La denonciation." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 51: 3-40.

Bonvin, Frangois. 1982. "Une seconde famille. Uncollege d'enseignement prive." Actes de la rechercheen sciences sociales 30: 47-64.

Breslau, Daniel. 1988. "Robert Park et l'ecologiehumaine." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales74: 55-63.

Chamboredon, Jean-Claude and Jean-Louis Fabiani.1977. "Les albums pour enfants. Le champ de['edition et les definitions sociales de l'enfance."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 13: 60-79,14: 55-74.

Champagne, Patrick. 1984. "La manifestation. Laproduction de l'evenement politique." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 52/53: 18-41.

. 1988. "Le cercle politique. Usages sociaux dessondages et nouvel espace politique." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 71/72: 71-97.

Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. 1979. "La competencep^dagogique des professeurs comme enjeu deconflits." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales30: 65-85.

Charle, Christophe. 1978. "Les milieux d'affaires


dans la structure de la classe dominante vers 1900."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 20/21: 83-96.

. 1983. "Le champ universitaire parisien a la findu 19eme siecle." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 47/48: 77-89.

Delsaut, Yvette. 1988. "Carnets de socioanalyse 1-.L'inforjetable." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 74: 83-88.

. 1988. "Carnets de socioanalyse 2-. Une photode classe." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales75: 83-96:

Desrosieres, Alain. 1978. "March6 matrimonial etstructure des classes sociales." Actes de la rechercheen sciences sociales 20/21: 97—107.

Dumont, Martine. 1984. "Le succes mondain d'unefausse science: la physiognomonie de Johann KasparLavater." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales54: 2-30.

Encrev6, Pierre et Michel de Fornel. 1983. "Le sensen pratique. Construction de la reference et struc-ture sociale de l'interaction dans le couple question/rfiponse." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales46: 3-30.

Gamboni, Dario. 1983. "Mepris et meprises. Elementspour une 6tude de l'iconoclasme contemporain."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 49: 2-28.

Garrigou, Alain. 1988. "Le secret de I'isoloir." Actesde la recherche en sciences sociales 71/72: 22-45.

Grignon, Claude. 1977. "Sur les relations entre lestransformations du champ religieux et les trans-formations de l'espace politique." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 16: 3-34.

Heinich, Nathalie. 1987. "Arts et sciences a Page clas-sique: professions et institutions culturelles." Actesde la recherche en sciences sociales 66/67: 47-78.

Karady, Victor. 1983. "Les professeurs de la Rdpub-lique." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales47/48:90-112.

Latour, Bruno and Paolo Fabbri. 1977. "La rhetoriquede la science. Pouvoir et devoir dans un article descience exacte." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 13: 81-95.

Lenoir, R6mi, 1980. "La notion d'accident du travail:un enjeu de luttes." Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 32/33: 77-88.

. 1985a. "L'effondrement des bases sociales dufamilialisme." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 57/58: 69-88.

. 1985b. "Transformations du familialisme etreconversions morales." Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 59: 3-37.

Maresca, Sylvain. 1981. "La representation de lapaysannerie. Remarcjues ethnographiques sur letravail de representation des dirigeants agricoles."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 38: 3-18.

Mauger, Gerard et Claude Foss6-Poliak. 1983. "Lesloubards." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales50: 49-67.

Merllie, Dominique. 1983. "Une nomenclature et samise en oeuvre: les statistiques sur I'origine socialedes etudiants." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 50: 3-47.

Pinto, Louis. 1975. "L'armee, le contingent et lesclasses." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales3: 18-41.

. 1984. "La vocation de l'universel. La formationde I'intellectuel vers 1900." Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales 55: 23-32.

Pollak, Michael. 1979. "Paul Lazarsfeld, fondateurd'une multinationale scientifique." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 25: 45-59.

. 1986. "Un texte dans son contexte. L'enquetede Max Weber sur les ouvriers agricoles." Actes dela recherche en sciences sociales 65: 69-75.

Pollak, Michael with Marie-Ange Schiltz. 1987."Identity sociale et gestion d'un risque de sante.Les homosexuels face au SIDA." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 68: 77-102.

Ponton, Remi. 1977. "Les images de la paysanneriedans le roman rural h la fin du 19eme siecle." Actesde la recherche en sciences sociales 17/18: 62-71.

Saint Martin, Monique de. 1980. "Une grandefamille." Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales31: 4-21.

. 1985. "Les strategies matrimoniales dansl'aristocratie. Notes provisoires." Actes de larecherche en sciences sociales 59: lA-11.

Sayad, Adbelmalek. 1979. "Les enfants ill6gitimes."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 25: 61-81,26/27: 117-132.

Suaud, Charles. 1982. "Conversions religieuses etreconversions economiques." Actes de la rechercheen sciences sociales 44/45: 72-94.

Thevenot, Laurent. 1979. "Une jeunesse difficile.Les fonctions sociales du fiou et de la rigueur dansles classements." Actes de la recherche en sciencessociales 26/27: 3-18.

Verger, Annie. 1982. "L'artiste saisi par Pecole.Classements scolaires et 'vocation' artistique."Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 42: 19-32.

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