Bourdieus Critique.scholarly.reason

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Roger FosterPierre Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason

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Roger Foster

Pierre Bourdieus critique ofscholarly reason

Abstract This paper investigates the implications of Pierre Bourdieusrecent reformulation of his social theory as a critique of scholarly reason.This reformulation is said to point towards a definition of social theory asa sociologically informed version of the Kantian concept of critique. It isargued that, by this means, Bourdieu is able to extend and develop thecritique of intellectualism in the philosophies of Wittgenstein andMerleau-Ponty and, furthermore, to ground this critique by showing howthe intellectualist error arises from a failure to reflect on the socialconditions of possibility of reason. The three forms of the critique ofscholarly reason (pertaining to the theoretical, the moral-practical and the

aesthetic forms of reason) are then briefly presented. In the final section, thecritique of scholarly reason is shown to provide the basis for a convincingresponse to critiques of Bourdieus work from critical theorists drawing onHabermass conception of discursive rationality. In particular, it is arguedthat critical theorists influenced by Habermas typically confuse practicalreflexivity with intellectual reflection the standpoint of scholarlyreason. Finally, it is shown that Bourdieus own account of the unity oftheory and practice is nonetheless deficient, and must be supplanted withan account centred on the idea of existential clarification.

Keywords Bourdieu critical theory Habermas intellectualism

reflexivity

In what would turn out to be the final restatement of his social theory,Pierre Bourdieu began to develop the idea of a critique of scholarlyreason.1 As well as deepening and extending his well-known theoryof practice, this reformulation renders visible a number of the mostsignificant philosophical implications of his work. I want to show, inparticular, how the critique of scholarly reason allows Bourdieus

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efforts to transcend the traditional dualisms of social theory to be pre-sented as a sociologically informed version of the Kantian model ofcritique, that is, a form of inquiry that sets out to determine the limits

of reason.2 The limits of reason, for Kant, were defined in terms ofapriori conditions of possibility relating to the subject of knowledge.In other words, they are those necessary conditions which make itpossible for the subject to attain knowledge concerning the object. Thecentral idea is that, in order to be known, the objects of cognitionmust be constituted in advance by the a priori activities of the subject.Pierre Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason, I will argue, can be saidto adhere to the framework of Kantian critique because it retains thefocus of transcendental inquiry on the necessary limits of cognition,

but, and importantly, it gives Kantian critique a sociological twistbecause it shifts the focus from subjective conditions to the socialcon-ditions of possibility of cognition. Bourdieus conception of critiquediffers from Kants, however, in that Bourdieu is not interested in thelimits of cognition per se, but rather in a specific distortion inherentin attempts to comprehend social practice theoretically. Bourdieuscritique of scholarly reason, I will argue, stipulates that social theoristsand philosophers have typically misunderstood the nature of socialpractice because they have failed to take account of the way that thetheoretical perspective is structured by the social conditions underwhich it takes place, in other words, its social conditions of possi-bility. The goal of critique, then, is to explain why theory goes wrongby showing how its typical errors follow from its failure to reflect onthe constitutive social conditions which make theoretical activitypossible. Before turning directly to the critique of scholarly reason, Iwant to discuss the oft-noted connection between Bourdieu and twohugely influential 20th-century philosophers, namely, Wittgensteinand Merleau-Ponty. The purpose of this discussion will be to preparethe ground for my claim that the critique of scholarly reason extends

the later Wittgensteins attack on the role of mental states in cogni-tion, and Merleau-Pontys critique of the dualism of intellectualism vs.empiricism, by showing how the typical philosophical errors identifiedby both thinkers can be traced to a failure to reflect on the social con-ditions of theoretical inquiry. In the final section, I will show how thecritique of scholarly reason allows Bourdieu to develop a convincingresponse to the charge of critical theorists that his theory deprivessocial agents of critical reflexivity. However, it also makes clear theshortcomings in Bourdieus own understanding of the interaction of

theory and practice.

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Wittgenstein: rules and social context

Although working within divergent philosophical traditions, the works

of the later Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty share a certain significantsimilarity. Both thinkers are seeking to undermine a particular philo-sophical conception of understanding, where this is equated with theframing of mental representations, and action is considered to be explic-able by means of the application of a mental insight, which somehowguides the body towards a consciously posited end. Wittgensteinsought to oppose this view by pointing to the centrality of the socialcontexts in which language is used. Linguistic meaning, for Wittgen-stein, must be explained in terms of social contexts, rather than in terms

of mental acts which somehow confer meanings on expressions. Thusif we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, he argued,we should have to say that it was its use.3 Merleau-Ponty, by contrast,focused on the body as the location of what might be called an incar-nate intentionality, thus providing for an analysis of embodied under-standing which would correct both intellectualist and empiricistaccounts of the mental. Bourdieus work draws significantly upon thesetheoretical innovations, but also, or so I will claim, provides a deeperunderstanding of the philosophical errors detected by both thinkers bytracing those errors to the specific social presuppositions of theoreticalinquiry.

The importance of Wittgensteins work for Bourdieus project canbe seen most clearly in the implications of Wittgensteins well-knowncritique of the intellectualist or mentalist picture of rule-following.Bourdieu draws upon Wittgensteins work to illuminate a widespreadconfusion in social theory between the idea of a rule as an explanatoryhypothesis, formulated by the theorist to account for what he or shesees, and the idea of a rule as the principle actually applied by the agentsthemselves in their practice. This confusion, for Bourdieu, is the basis

of the constitutive error of intellectualism, namely, the projection oftheoretical comprehension into practice. Intellectualism, Bourdieuargues, tends inevitably to slip from the perfectly acceptable use of rulesas descriptions of certain regularities within practice, to the idea of therule as a force or mechanism guiding the conduct of social agents them-selves.4

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein develops a con-ception of rules as customs or conventions.5 Wittgenstein conceivedthis idea as a critique of the intellectualist or mentalist view that the

correct application of a rule can be discerned from an intuitive grasp ofthe rules essence. According to the latter view, application must beseen to result on each occasion from an act of special knowledge.6 Thepoint of speaking about customs/conventions rather than mental acts as

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the basis of rule-following is, first, that it shifts attention away frommental intentions and towards social practices as the guarantors oflinguistic meaning. The bottom line of explanation, Wittgenstein argues

in On Certainty, is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is anungrounded way of acting (Handlungsweise).7 The account of rulesas customs/conventions, secondly, suggests an explanation of rule-following which focuses not on a mental grasp of the meaning of arule as the basis of correct application, but rather on a set of sociallyinculcated dispositions and tendencies that are the result of training andeducation. This would account for Wittgensteins claim that a rule isobeyed blindly rather than consciously. Blindly does not mean herewithout thinking, but rather points to habitual (and socially sustained)

ways of acting as the basis of rule-following.8

This reading of Wittgenstein helps to elucidate an often misunder-stood aspect of Bourdieus work. In his efforts to surmount the intel-lectualist error which portrays rules as consciously applied by socialagents, Bourdieu has developed the concept of strategy. This has,unfortunately, led to a familiar mis-characterization of Bourdieustheory of action as utilitarian or economistic.9 Bourdieu, that is, isaccused of positing the conscious calculation of individual interests andadvantage as the basis of social action. In order to see what is wrongwith this reading we need to look a little more closely at the Wittgen-steinian account of rules.10 One consequence of Wittgensteins critiqueof the intellectualist view is the position that we can call meaningfinitism.11 If the social context is the ground of linguistic meaning, thenit follows that the correctness of the application of any concept or rulecannot be derived from an analysis of the essential meaning of thatconcept or rule. This follows from Wittgensteins critique of the philoso-phers search for the closed extension of concepts, that is, firm bound-aries which would clearly delimit the legitimate and the illegitimate.12

Implicit in Wittgensteins critique of closed extension is the idea that a

class of particular things cannot be delimited in advance of the appli-cation of a concept or label. Wittgensteins point, according to thismeaning finitist picture, is that linguistic meanings are themselves con-tinually reinterpreted and redefined through their usage within thetypical contexts of social practice. This means, however, that thesuccess of any particular application can never be as certain or secureas the intellectualist picture presupposes. It is exactly this element ofpractical uncertainty that Bourdieus reference to social action as regu-lated by strategies rather than rules is intended to capture. Hence

Bourdieu asserts that ritual action, which structural anthropologysituates on the side of algebra, is in fact more akin to gymnastics or adance, and is characterized by ambiguities . . . polysemic realities,undetermined or indeterminate, not to speak of partial contradictions

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and the fuzziness that pervades the whole system and accounts for itsflexibility, its openness, in short, everything that makes it practical .13

By speaking of strategies rather than rules, then, Bourdieu intends to

capture precisely that uncertainty and open-endedness of practice whichstems from the contextual rootedness of meaning. Any ritual action,such as gift-giving in traditional societies, for example, is to be under-stood as an interpretation of a rule whose success cannot be deter-mined in advance.14

There is a further aspect to Bourdieus relationship to Wittgenstein,however, which has been left unexplored thus far in philosophicalengagements with Bourdieus work.15 Bourdieu, I want to argue, pro-ductively develops the social-critical implications of Wittgensteins refer-

ences to the occult or queer nature of mental states.16

There seems,Wittgenstein asserts, to be something sublime about logic. Our typicalaccounts of the way language functions, furthermore, makes it seem asif thought is surrounded by a halo.17 Further, we tend to think ofnaming itself as a sacramental act creating a magic relation.18 Ourordinary notions of language, Wittgenstein is here claiming, accord tothe mental a certain mysterious force or power to confer meaning onwords. For Bourdieu, this process of conferring mysterious propertieson the mental is a particular case of the more general process of thetransfiguration of social forces onto objects. The locus classicus for anexamination of this process is mile Durkheims discussion of primi-tive religion in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheimargued that totemistic religions tended to incorporate a process of theprojection of social forces onto specific things, animals and persons,with the result that the object thereby took on a sacred quality,marking it with mysterious powers. If, however, linguistic meaning canbe said to be a function of social context, then the sacred/mysteriousproperties attaching to mental states must be similarly understood to bea result of the transfiguration of what is social in origin onto a

mental/psychologistic apparatus. For Bourdieu, this process of the trans-figuration of social forces is not merely a philosophical error, however.It is in fact essential to the workings of what he terms symbolic power,which operates by means of the naturalization of socially produced dis-tinctions. For Bourdieu, symbolic power can be seen to be at work inany social institution (such as the school system) which operates toproduce a distinction between insider (successful) and outsider (failedor unsuccessful) groups. The act which consecrates insiders (thegranting of diplomas and degrees) simultaneously attributes magical

properties to the agents involved, turning what are in effect sociallyproduced distinctions between individuals and groups into naturaldifferences, and thereby generating a political effect of legitimation withregard to the distinctions thus produced.

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Merleau-Ponty: the body and habitus

Merleau-Ponty shares with Wittgenstein a deep scepticism regarding the

role of mental representations in conferring linguistic meaning.Merleau-Ponty, however, develops his critique of intellectualism bymeans of a phenomenology of the lived body.19 According to Merleau-Ponty, both empiricism and intellectualism go wrong in failing to takeaccount of the practical intentionality of the body, and hence, fail tograsp the active, structuring role of the situated body. Both empiricismand intellectualism, Merleau-Ponty argues, reduce the body to anobject. The body functions according to these accounts as either apassive receiver of stimuli (empiricism), or a mechanism for the inten-

tional projects of a disembodied consciousness. The active role of thebody in structuring experience, however, Merleau-Ponty argued, pre-cluded the reduction of the significance of motility to a sum of reflexesand, moreover, suggested a form of incarnate intentionality which wasnot reducible to an act of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty describes thehollowing out of the significance of the body in both of these perspec-tives:

The motor intentions of the living being were thus converted into objec-tive movements: to the will was given only an instantaneous fiat, the exe-

cution of the act was delivered over entirely to the nervous mechanism.Sensation, thus detached from affectivity and the motor functions, becamethe simple reception of a quality and physiology believed that it couldfollow, from the receptors to the nervous centre, the projection of theexterior world into the living being. The living body thus transformedceased to be my body, the visible expression of a concrete Ego, and becamean object among all the others.20

The relevance of this critique for Bourdieus work comes into view whenwe focus on Merleau-Pontys comments concerning the significance ofhabitual action. The incarnate, practical intentionality of the body,Merleau-Ponty argues, must become sedimented or fixed in habitualschemes of comportment. It is, Merleau-Ponty states, an internal neces-sity for the most integrated existence to give itself an habituated body.21

With the emergence of the habituated body, incarnate or embodiedintentionality comes to be characterized by regular, structured patternsof response and action in typical situations. In the acquisition of habit,Merleau-Ponty argues, the subject acquires the capacity to respond bya certain number of solutions to a certain number of situations.22

Like Merleau-Pontys notion of the lived body, the function of

Bourdieus concept of habitus is to replace the transcendental subjectwith the situated body, conceived as a source of practical intentionalitywith the power to constitute social reality. The habitus, Bourdieu argues,avoids the twin errors of materialist and idealist accounts because it

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. . . restores to the agent a generative and unifying capacity which isconstructive and classificatory, at the same time recalling that this capacityto constitute social reality, itself socially constituted, is not that of a tran-

scendental subject, but that of a socialized body, investing in practicesocially constructed organizing principles acquired in the course of asituated and temporally confined social experience.23

The central theoretical innovation of the habitus, in relation to Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of the lived body, is that it poses the questionof the origin of the structures of practical intentionality incorporated inthe body from a social-historical perspective. This enables Bourdieu totake up a social-critical inquiry into the social construction of the struc-tures or schemes that the agent puts to work in order to construct the

world.24 Bourdieu, in effect, historicizes Merleau-Pontys notion ofincarnate intentionality, and this allows him to pose the question of thesocial determinants of the understanding that is incorporated in the con-structive/classificatory operations of the body. Bourdieu is thereby ableto focus on the social imperatives that are encoded and incorporated inthe generative schemes of the body through the work of socialization:

One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by thehidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instil a whole cos-mology, through injunctions as insignificant as sit up straight, or dont

hold your knife in your left hand, and inscribe the most fundamental prin-ciples of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous detailsof bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond thereach of consciousness and explicit statement.25

Like Merleau-Pontys notion of the habituated body, the habitus denotesa structured pattern of responses and adaptations rooted in the practicalintentionality of the body. Yet because Bourdieu historicizes the questionof the structuring of bodily intentionality, it becomes possible to obtaina critical perspective on the social forces which are at work in deter-

mining the structures of habituated action. The habitus thereforeprovides the key to the durability of structures of domination and socialdivisions. The body, Bourdieu argues, is in the social world but thesocial world is in the body (in the form of hexis or eidos). The verystructures of the world are present in the structures (or better, the cog-nitive schemata) that agents put to work in order to understand it.26

Bourdieus thesis, in simple terms, is that the objective life-chances ofindividuals are incorporated in the form of projects, goals, aspirations,and perceptions which make up the habitus. Because they are able to

be internalized in the form of class- or group-specific aspirations, struc-tural social disadvantages are able to be transformed into relativelydurable dispositions that can be transmitted intergenerationally.Bourdieu is therefore able to dispense with all accounts of ideology

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which focus on false belief (or voluntary servitude). The complicityof the dominated with the conditions of their subordination is not tobe understood, Bourdieu argues, in terms of a conscious and deliberate

act; it is rather the effect of a power, which has durably inscribed itselfin the bodies of the dominated in the form of schemes of perception anddispositions.27 The habitus is not to be understood in a mechanisticsense, however. Social disadvantages are incorporated in the form ofclass- and group-specific schemes ofpractical-bodily understanding,which generate projects, aspirations, and perceptions. Social inequali-ties are reproduced because these projects and aspirations are adjustedto the social conditions of their formation.28

The critique of scholarly reason

Wittgensteins thesis, as we saw, was the claim that social context, ratherthan mental states or representations, is the primary locus and deter-minant of linguistic meaning. Merleau-Pontys thesis was that theprimary locus of cognitive synthesis is not a disembodied consciousness,but is rather generated through the practical intentionality of the livedbody. These theoretical innovations, for Bourdieu, furnish the tools fora social theory free of the errors of intellectualism, and of the subjec-tivism vs. objectivism dichotomy of its recent past, which characterizessocial action either as a free, presupposition-less, conscious choice, or amechanical execution of structural laws. Bourdieus critique of schol-arly reason, I now want to argue, is able to ground the Wittgensteiniancritique of the magical properties attributed to mental states, andMerleau-Pontys critique of the disembodied consciousness, by showinghow these philosophical errors arise in a failure to reflect on the (social)limits of reason.

It is Merleau-Ponty, in fact, who provides the initial clue to this

analysis. In the final section of The Phenomenology of Perception,Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the accounts of class consciousnessgiven by historical materialism, on the one hand, and by Sartre, on theother. Merleau-Ponty perceptively presents these positions as the social-theoretic form of the dualism of intellectualism and empiricism. Hence,for Sartre, the emergence of class consciousness is only conceivable asa purely presupposition-less, free, conscious act. For historical material-ism, on the other hand, class consciousness is explicable solely as ablind or mechanical effect exerted at a particular point in the develop-

ment of the forces of production. Merleau-Ponty argues that bothpositions miss the way that class consciousness emerges from a certainway of existing (as proletarian or bourgeois), or, in other words,from a certain pattern of interaction with society and world which

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motivates revolutionary or counter-revolutionary projects.29 What ismost significant in this analysis, however, is Merleau-Pontys descriptionof the Sartrean error. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty charges, transforms an

existential project, which is lived ambiguously, into a pure intellectualproject, deriving from a pure act of consciousness. This transformation,Merleau-Ponty continues, itselfpossesses an existential basis in the lifesituation of the intellectual:

Even the decision to make oneself into a revolutionary without motive, andby an act of pure freedom, must still express a certain way of being in thenatural and social world, which is typically that of an intellectual. [Theintellectual] only links up with the working class from out of his situationas an intellectual.30

Sartres transformation of the existential revolutionary project into anintellectual project, Merleau-Ponty is here suggesting, is attributable tothe particular life-conditions which determine how the intellectualexperiences the revolutionary situation. Because he fails to reflect onthose conditions, Sartre generalizes what is unique to the existential situ-ation of an intellectual into a universal theory of what constitutes classconsciousness. The basis of Merleau-Pontys critique, then, is that Sartrehas unwittingly projected a mode of understanding which is unique tothe existential situation of an intellectual into the non-scholastic world,with the result that the logic of the emergence of class consciousness atthe level of (non-intellectual) practice is obscured.

According to Bourdieu, this error is liable to occur in any theoreti-cal inquiry which fails to reflect on the constraints (in effect, backgroundconditions) under which theoretical comprehension takes place. Just as,for Kant, rationalism tends to situate the principle of its judgements,not in itself, but in its object, so scholarly reason imputes to its objectthat which belongs to the manner of comprehending it, thereby, as inSartres account of class consciousness, presenting as a general theory

of social action what is in fact distinctive of the scholarly relation to theworld.31 We have already seen another pervasive form of this error inthe slippage from rules as statistical regularities to rules as active forceswithin social practice. Another variant is to be found in rational actortheory, insofar as it explains practices as the result of conscious decisionsor intentions having economic calculation as their basis.32 The purposeof the critique of scholarly reason is to show how these errors can betraced to a failure to reflect on the social conditions of possibility oftheoretical comprehension. This is akin to transcendental inquiry in that

it seeks to obtain a theoretical point of view on the theoretical pointof view, in order to make possible a reflection on the social presuppo-sitions which structure theoretical comprehension presuppositionswhich, according to Bourdieu, are based on the fact which is in a sense

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too evident, that the scholar (ethnologist, sociologist, historian) is not,with regard to the situation and the conduct that he/she observes andanalyses, in the position of an acting agent (agent agissant), engaged in

action, with an investment in the games and stakes.33The most important social presuppositions which structure theor-etical comprehension, according to Bourdieu, are those which concernthe bracketing of temporal urgency and economic necessity. WhatBourdieu refers to as the scholastic fallacy derives from a projectionof modes of understanding, for which these social presuppositionsfunction as conditions of possibility, into the day-to-day activities ofsocial agents. The ethnologist, for example, is able to represent gift-giving as the execution of an underlying formula because theoretical

comprehension takes place in conditions in which the uncertaintyderiving from the temporal unfolding of day-to-day practice is brack-eted. Similarly, the intellectuals representation of the emergence of classconsciousness as a decision ex nihilo has for its condition of possibilitythe bracketing of the existential situation of the worker, for whom therevolutionary project matures in the immediacy (and urgency) of her orhis life-experience of the economic process. The social conditions ofpossibility of scholarly reason thus constitute what Bourdieu calls anepistemic doxa. This is intended to express the idea that philosophers,sociologists and historians typically leave in a state of unthought(impens, doxa) the presuppositions of their thought, that is, the socialconditions of possibility of the scholastic point of view and the un-conscious dispositions, productive of unconscious theses, which areacquired through an academic or scholastic experience.34

The point of the critique of scholarly reason within the wider frame-work of Bourdieus theory is to call attention to the inherent risks offalse universalization, which occurs when the theorist forgets how hisor her own standpoint is itself structured by social conditions. Thedanger this poses is not, however, merely of theoretical import. Bourdieu

believes that there are always also political implications attached to theprojection of the theoretical viewpoint into social practice. This isclearest in the case of moral-practical reason, and in particular inHabermass communicative ethics, where the effort to root communi-cative rationality in the structures of language suppresses the questionof the social conditions which make possible a capacity for systematizedmoral judgements.35 Bourdieus perspective, in contrast, is able touncover the limits to the universality of communicative rationalitystemming from the unequal distribution of the social, cultural and

material means which make free and equal participation in public dis-course possible. Bourdieu thus urges that we work to universalize theconditions of access to universality.36 The critique of scholarly reasonthus takes the form of a constant vigilance, in which we are recurrently

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called back from the temptation to mistake the universalization of theor-etical equality with the universalization of the social conditions whichwould give rise to genuine equality in practice.

Bourdieu and critical theory

Bourdieus theory has consistently been criticized for its apparent failureto account for agent reflexivity, and this critique has, unsurprisingly,figured particularly strongly in the reception of Bourdieus work bytheorists sympathetic to critical social theory. Bourdieus account of howstructural inequalities are reproduced through socialization in a habitus,

it is argued, robs agents of the practical reflexivity which enables themto reflect upon the dispositions which they have been socialized into andto criticize the effects of social and cultural power. James Bohman hasrecently forcefully restated this objection. He argues that Bourdieusaccount of how structures of domination are reproduced by socializa-tion in a habitus effectively turns social agents into cultural dupes.37

Bourdieus account of how inculcated dispositions reproduce structuraldisadvantages fails to come to terms with the possibilities of interpre-tation and reinterpretation of cultural meanings, which often occur inways that contest current identities and practices. Bourdieus socialactors will be symbolic fools, Bohman argues, unless they can beginto reflect upon and thus to transform the dispositions that they havebeen socialized into, at least one at a time.38 This charge, as I will argueshortly, rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that thehabitus works to adjust projects and aspirations to structural pos-sibilities. Yet the misunderstanding is itself deeply significant, since it restsupon the typical error which consists in the projection of the theoreti-cal point of view into practice. Critical theorists, in their critique ofBourdieu, have typically confused agent reflexivity with intellectualreflection. That is to say, they have conflated the adoption of a criticalstance to social conditions with the adoption of a scholastic point ofview on social practice. To see this more clearly, we need to look a littlemore closely at how the habitus works.

The charge that Bourdieu portrays social agents as cultural dupessuggests that the habitus is to be understood on the Parsonian model ofthe internalization of social norms. According to this model, the dispo-sitions which make up the habitus would be seen as internalized formsof social and cultural power, which agents unthinkingly sustain and

reproduce by behaving as they have been socialized to behave. This hasoften been thought to be implicit in Bourdieus account of how thepossibilities/impossibilities, freedoms/necessities, and opportunities/prohibitions inscribed in objective conditions generate dispositions

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objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adaptedto their demands.39 Yet everything depends on what we take adaptationto mean here, and in particular whether we understand the adjustment

between objective conditions and the habitus to occur at the level of theconstructed identities of agents or more properly at the level of the con-sequences of the strategies adopted by subordinate groups for dealingwith the oppressive social conditions in which they find themselves. Itis the latter possibility, I believe, which reflects Bourdieus own inten-tions, and it is this option which allows Bourdieu to avoid the falsedilemma of critical theorists, in which social agents are to be seen eitheras pre-programmed machines who blindly reproduce the conditions oftheir existence, or as agents who are able to extricate themselves from

practice in order to evaluate their commitments from the perspective ofpure, self-conscious freedom. The central point at issue here has beeninsightfully developed in the analyses of so-called resistance theorists.40

These theorists have shown convincingly how it is possible to conceivethe members of subordinated social groups as intelligent, reflexiveagents possessed of penetrating insights into the oppressive nature ofthe social conditions in which they live. And yet, at the same time, weneed to see how the complex strategies adopted by the oppressed onthe basis of their critical insights into the social conditions whichoppress them to cope with the harsh conditions of their existence,make them active agents in the intergenerational transmission of struc-tural disadvantages.41 Thus, in Paul Williss hugely influential study, thecounter-school culture of working-class boys (the lads) is seen to followfrom insightful penetrations of the prevailing ideology of the school,which is predicated on a denial of the connection between educationalopportunities and class position. And yet the very strategies which theseboys create and develop on the basis of their critical insights lead themtowards a free affirmation of a life of manual labour (where free heresignifies that it has nothing to do with blind conditioning or determi-

nation by social forces). It is ironically in the form of creative penetra-tions that cultures live their own damnation and that, for instance, agood section of working-class kids condemn themselves to a future inmanual work.42 Similarly, in Philippe Bourgoiss study, the streetculture of resistance developed by young, ghettoized Puerto Ricans inEast Harlem can be seen to emerge from penetrating insights into theconditions of extreme economic and social marginalization in whichthese agents live. And yet the very strategies that define street culture,its oppositional celebration of street marginality, generate forms of

action which entrench and stabilize the intense marginalization of thegroups concerned. The strategies of resistance creatively developed bysubordinated groups ironically play an active role in sustaining andreproducing structural disadvantages.

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These analyses, I suggest, give us an insight into how the habitusworks, and, in particular, they demonstrate why it is thoroughly mis-leading to portray the adjustment between objective conditions and

projects/aspirations that characterizes the habitus as a functionalistthesis.43 The theory of the habitus need not (and, if my reading ofBourdieu is correct, does not) portray social agents as passive recipientsof social-structural forces, which somehow reproduce themselves bypre-programming agents with certain dispositions. The theory of thehabitus is not incompatible with the view that all social agents are reflex-ive agents who, in Anthony Giddenss words, know a great deal aboutthe conditions and consequences of what they do in their day-to-daylives.44 The central purpose of the habitus is to point to the way that

the creative strategies of subordinate groups are constructed within andrespond to a social context, and their strategies will have consequenceswithin this context which the groups in question cannot control.

According to the interpretation I have offered, then, Bourdieu doessee subordinated groups as able to reflect critically on social conditions,and their critical insights are lived out practically in the oppositionalstrategies which these groups develop. But and this is the decisive point the type of contestation in question does not take the form of intel-lectual reflection. It is here that we can see how, in their critique ofBourdieu, critical theorists have projected the scholastic point of viewinto practice, and, unsurprisingly, they have done so in a way whichframes the distinction between cultural conditioning and agent reflex-ivity in terms of the classic dichotomy between blind determination bysocial forces and free, presupposition-less, self-conscious choice. Thepoint to be made here is that critical theorists have conflated criticalreflexivity with the adoption of the detached theoretical standpointwhich defines scholarly reason. Because they define reflexivity as theor-etical detachment, critical theorists have fallen prey to the illusion thatresistance to the operations of social and cultural power must, and

indeed can only, stem from a free, self-conscious decision originating inan act of theoretical comprehension. Hence, in his critique of Bourdieu,Hans Herbert Kgler has argued that Bourdieu effectively eliminates anypossibility of power-critical praxis because he misses the differencebetween imposed structures that need to be rejected and, on the otherhand, self-chosen and consciously accepted actions and relations.45

This same dichotomy is at work in James Bohmans charge thatBourdieus failure to ascribe to social agents that type of detached, dis-cursive reflexivity proper to theoretical comprehension implies a vision

of social agents as cultural dupes. Bohmans error stems from theguiding thesis that practical reflexivity requires practical agency forreasoning participants in social discourse that is much like whatBourdieu grants to the sociological theorist.46 But, as my reading of

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resistance theorists sought to demonstrate, subordinated agents doreflect upon social conditions, and they do criticize them, but they doso by responding practically to the demands of the social conditions in

which they find themselves they do not and cannot do so by adoptinga detached theoretical point of view on social practice. This is notbecause they lack a certain attribute or reflective capacity which socialtheorists possess. Rather, and as Bourdieu has consistently stressed, it isbecause social agents are engaged in and relate to the demands, pos-sibilities and prohibitions of practice differently than social theorists.That type of critical reflection which critical theorists chide Bourdieufor failing to ascribe to social agents, is precisely that standpoint whichis rooted in the social conditions that are the conditions of possibility

of detached theoretical comprehension. Critical theorists introduce intothe object the intellectual relation to the object by framing reflectiveagency in terms of an opposition between blind, imposed socialdetermination and a free consciousness able to detach itself from itspractical engagements so as to see them from the outside (that is, bereftof their social-economic urgency and their temporal unfolding).Bourdieu portrays this error as follows:

Projecting into the perception of the social world the unthought contentinherent in his position in that world, that is, the monopoly of thought

which he is granted de facto by the social division of labour and whichleads him to identify the work of thought with an effort of expression andverbalization in speech and writing . . . the thinker betrays his secret con-viction that action is fully performed only when it is understood, inter-preted, expressed, by identifying the implicit with the unthought and bydenying the status of authentic thought to the tacit and practical thoughtthat is inherent in all sensible action.47

Because they have failed to reflect on the social conditions of possibilityof scholarly reason, then, critical theorists have equated agent reflex-ivity with the scholastic point of view on practice. They have therebyoverlooked the fact that reflexivity is embedded practically in thestrategies of resistance of subordinate groups who, nevertheless, cannoteffectively challenge power relations. Critical theorists therefore repeatthe error of equating the implicit with the unthought, as though sub-ordinated individuals are blind dupes to social forces unless they areable to express their critical insights in the typically detached discursivemode of academic intellectuals. This may, of course, be entirely counterto the intentions of the followers of Habermas themselves, yet the impli-cations are all too evident in Bohmans equation of agent reflexivity with

discourse, a reflexive language use in which speakers consider andthematize the reasons or claims that are made explicitly or implicitly inspeech.48 To present this type of intellectual reflection as a model ofpractical reflexivity is surely to assume that subordinated groups

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primarily encounter dominant discourse as a thesis in academic debate,rather than as the hard reality of their experiential situation whichdemands a practical (not a theoretical) response. The opposition of

subordinated groups to the dominant discourse does not take the formof a thematization of reasons, it is most often embedded in practicalstrategies: in the purposeful disruption of schooling (Williss lads), or,in dead-end, service-sector jobs, by foot-dragging, attitudinal opposi-tion and petty theft.49 To identify critical reflexivity with discursivechallenge is to assume that subordinated groups stand in the samerelation to the dominant discourse as does the academic theorist, forwhom the dominant discourse is a claim to normative truth. This is not,and cannot be, the nature of the dominant discourse for the subordi-

nated group, however. The members of the latter do not experience thedominant discourse primarily as a free-floating assertion, but rather asconcretely embedded in social customs and institutions which framepossibilities and constraints of action and thus demand a practicalresponse. It is, then, the projection of scholarly reason into practice,through a neglect of its social conditions of possibility, that is the groundof critical theorists conflation of critical reflexivity with intellectualdetachment. The demand that social agents be conceived as reflexivethus slides into the requirement that social agents learn to think likeacademic intellectuals.

Granted, then, that Habermasian critical theorists go wrong in con-ceiving power-critical praxis on the model of intellectual reflection, howshould we conceive of a unity of theory and practice which would befree of these errors? In his suggestions on this topic, I now want to argue,Bourdieu draws the wrong conclusions from his critique of scholarlyreason. In Practical Reason, Bourdieu called for a realpolitik of reason,which takes the form of a political struggle aimed at endowing reasonand freedom with the properly political instruments.50 The goal of thisstruggle is to extend the social conditions of possibility of scholarly

reason beyond their narrow confines within academic and scientificinstitutions. However indispensable this may be, it is clear that thisdelineation of the critical task rests on an approach from the top down-wards; the removal of conditions of domination is here seen to rest onthe effectiveness of efforts of social engineering that have little to dowith practical struggle. This one might say elitist tendency inBourdieus work has also surfaced in his more explicitly politicalwritings where, as Alex Callinicos has argued, Bourdieu portrays neolib-eralism as a programme imposed by elites who are separated from the

society they are trying to transform.51 Neoliberalism is thus understoodas a theory effect (Bourdieus term for the performative character oftheory) of a certain intellectual discourse, rather than as bound up withthe structural dynamics of capitalism. This reading pushes Bourdieu

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towards a conception of social struggle as a battle among elites for thecontrol of the theory effect. This tendency is also accentuated in Mdi-tations pascaliennes, where Bourdieu calls for the deployment of the

relative autonomy of the symbolic order, in order to exploit the marginsof freedom that arise in the dis-adjustment of projects and aspirationsto the objective conditions of the habitus.52 Here again we are given atop downwards solution where, it seems, an elite of knowledgeabletheorists is charged with bringing subordinated actors to critical con-sciousness behind their backs, as it were. This, again, is far from sug-gestive of an optimism on Bourdieus part concerning the possibilitiesof a genuine creative interaction of theory and practice.

I want to suggest, however, that an alternative understanding of

theorypractice interaction is opened up by Bourdieus own critique ofscholarly reason, which both avoids the errors of critical theorists falseprojection of intellectual comprehension into social practice, and evadesthe elitist connotations implicit in Bourdieus own account. In order toreconstruct this alternative view, we need to focus on the dynamics ofwhat Merleau-Ponty characterized as the existential situation. Thenotion of the existential situation, as we saw, calls attention to the factthat, for social agents, class consciousness does not emerge ex nihilo.Rather, it germinates in the day-to-day experiences of workers lives.This implies that the critical insight available to the theorist will also beaccessible to social agents themselves, but in non-discursive form. Whatthe social theorist, in an attitude of theoretical contemplation, is able toperceive as the reproduction of structural disadvantages, will be presentto the social agent in the form of experiential tensions and conflicts,typically in the form of disjunctions between aspirations and life-chances, or between life-projects and objective possibilities. Here, itseems, the theorist is able to play a role which is different from thatimplied in Bourdieus notion of the theory effect. The theorist is hereengaged, not in an exploitation of symbolic autonomy, but rather inexistential clarification. The task of theory is here to offer to socialagents an interpretation of the experiential tensions and conflicts whichcharacterize the existential situation. This idea points towards the pos-sibility of a dynamic interaction of theoretical comprehension andsituated experience, in which theory informs and develops experiencethrough existential clarification and theory, in turn, takes its cue fromthe tensions and conflicts which are the latent, practical form of thecritical insights of theory.

Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason, as I have tried to show,

furnishes the basis for a plausible response to the central objections of(Habermasian) critical theorists to his work. Furthermore, Bourdieuidentifies a central weakness in the work of proponents of discursivereflexivity, which stems from the projection of the standpoint of

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intellectual comprehension into social practice. This causes criticaltheorists to miss the distinctive logic of practical resistance. The latteronly comes into view if we are able to reflect critically on the social con-

ditions of possibility of theoretical comprehension. In the absence of thisself-reflection, as Bourdieu has convincingly shown, there is aninevitable tendency to dichotomize social action, as the work either ofblind forces or of free, self-conscious insight; social agents are con-ceived either as mindless automata or as intellectual theorists withoutpractical engagements. As I argued, critical reflexivity typically workswithin (non-scholastic) practice in the form of practical strategies, whichembody a concrete, practical rejection of the imperatives of dominantgroups. Thus when critical theorists equate practical reflexivity with dis-

cursive contestation, they are typically, and unwittingly, demanding theuniversalization of those social conditions of existence (the structures ofsocialization, as well as the institutional conditions which bracketeconomic and temporal urgency) which are the conditions of possibilityof the existence of certain social agents as intellectual theorists. Criticaltheorists are thereby led to confuse the unity of theory and practice withthe projection of the point of view of intellectual comprehension intosocial practice. I argued, however, that Bourdieus notion of the theoryeffect will not suffice either, since it sacrifices genuine interaction fortheoretical manipulation. The idea of existential clarification, I believe,may point to a more appropriate beginning point for extendingBourdieus theoretical insights in the form of a genuine social-politicalproject.

Social Science Department, Borough of ManhattanCommunity College, CUNY, New York, USA

Notes

1 Pierre Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997); PracticalReason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1998).

2 See Mditations pascaliennes, p. 9, where Bourdieu explicitly identifies histheoretical project as a form of Kantian critique.

3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell,1969), p. 4.

4 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 39.

5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe(Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 199.

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6 Jacques Bouveresse, Rules, Dispositions and the Habitus, in R. Shuster-man (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1972),

110. See also 204.8 Philosophical Investigations, 219.9 Axel Honneth, for example, argues that Bourdieus social-theoretic

concepts provide for the assertion of a profit motive that penetrates theentire social world. See his The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms, inDie zerissene Welt des Sozialen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990),p. 160.

10 Bourdieu himself has recently protested that this charge of utilitarianism isthe exact contrary of his express theoretical intentions. See his PracticalReason, p. 79.

11 I borrow this term from David Bloor, in his Wittgenstein, Rules and Insti-tutions (London: Routledge, 1997), chapter 1.12 See Philosophical Investigations, 68, 71, 99.13 Practical Reason, p. 132.14 Strategies, furthermore, are not to be conceived in terms of utilitarian calcu-

lation. In his analysis of Kabyle society, for example, Bourdieu argues thatstrategies are largely governed by a sense of honour. The sense of honourguides a series of complex practical manoeuvres (riposte, delay, aggression,retaliation), which are to be understood as practical interpretations andreinterpretations of its meaning, yet whose success can never be guaran-

teed.15 See, for example, the essays in Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A CriticalReader.

16 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 93, 94.17 ibid., 89, 97.18 Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 172.19 An exemplary account of the importance of the body in Merleau-Pontys

critique of intellectualism can be found in M. C. Dillon, Merleau-PontysOntology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), chapter 8.

20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La phnomnologie de la perception (Paris:Gallimard, 1945), pp. 678.

21 ibid., p. 103.22 ibid., p. 166.23 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 164.24 ibid., p. 175.25 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 69.26 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 180.27 ibid., p. 205.28 A common misunderstanding of how this adjustment is supposed to work

is the basis of a familiar critique of Bourdieu. I will return to this in the finalsection.

29 Revolutionary slogans, Merleau-Ponty suggests, crystallize what is latentin workers lives at large: Phnomenologie de la perception, p. 508.

30 ibid., p. 510.31 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 67.

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32 See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 50.33 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 68.34 Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 129.

35 See Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, pp. 80ff.36 Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 137.37 James Bohman, Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint: Agency in

Bourdieus Theory of Practice, in Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A CriticalReader, p. 135.

38 ibid., p. 136.39 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 54.40 In particular, Paul Willis, in his Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon

House, 1977), and Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crackin El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bourdieu

himself has perceptively noted that the difficulty of thinking beyond thedilemma of mechanistic determination versus pure, conscious freedom isitself reflected in the alternative characterizations of ethnographers workingwithin this vein as either resistance theorists or reproduction theorists, asthough the strategies of subordinate groups have to be fitted into the grandeither/or of presupposition-less freedom and blind determination of socialforces. See Mditations pascaliennes, p. 274.

41 Bourgois, In Search of Respect, p. 9.42 Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 174.43 Honneth commits this error in his The Fragmented World of Symbolic

Forms, pp. 1767.44 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1984), p. 281.

45 Hans Herbert Kgler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics afterGadamer and Foucault, trans. P. Hendrickson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1996), p. 225.

46 Bohman, Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint, p. 145.47 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 36.48 Bohman, Practical Reason and Cultural Constraints, p. 140. Bohman

does, however, recognize the necessity of creating an institutional basis forthe exercise of discursive reflexivity, and this pushes him towards Bourdieuscall for a realpolitik of reason, in which the extension of scholarly reasonbecomes a social-political project rather than a theoretical presupposition.See Bourdieu, Practical Reason, pp. 13940.

49 Bourgois, In Search of Respect, p. 155.50 Bourdieu, Practical Reason, pp. 13940.51 See Alex Callinicos, Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre

Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, New Left Review 236 (1999): 77102(90). See also the essays by Pierre Bourdieu in Contre-feux (Paris: EditionsRaisons dAgir, 1998).

52 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, pp. 276ff.

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