The three forms of theoretical knowledge (Pierre Bourdieu)

and methods Théorie et méthodes Theory PIERRE BOURDIEU The three forms of theoretical knowledge The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical knowledge, each of which implies a set of (usually tacit) anthropological theses The only thing these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all stand in opposition to practical knowledge The mode of knowledge we shall term phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of currently active schools, &dquo;interactionist&dquo; or &dquo;ethnomethodological&dquo;) makes explicit primary experience of the social world: perception of the social world as natural and selfevident is not self-reflective by definition and excludes all interrogation about its own conditions of possibility At a second level, objectivist knowledge (of which the structuralist hermeneutic constitutes a particular case) constructs the objective relations (e.g economic or linguistic) structuring not only practices but representations of practices and in particular primary knowledge, practical and tacit, of the familiar world, by means of a break with this primary knowledge and, hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer upon the social world its self-evident and natural character Objectivist knowledge can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and the objective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of these structures is absent), provided it poses the very problem doxic experience of the social world excludes by definition, namely the problem of the (specific) conditions under which this experience is possible Thirdly, what we might refer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned not only with the system of objective relations constructed by the objectivist form of knowledge, but also with the dialectical relationships between these objective structures and the structured dispositions which they produce and which tend to reproduce them, i.e the dual process of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality This knowledge presupposes a break with the objectivist form of knowledge, that is, it presupposes investigation into the conditions of possibility and, consequently, into the limits of the objectivistic viewpoint which grasps practices from the outside, as a fait accompli, rather than 53 54 construct their generative principle by placing itself inside the process of their accomplishment The praxeological form of knowledge may appear to be a regression to the phenomenological mode of knowledge, while the implied critique of objectivism is liable to be confused with the critique of scientific objectification formulated by naive humanism in the name of lived experience and the rights of subjectivity This is so because it is the product of a double theoretical movement of translation : in effect, it carries out a second reversal of the problematic that objective science of the social world, seen as a system of objective relationships, constituted by posing those problems which practical experience and the phenomenological analysis of that experience exclude Just as objectivist knowledge poses the problem of the conditions of possibility of practical experience, thereby demonstrating that this experience is defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it does not pose this problem, so praxeological knowledge sets objectivist knowledge on its feet by posing the problem of the conditions of possibility of this problem (theoretical, but also social conditions) and, at the same time, makes it apparent that objectivist knowledge is defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it excludes this problem Being set up in opposition to practical perception of the social world, objectivist knowledge is distracted from the task of constructing the theory of practical knowledge of the social world Praxeological knowledge does not cancel out the gains accruing from objectivist knowledge, rather it conserves and transcends them by integrating that which this knowledge had to exclude in order to obtain them We must pause for a moment on what is objectivism’s field par excellence, that of semiology Just as Saussure postulates that language is an autonomous object, irreducible to its concrete actualizations, that is to the speechbehaviour it makes possible, so Panofsky establishes that what he calls, following Alois Riegl, Kunstwollen, in other words, roughly, the objective meaning of a work 1, is no more reducible to the artist’s &dquo;will&dquo; than it is to the &dquo;will of the age&dquo; or to the lived experiences which the work arouses in the spectator In so doing, both Saussure and Panofsky carry out, with regard to speech, that particular form of behaviour, and to works of art, those particular products of action, the operation which builds objectivist science by building a system of objective relations that are as irreducible to the practices within which they are realized and manifested as they are to the intentions of the subjects, and to any awareness these may have of its constraints or its Saussure shows that the true medium of communication between two logic is agents not speech, as an immediate datum grasped in its observable materiality, but language, as the structure of objective relations making both the "That which ’presents itself’, not to us, but objectively, as the ultimate and definitive meaning of the artistic phenomenon" (E Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens", Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14, 1920, pp 321-339) 55 production and decoding of speech possible Similarly, Panofsky shows that iconological interpretation treats the tangible properties of the work of art, with the affective experiences it arouses, as mere &dquo;cultural symptoms&dquo;, which only fully yield up their meaning to a reading armed with the cultural code the creator himself has &dquo;involved&dquo; in his work Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo; presupposes an unconscious decoding operation which can only be perfectly adequate where the competence which one of the agents engages in his practice or in his works is identical to that objectively engaged by the other agent in his perception of this practice or work; in other words, in the particular case in which the coding in the sense of the transformation of a subjective meaning into a practice or a work - coincides with the symetrical decoding operation Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo;, a decoding act that does not recognize itself as such, is only possible (and only really accomplished) in the particular case where the historical code which makes the (unconscious) act of decoding possible, is completely mastered (as a cultivated disposition) by the perceiving agent and coincides with the code which has (as a cultivated disposition) made the production of the perceived practice or work possible Partial or total misunderstanding is the rule in all other cases, the illusion of immediate comprehension leading to illusory comprehension, that of ethnocentrism, in the sense of a code interference: in short, when its sole cognitive tool is what Husserl termed the &dquo; intentional transfer into the Other&dquo;, even the most &dquo;comprehensive&dquo; interpretation is liable to amount to no more than a particularly irreproachable form of ethnocentrism As the heirs to an intellectual heritage, that of linguistics, whose conditions of production they are not always able to reproduce, structuralist anthropologists have all too often contented themselves with literal translations of linguistic terms dissociated from the structure from which they derived their original meaning, sparing themselves the trouble of undertaking their own epistemological reflection on the conditions and the limits of the validity of the transposition of the Saussurian construction It is noteworthy, for example, that, with the exception of Sapir, who was predisposed by his dual formation as linguist and anthropologist to raise the problem of the relationship between culture and language, no anthropologist has attempted to bring out all the implications of the homology (which Leslie White is virtually alone in formulating explicitly) between two oppositions, language and speech on one side culture, and behaviour or works on the other side Objectivism states that immediate communication is possible if, and only if, the agents are objectively disposed in such a way that they associate the same meaning with the same sign (speech, practice or work) and the same sign with the same meaning or, to put it another way, if they are objectively disposed in such a way that, in their coding and decoding operations, i.e in their practices and their interpretations, they both refer to one and the same system of constant relations, independent of individual consciousness or wills and irreducible to their execution in the form of practices or works (code or cipher) - 56 In so doing, objectivism does not deny the phenomenological analysis of primary experience of the social world and of the immediate comprehension of speech or actions: it merely sets the limits of its validity by establishing the particular conditions within which it is possible and which phenomenological analysis leaves out of account The social sciences have, necessarily, to quote Husserl, &dquo;a thematics with a consistently dual orientation, a thematics consistently linking theory of the scientific field with a theory of the knowledge of that theory&dquo; 2; in other words, epistemological reflection on the conditions of possibility of the anthropological sciences forms an integral part of the anthropological sciences That is so firstly because a science which has as its very object that which makes the science possible, such as language or culture, can only constitute itself by the constitution of its own conditions of possibility; but it is also because complete knowledge of the conditions of the science, that is, of the operations whereby this science acquires symbolic mastery of a language, a myth or a rite, implies the knowledge of practical comprehension: the practical knowledge accomplishes the same operations, though in absolute ignorance of the general and particular conditions within which it is possible and which confer its particularity upon it We have only to examine the theoretical operations whereby Saussure builds up linguistics as a science, by treating language as an autonomous object, distinct from its materializations in speech, in order to reveal the presuppositions implicit in any form of knowledge which treats practices or works as symbolic facts to be decoded and, more generally, which treats them as accomplished facts rather than as practices Although one could invoke the existence of dead languages or of mutism in old age as demonstrating that it is possible for speech to disappear while language remains preserved, although language faults reveal language as constituting the objective norms underlying speech (were it otherwise, any language fault would modify the language and there would be no language faults), speech appears to be the condition of language, as much from an individual as from a collective point of view, since language cannot be apprehended outside of speech, because language is learnt by means of speech, and because speech lies at the origin of innovations in and transformations of language But the priority of the two processes mentioned is merely chronological; when one leaves the field of individual or collective history, as does objectivist hermeneutics, in order to inquire into the logical conditions of decoding, the relationship is turned on its head : language is the condition of the intelligibility of speech, that is the mediation which, ensuring the identity of the associations of sounds and concepts operated by the senders and receivers, guarantees mutual comprehension So, from this point of view, that of intelligibility, speech is the product of language It follows that, because it is developed from the strictly intellec- E Husserl, Logique formelle France, 1965, p 52 F de et logique transcendentale, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, Payot, 1960, pp 37-38 57 tualist point of view, that of decoding, Saussurian linguistics gives priority to the structure of signs, that is, to the relations between them, to the detriment of their practical functions, which are never reducible, as structuralism tacitly assumes, to functions of communication or knowledge: those practices apparently most strictly oriented towards functions of communication for the sake of communication (the phatic function) or communication for the purposes of knowledge, such as feasts and ceremonies, ritual exchanges or, in a wholly different field, the circulation of scientific information, are always more or less openly oriented towards political or economic functions Structuralist linguistics bases the construction of the structural properties of the message as such, that is to say, as a system, on the assumption of an impersonal and interchangeable sender and receiver and on the ignorance of the functional properties that each message owes to its utilization within a certain social(>, structured interaction In fact, we know well that the symbolic interactions within any group depend, not only on the structure of the interaction group within which they occur 4, but also on the social structures within which the interacting agents are situated (e.g the class structure): consequently, it is probable that a measurement of symbolic exchanges which would enable us to distinguish, with Chapple and Coon 5, those who only originate, those who only respond and those who respond to the sending of the first group while originating with regard to the second group, would reveal, both on the level of a society in its entirety and inside a circumstantial group, the dependence of the structure of symbolic power relations upon the structure of political power relations The perfect competition model is just as unrealistic here as it is elsewhere, the market in symbolic goods also having its monopolies and its structures of domination In short, the moment one shifts from the structure of language to the functions it fulfills, that is, to the uses agents really make of it, one sees that knowledge of the code alone permits only a very imperfect mastery of the linguistic interactions actually carried out; as Luis Prieto observes, the meaning of a linguistic element depends at least as much on extra-linguistic as on linguistic factors, that is, on the context and situation in which it is employed It is as if, in the class of significates abstractly corresponding to a speech sound, the receiver &dquo;selected&dquo; the one that seemed to him to be compatible with the circumstances, such as he perceives them Which is another way of saying that the reception (and doubtless the emission too) largely depends on the objective structure of the relations between the objective positions in the social structure of the interacting agents (e.g competitive relations, objectively S Moscovici and M Plon, "Les situations-colloques : Observations théoriques et expérimentales", Bulletin de psychologie, jan 1966, pp 701-722 E D Chapple and C S Coon, Principles of anthropology, London, Jonathan Cape, 1947, p 283 L J Prieto, Principes de noologie, Paris, Mouton, 1964, and J C Pariente, "Vers un nouvel esprit linguistique", Critique, apr 1966, pp 334-358 58 antagonistic relations or power and authority relationships, etc.), for it is this by the interactions observed structure which determines the form assumed within a particular conjuncture Nothing demonstrates better the inappropriateness of the theory of practice haunting linguistic (and also anthropological) structuralism than its inability to integrate, into this theory, all that pertains to execution, as Saussure puts it The foundations of this inability reside in the incapacity to think of speech and, more generally, of practice otherwise than as execution Objectivism constructs a theory of practice (as execution), but only as a negative sub-product or, one might say, as a refuse immediately thrown away, left over from the construction of language or culture as systems of objective relations So, with the aim of delimiting, within language facts, the &dquo;field of language&dquo; and of isolating &dquo;a well defined object&dquo;, &dquo;an object capable of being studied seperately&dquo;, &dquo;with a homogeneous nature&dquo;, Saussure rejects the &dquo;physical aspect of communication&dquo;, that is, speech as a pre-constructed object, liable to obstruct the construction of language; then within the &dquo;speech circuit&dquo;, he isolates what he terms the &dquo;executive aspect &dquo;, that is, speech as a constructed object, defined as the actualization of a certain meaning within a particular combination of sounds, which he finally eliminates by stating that &dquo;execution is never carried out by the collectivity&dquo;, but is &dquo;always individual&dquo; Thus, the same concept, that of speech, is divided by theoretical construction into a preconstructed datum, which is immediately observable and the very one against which the operation of theoretical construction is carried out, and a constructed object, the negative product of the operation whereby language as such is constituted or, better, which produces the two objects by producing the conflicting relationship within which and by which they are defined It would be easy to show that the construction of the concept of culture in the sense of cultural anthropology or of social structure (in RadcliffeBrown’s sense and that of social anthropology) also implies the construction of a notion of conduct as execution which coexists with the primary notion of conduct as simple behaviour taken at face value The extreme confusion of debates on the relationship between &dquo;culture&dquo; (or &dquo;social structures&dquo;) and conduct usually arises out of the fact that the constructed meaning of conduct and its implied theory of practice lead a kind of clandestine existence inside the discourse of both the defenders and the opponents of cultural anthropology In fact, the most virulent opponents of the notion of &dquo;cul- - "Neither is the psychological part of the circuit wholly responsible: the executive side is missing, for execution is never carried out by the collectivity Execution is always individual, and the individual is always its master: I shall call the executive side speaking (parole)" (F de Saussure, Course in general linguistics, New York, Philosophical Library, 1959, p 13) The most explicit formulation of the theory of speech as execution is certainly found in the work of Hjelmslev, who clearly reveals the various dimensions of the Saussurian opposition between language and speech, the former being institutional, social and "rigid", the other being executive, individual and "non-rigid" (L Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques, Copenhagen, Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturforlag, 1959, esp p 79) 59 ture&dquo;, such as Radcliffe-Brown, can only set over a naive realism against the realism of the ideas which turn &dquo;culture&dquo; into a transcendent and autonomous reality, which obeys only its own internal laws e The implicit state of its theory of practice is what protects objectivism against the only really decisive criticism, that which would be aimed at its theory of practice, the generator of all those metaphysical aberrations on the &dquo;locus of culture&dquo;, on the mode of existence of the &dquo;structure&dquo; or on the unconscious finality of the history of systems, not to mention the too famous &dquo;collective consciousness&dquo; Short of constructing practice other than negatively, that is, as execution, objectivism is condemned either only to record regularities, ignoring the whole "Let us consider what are the concrete, observable facts with which the social anthro- pologist is concerned If we set out to study, for example, the aboriginal inhabitants of a part of Australia, we find a certain number of individual human beings in a certain natural environment We can observe the acts of behaviour of these individuals, including of course their acts of speech, and the material products of past actions We not observe a "culture", since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction But direct observation does reveal to us that these human beings are connected by a complex network of social relations I use the term "social structure" to denote this network of actually existing relations" (A R Radcliffe-Brown, "On social structure", Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 70, 1940, pp 1-12) The reason for the extreme confusion surrounding debates on the if only in order to oppose notion of culture probably lies in the fact that most authors place them — concepts of very different epistemological status, such as culture and society or the individual or conduct, etc., on the same level The imaginary dialogue on the notion of culture presented by Clyde Kluckhohn and William H Kelly cf C Kluckhohn and W H ( Kelly, "The concept of culture", pp 78-105 in: R Linton (ed.), The science of man in the world crisis, New York, Columbia University Press, 1945) gives a more summary, though livelier image of this debate than that to be found in A L Kroeber and C Kluckhohn’s work, Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1952, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 67 (1) Leach has observed that, despite their apparent opposition, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown at least agree to consider each "society" or each "culture" (in their respective vocabularies) as a "totality made up of a number of discrete, empirical ’things’, of rather diverse kinds e g groups of people, ’institutions’, customs" or also as "an empirical whole made up of a limited number of readily identifiable parts", the comparison between different societies having the purpose of examining whether the "same kinds of parts" are to be found in all cases (E R Leach, Rethinking anthropology, London, Athlone Press, 1961, p 6) If we except those rare authors who confer on the notion of conduct a meaning that is rigorously defined by the operation constituting it as opposed to "culture" (for example, H D Laswell, who states that "if an act conforms to culture then it is conduct, if not, it is behaviour", H D Lasswell, "Collective autism as a consequence of culture contact", Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 4, 1935, pp 232-247) without drawing any conclusions from it, most of those who employ the opposition propose epistemologically discordant definitions of culture or of conduct, opposing a constructed object to a preconstructed datum, leaving the place of the second constructed object, namely practice, in the sense of execution, empty: thus and this is far from the worst example Harris opposes "cultural patterns" to "culturally patterned behaviours", as "what is constructed by the anthropologist" and "what members of a society observe or impose upon others" (M Harris, "Review of selected writings of Edward Sapir, language, culture and personality", Language 27 (3), 1951, pp 288-333) — — — — 60 question of the principle of their production, or to reify abstractions, by be they &dquo;culture&dquo;, &dquo;structures&dquo;, treating objects constructed by science &dquo;social classes&dquo;, &dquo;modes of production&dquo;, etc as autonomous realities, endowed with social efficacity, capable of acting as subjects responsible for historical actions or as a power capable of constraining practices Although it has the merit of rejecting the coarser forms of the realism of ideas, the hypothesis of the unconscious nonetheless tends to mask the contradictions arising out of the uncertainties of the theory of practice which &dquo;structural anthropology&dquo; accepts, if only by omission, and even worse, it may permit the restoration in the apparently secularized form of a structure that is structured without the aid of any structuring principle of the old entelechies of social metaphysics Unless, of course, one assumes, along with Durkheim, that none of the implicit rules constraining subjects &dquo;are to be found in their entirety in their applications by individuals, since they may even exist without actually being applied&dquo; 10, and consequently that the rules have - - - - the transcendent and permanent existence that Durkheim ascribes to all collective &dquo;realities&dquo;, it is impossible to escape the coarsest naiveties of legalism, which believes practices to be the product of obedience to norms, except by playing on the multiple meanings of the word rule: most often used in the sense of a social norm, expressly stated and explicitly recognized, as the moral or juridical law, sometimes in the sense of a theoretical model, a construction developed by science in order to explain practices, the word is also used, exceptionally, in the sense of a scheme (schème) (or a principle) that is immanent in practice, which should be considered implicit rather than unconscious, merely in order to signify that it exists in a practical state, in the practice of agents, and not in their consciousness One has only to re-read the following paragraph, from the preface of the second edition of Structures elenrerrtaires de la pat-eiiti (Elementary structures of kinslrip) dealing with the distinction between &dquo;preferential&dquo; and &dquo;prescriptive systems&dquo;, in which one may assume that the terms norm, rule or model are used with particular care: &dquo;Conversely, a system which recommends marriage with the mother’s brother’s daughter may be called prescriptive even if the rule is seldom observed, since what it says must be done The question of how far and in what proportion the members of a given society respect the norm is very interesting, but a different question to that of where this society should properly be placed in a typology It is sufficient to acknowledge the likelihood that awareness of the rule inflects choices ever so little in the prescribed direction, and that the percentage of conventional marriages is higher than would be the case if marriages were made at random, to be able to recognize what might be called a matrilateral ‘oper-ator’ at work in this society and acting as a pilot: certain alliances at least follow the path which it 10 E Durkheim, Les de France, 1956, p 11 règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris, Presses Universitaires 61 charts out for them, and this suffices to imprint a specific curve in the genealogical space ~( No doubt there will be not just one curve but a great number of local curves, merely incipient for the most part, however, and forming closed cycles only in rare and exceptional cases But the structural outlines which emerge here and there will be enough for the system to be used in making a probabilistic version of more rigid systems the notion of which is completely theoretical and in which marriage would conform rigorously to any rule the social group pleases to enunciate.&dquo; 11 This passage, as indeed the whole preface, is written in the language of norms, while Structural anthropology is written in the language of models, or if one prefers, of structures; this vocabulary is not entirely absent here, since the system of physico-mathematical metaphors on which the central passage is founded (&dquo;operator&dquo;, &dquo;certain alliances&dquo; &dquo;follow the path which it charts out for them&dquo;, &dquo;curvature&dquo; of the &dquo;genealogical space&dquo;, &dquo;structures&dquo;) evokes the logic of the theoretical model and the both declared and repudiated equivalence of model and norm : &dquo;A preferential system is prescriptive when envisaged at the model level, a prescriptive system must be preferential when envisaged on the level of reality.&dquo; 12 But for those who remember the passages in Structural anthropology on the relationship between language and kinship (e.g &dquo; ’Kinship systems’, like ’phonemic systems’, are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought &dquo;13) and the imperious flatness with which &dquo;cultural norms&dquo; and all the &dquo;rationalizations&dquo; or &dquo;secondary arguments&dquo; produced by the natives were rejected in favour of &dquo;unconscious tructures&dquo;, not to mention those passages where the universality of the rule lying at the origins of exogamy is affirmed, the concessions made here to &dquo;awareness of the rule&dquo;, and the dissociation from these rigid systems, whose notion is completely theoretical, may come as a surprise, as may this other passage taken from the same preface: &dquo;It is nonetheless true that the empirical reality of so-called prescriptive systems only takes on its full meaning when related to a theoretical mode worked out by the natives themselves prior to ethnologists.&dquo;11; or again: &dquo;Those who practise them know fully that the spirit of such systems cannot be reduced to the tautological proposition that each group obtains its women from ’givers’ and gives its daughters to ’takers’ They are also aware that marriage with the matrilateral cross cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter) provides the simplest illustration of the rule, the form most likely to guarantee its survival On the other hand, marriage with the patrilateral cross cousin (father’s sister’s daughter) would violate it irrevocably&dquo; 15 One must mention, here, a passage in which - 11 - C backs, 1969, 12 13 Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship, London, Social science p 33 (my italics) Ibid C Lévi-Strauss, Structural anthropology, London, Allen Lane, 1968, p 34 14 15 Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship, op cit., p 32 Ibid paper- Penguin Press, 62 Wittgenstein enumerates all the questions evaded by structural anthropology and doubtless, more generally, by all intellectualism, which transfers the objective truth established by science into a practice which excludes the disposition which would make it possible to establish this truth 16 :&dquo;What I call the rule by which he proceeds? The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use of words; or the rule which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he gives us in reply if we ask him what his rule is? But if observation does not enable us to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light ? For he did indeed give me a definition when I asked him what he understood by ’N’; but he was prepared to withdraw and alter it So, how am I to determine the rule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself Or, to ask a better question: What meaning is the expression ’the rule according to which he acts’ supposed to have left in it here?&dquo; 11 To consider regularity, i e what recurs with a certain statistically measurable freguency, as the product of a consciously laid-down and consciously respected regulation (so having to explain both their genesis and their effectiveness), or else as the product of the ullconsciolls regulation of some mysterious cerebral and social mechanism, is to slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model: &dquo;Take the example of the difference between ’the train is regularly two minutes late’ and ’as a rule the train is two minutes late’: [ ]in the latter case it is suggested that the fact that the train is two minutes late is the result of a policy or plan [ ]I Rules relate to plans and policies, while regularities not [ ]To claim that there ought to be rules in natural language amounts to claiming that roads ought to be red because they correspond to the red lines on a map&dquo; 18 All sociological statements should be preceded by a sign announcing &dquo;it is as if&dquo; and should function in the same way as quantifiers in logic, which would continually remind us of the epistemological status of the constructed concepts of objective science Everything conspires to encourage the reification of concepts, beginning with the logic of ordinary language, which is inclined to infer the substance from the substantive or to award to concepts the power to act in history in the same way as the words designating them act in the sentences of historical discourse, that is as historical subjects As Wittgenstein remarked, one has only to slip from the adverb &dquo;unconsciously&dquo; (&dquo;unconsciously I have a toothache&dquo;) to the substantive &dquo;unconscious&dquo;, or to a certain usage of the adjective &dquo;unconscious&dquo; (as in &dquo;I have an unconscious toothache&dquo;) in order to produce prodigies of metaphysical profundity 19 Simi16 This is an unwarranted transfer of the same type as that which, according to Merleaucf M Merleau( Ponty, generates the intellectualist and the empiricist errors in psychology Ponty, La structure du comportement, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949, esp p 124, 135) 17 L Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1963, pp 38-39 18 P Ziff, Semantic analysis, New York, Cornell University Press, 1960, p 38 Wittgenstein, Le cahier bleu et le cahier brun, études préliminaires aux investigations philosophiques, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp 57-58 19 L 66 to objective chances without the agents having to carry out the slightest calculation, nor even a more or less conscious estimate of the chances of success: so, it is as if the a posteriori or e.~ post probability of an event, which is known as a result of past experience, would determine the a priori or ex ante probability adjusted subjectively ascribed to it Because the dispositions durably inculcated by the objective conditions (which science perceives through statistical regularities as probabilities objectively attached to a group or a class) gives rise to aspirations and practices that are objectively compatible with these objective conditions and, to some extent, preadapted to their objective requirements, the most improbable events are able, by refusing or at the cost excluded, either without even being examined, as unthinkof a double negation tending to make a virtue out of necessity what is anyway refused and loving the inevitable The very conditions of the production of the ethos, a virtue fumed into necessity, are such that the anticipations arising out of it tend to ignore the restriction to which the validity of any calculus of probabilities is subject, namely that the conditions of the experiment should not have been modified Unlike scientific estimates, which are corrected, following each experiment, according to rigourous rules, practical estimates ascribe a disproportionate weight to primary experiments: the characteristic structures of a determinate type of conditions of existence, through the mediation of the economic and social necessity which they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous universe of family relationship, or better, through the mediation of specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (e g taboos, worries, lessons in morality, conflicts, tastes, etc.), produce the habitus structures which, in turn, generate the perception and appreciation of all further experience Finally, as a result of the effect of hysteresis necessarily entailed in the logic of the genesis of habitus, practices are always exposed to negative sanctions, hence to a &dquo;secondary negative reinforcement&dquo;, when the environment with which they are in fact confronted differs too widely from the environment to which they are objectively adjusted It is understandable, in the same logic, that generation conflicts oppose, not age classes separated by natural properties, but classes of habitus produced according to different modes of generation: by instilling different definitions of what is impossible, possible, probable and certain, the conditions of existence cause one group to experience as natural or reasonable the same practices or aspirations which the other group finds unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa In other words, one must abandon all those theories which, explicitly or implicitly, treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the functioning of pre-established mechanisms, &dquo;models&dquo;, &dquo;norms&dquo; or &dquo;roles&dquo;; if not, one is supposed to assume that these mechanisms exist in infinite number, as the fortuitous configurations of stimuli capable of releasing them from the outside, thus being condemned to the kind of grandiose and desperate enterprise undertaken by the anthropologist who, armed with fine positivist courage, recorded 480 ele- 67 mentary units of behaviour in twenty minutes of observation of his wife in the kitchen ~~ But, the rejection of mechanistic theories in no way implies that, according to the traditional opposition between objectivism and subjectivism, we bestow upon some free and creative will the free and arbitrary power to produce, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projecting the goals aiming at its transformation Nor does it mean that we reduce the objective intentions and constituted significations of human actions and works to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors and the same time, necessary and relatively autonomous Practice is, at reference to the situation considered in its precise immediacy, because it is the product of the dialectical relationship between a situation and a habitus, understood as a system of durable and transposable dispositions which, integrating all past experiences, functions as a matrix of perceptions, of appreciations and actions, making possible the accomplishment of an infinite variety of tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes, practical metaphors, in the strictest sense of the term, which permit the resolution of problems having the same form, and thanks to incessant correction of the results obtained, that these results dialectically produce As the durably generating principle of regulated improvisations (principium importans ordillem ad actllll1 , as the scholastics put it), the habitus produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities inserted in the objective conditions of the production of their generating principle, while adjusting to the demands inserted as objective potentialities in the situation directly being confronted Hence it follows that the practices can directly be deduced neither from the objective conditions, defined as the instantaneous sum of the stimuli which may appear directly to have set them in motion, nor from the conditions which produced the lasting principle of their production Consequently, we can only explain these practices if we relate the objective structure defining the social conditions of production of the habitus which engendered them to the conditions of the operation of this habitus, that is, if we relate the former to the conjuncture which, except when these conditions have been radically transformed, represents a particular state of this structure The habitus is capable of functioning as an operator which accomplishes practically this relating of these two systems of relations in and by the production of practice, because it is history transformed into nature, that is to say, denied as such because turned into second nature; the &dquo;unconscious&dquo; is never anything more than the forgetting one by 22 "Here we confront the distressing fact that the sample episode chain under analysis is a fragment of a larger segment of behavior which in the complete record contains some 480 separate episodes Moreover, it took only twenty minutes for these 480 behavior stream events to occur If my wife’s rate of behavior is roughly representative of that of other actors, we must be prepared to deal with an inventory of episodes produced at the rate of some 20 000 per sixteen-hour day [ ] In a population consisting of several hundred actor-types, the number of different episodes in the total repertory must amount to many millions during the course of an annual cycle" (M Harris, The nature of cultural things, New York, Random House, 1964, pp 74-75) 68 history itself produces by incorporating the objective quasi-natures, the habitus: &dquo;Inside each one of us, in varying proportions, there exists part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little as compared with the long past, in the course of which we were formof the history which structures in the form of these ed and from which we result But we not sense this man from the past, since he is so much a part of us ; he is the unconscious part of ourselves Consequently, we not take him into account, anymore than we take account of his legitimate requirements On the contrary, we are very much aware of the most recent acquisitions of civilization since, being recent, they have not yet had time to settle into our unconscious&dquo;23 Amnesia of the genesis, one of the paradoxical effects of history, is encouraged, also, (if not entailed) by objectivist perception: comprehending the product of history as opus operatum and placing itself before the fait accompli, objectivism has to invoke the mysteries of pre-established harmony or the prodigies of conscious concertation in order to account for what, perceived purely synchronically, appears as the objective meaning, whether it be the internal coherence of works or of such institutions as myths, rites or laws or the objective concertation both manifested and presupposed (insofar as they entail a community of repertoires) by the concordant or even conflicting practices of members of the same group or class The fallacy of objectivism is the consequence of the complete failure to analyse the dual process of internalization and externalization or, more precisely, the production of objectively concerted habitus, hence apt and inclined to produce practices and works which are, themselves, objectively concerted g Because the h identity d of[ the h conditions d off existence tends to produce similar least of (at partially so) systems dispositions, the resulting (relative) homogeof habitus an neity generates objective harmonization of practices and works conferring upon them the regularity as well as the objectivity which define their specific &dquo;rationality&dquo; and which result in their being experienced as evident or taken for granted : they are seen as immediately intelligible and predictable by all agents possessing practical mastery of the system of schemes of action and interpretation objectively implied in their accomplishment and by those alone; that is by all those who, like the members of the same group or class, are products of identical objective conditions, which exercice a llniversalizing aiid pa;ticulari=iiig effect insofar as they only homogenize the members of a group by distinguishing them from all the others As long as we ignore the true principle of this conductorless orchestration, which confers regularity, unity and systematicity upon the practices of a group or class, and that in the absence of any spontaneous or imposed organization of individual projects, we condemn ourselves to the kind of naive artificialism which recognizes no unifying principle of ordinary or extraordinary activity of a 23 E d d L’évolution pédagogique en France, Paris, Alcan, 1938, p Durkheim, 16 69 group or class other than the conscious and meditated concertation found in conspiracies In this way, some may deny, with no other proof than their own fashionable impressions, the unity of the ruling class and challenge those who hold the opposite view to establish empirical proof, that the members of the ruling class have an explicit policy, expressly imposed by explicit concertation 2~ Others, who at least provide an explicit and systematic formulation of this naive representation of collective action, transpose the archetypal question of the philosophy of consciousness to the level of the group, and turn awakening of class consciousness into a sort of revolutionary cogito, this alone being considered capable of bringing the class into existence, by constituting it as a &dquo;class for-itself&dquo; ( &dquo;Classe pour soi &dquo;) 25 The objective harmonization of group or class habitus results in the fact that practices can be objectively attuned without any direct interaction and, a fortiori, in the absence of any explicit concertation &dquo;Imagine, suggested Leibniz, two clocks in perfect agreement as to the time This may occur in three ways The first consists in mutual influence; the second in assigning to each a skillful worker who would correct them and synchronize them continually; the third way would be to construct the two clocks with such art and precision that one could be assured of their subsequent agreement&dquo; 26 By systematically retaining only the first, or at the most, the second of these hypotheses when one casts a party or charismatic leader in the role of Deus ex machina one ignores the surest foundation of the integration of groups or classes: the practices of members of the same group or class are always more and better attuned than the agents themselves know or would have it, - - 24 "As for the margin of autonomy enjoyed by political personnel with regard to the industrial leadership, it is neither fixed, once and for all in any given country, nor is it the I challenge Meynaud to account for the vicissitudes same in different domains of activity of the French decolonization process in terms of the influence exercized by capitalists (some were colonialists, others anticolonialists) And I am sure he will be unable to explain General De Gaulle’s diplomacy in terms of the influence of M Villiers, or of the French Employers’ Council." (R Aron, "Catégories dirigeantes ou classe dirigeante?", Revue française de science politique 15 (1), feb 1965, p 24.) From his long "demonstration" of the governing class’s unconsciousness, and incoherence, we shall merely quote a few passages: "One of my disappointments has been to observe that those who, according to the Marxist representation of the world, determine the course of events, most often have no political conceptions [ ] I have met a number of representatives of this ’damned race’, I have never known them to hold resolute, or unanimous, opinions concerning the policy to be adopted [ ]the capitalists themselves were divided I have discoamong ’monopolists’, or ’big capitalists’, uncertainties, doubts and quarrels which aired in public, in the press, and in Parliament In order to imagine that it is they who have directed French policy, I would have to assume that some among them were able to impose their policies [ ] In most of the cases I have been able to observe directly, the representatives of big capitalism are less politically motivated than is generally believed" (R Aron, vered, were Démocratie et totalitarisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp 145-149) 25 See Appendix 26 G W Leibniz, "Second éclaircissement du système de la communication des substances", p 548 in: P Janet (ed.), Oeuvres philosophiques (vol 2), Paris, de Lagrange, 1866 ; / 70 because, as Leibniz says, &dquo;by only obeying its own laws&dquo;, each &dquo;nonetheless is attuned to the other&dquo; 27 The habitus is nothing either than this immanent law, lex iiisita deposited in each agent by his basic education, which is not only the condition of the concertation of practices but also of practices of concertation : the rectifications and adjustments consciously carried out by the agents presuppose the mastery of a common code, and attempts at collective mobilization cannot succeed without a minimum of agreement between the habitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g prophet or party leader, etc.) and the dispositions of those whose aspirations they attempt to express Far from the concertation of practices always being the product of concertation, one of the prime functions of the orchestration of habitus might be to allow a saving in &dquo;intention&dquo; and in the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo; by making possible a kind of practical behaviourism which, in most situations in life, dispenses with close analysis of the nuances of someone else’s conduct or with direct investigation of his intentions (&dquo;What you mean ?&dquo;): just as someone who posts a letter supposes simply, as Schutz has shown, that anonymous employees will conduct themselves anonymously, in conformity with his anonymous intention, in the same way someone who accepts money as an instrument of exchange implicitly takes into account, as Weber shows, the chances that other agents will agree to recognize its function Automatic and impersonal, significant without intending to signify, the ordinary conduct of life lends itself to a no less automatic and impersonal decoding: the decoding of the objective intention which they express in no way requires the &dquo;reactivation&dquo; of the intention &dquo;experienced&dquo; by the person who accomplishes this conduct ~e Each agent is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning: because his actions are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer and of which he does not possess conscious mastery, they contain an &dquo;objective intention&dquo;, as the scholastics say, which always exceeds his conscious intentions Thus, just as is shown by Gelb and Goldstein, certain aphasics who have lost the power to evoke the word or notion called forth by the meaning, may pronounce, as though inadvertently, formulae in which they only later recognize the response called for, so the internalized schemes of thought and expression make possible the intentionless invention of regulated improvisation whose points of departure and support lie in ready-made &dquo;formulae&dquo;, such as word-pairs or contrasting images 29: continually overtaken by his Ibid It is one of the merits of subjectivism and moralism that it demonstrates, per absurdum, in analyses in which it condemns actions subject to the world’s objective sollicitations as unauthentic (whether Heideggerian analyses of daily existence and of "das Man" or Sartrean analyses of "the spirit of serious-mindedness"), the impossibility of the "authentic" existence which would gather into a project of liberty all the pre-given significations and ob jective determinations 29 If it did not constitute a rudimentary, hence economic and practical form, thought in terms of couples would probably be less frequent in ordinary language and, even in scholarly language, beginning with the language of anthropologists, still dominated by numerous 27 28 71 words, with which he carries on a relationship of &dquo;carry and be carried&dquo;, Nicolai Hartmann puts it, the virtuoso discovers, in the opus operatum, new cues and new supports for the modus operandi of which it is the product, in such a way that his discourse continuously feeds off itself like a train bringing along its own rails 3° Witticisms surprise their author no less than their audience and they ~mpress as much by their retrospective necessity as by their novelty, because the discovery appears as the simple revelation, both fortuitous and ineluctable, of a possibility immanent in the structures of language It is because subjects not, properly speaking, know what they are doing that what they are doing has more meaning than they suspect The habitus is the universalizing mediation which makes practices that have neither explicit reason nor significant intention &dquo;sensible&dquo;, &dquo;reasonable&dquo; and objectively orchestrated: that part of practices which remains obscure in the eyes of their own producers is the aspect whereby they are objectively adjusted to the other practices and structures of which the principle of their own production is, itself, the product In order to be finished with chitchat concerning the &dquo;comprehension&dquo; which constitutes the last resort of those who defend the rights of subjectivity against the &dquo;reductive&dquo; imperialism of the human sciences, we have only to recall that the decoding of the objective intention of practices and works has nothing to with the &dquo;reproduction&dquo; (Nachbildung, as the early Dilthey put it) of subjective experiences and the reconstitution, useless and uncertain, of the personal singularities of an &dquo;intention&dquo; which did not actually generate them Because they are the product of dispositions which, being the internalization of the same objective structures, are objectively concerted, the practices of the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, of the same class, possess an objective meaning that is both unitary and systematic, transcending subjective intentions and conscious individual or collective projects 31 : in other words, the process of objectification cannot be described in the language of interaction and mutual adjustment, because the interaction itself owes its form to the objective structures which produced the dispositions of own as false dichotomies, such as the individual and society, personality and culture, community and society, "folk" and "urban", etc., which are just as inadequate as the most traditional philosophical dichotomies, such as matter and spirit, body and soul, theory and practice, etc cf R Bendix and P Berger, "Images of society and problems of concept formation in socio( logy", pp 92-118 in: L Gross (ed.), Symposium on sociological theory, New York, Harper and Row, 1959 30 R Ruyer, Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l’automatisme, Paris, A Michel, 19G6, p 136 31 Were this language not otherwise dangerous, one would be tempted to say, against all forms of subjectivist voluntarism, that the unity of a class fundamentally rests upon the "class unconscious": "consciousness" is not an originating act which would constitute the class in an effulgence of freedom; its only effectiveness, as in all actions of symbolic duplication, comes from the extent to which it brings everything that is implicitly assumed concerning the unconscious mode in the class habitus to the conscious level 72 the interacting agents and which assign them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere The apparently limitless universe of theories of acculturation and cultural contacts can be reduced to an opposition between the realism of ideas and the realism of the sensible The first category of theories treat cultural or linguistic changes as the result of contacts between cultures and languages, subject to laws which are generic as the law of the restructuring of borrowings or specific as those established by the analysis of the structures specific to the languages or cultures in contact The realism of the sensible emphasizes contacts between the societies involved (in the sense of populations, reducible to a set of individuals) and ignores most of the time even the objective structure of the relations between the societies confronting each other (domination, etc.) In fact, in every singular confrontation between two individual agents or groups (e.g boss giving orders to a subordinate, colleagues talking about their pupils, intellectuals taking part in a symposium, etc.), that is in every interaction structured by the objective structure of the relationship between the corresponding groups (e.g colonizer and colonized), generic habitus (borne by biological individuals) are confronted: interaction occurs between systems of dispositions, such as linguistic competence and cultural competence and, through this habitus, all the objective structures of which they are the product and, in particular, the structures of the systems of symbolic relations, such as language In this way, the structures of the phonological systems involved are only active (as is witnessed, for example, by the accent of non-native users of the dominant language) if they are incorporated into a competence acquired in the course of an individual history (the different kinds of bilinguism being the result of different modes of acquisition) within a learning process which implies a selective deafness and systematic restructuring operations To speak of class habitus (or of &dquo;culture&dquo;, in the sense of cultural competence acquired within a homogeneous group) is, then, a reminder against all forms of the occasionalist illusion which consists in directly relating practices to the properties contained in the situation: &dquo;interpersonal&dquo; relations are never, except in appearance, individual to individual relationships and the truth of the interaction never completely resides in the interaction itself Social psychology, interactionism and ethnomethodology forget this when, reducing the objective structure of the relationship between individuals brought together to the conjunctural structure of their interaction in a particular situation and group, they propose to explain everything that occurs in an experimental or observed interaction by the experimentally controlled characteristics of the situation, such as the relative position in space of the participants or the nature of the channels utilized It is their past and present position in the social structure which biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of the habitus The dispositions are seen as signs off social positions and, hence, of the social distance between objective positions, or, to put it another way, between the social persons conjuncturally 73 brought together (in physical space, which is not the same thing as social reminders of this distance and of the conduct necessary to strategically manipulate social distances symbolically or in reality, to shorten them (which is easier for the dominating agent than for the dominated) or to increase them or, quite simply, to maintain them (by avoiding &dquo;permitting familiarities&dquo;, in short, by &dquo;standing on one’s dignity&dquo;, or, conversely, by avoiding &dquo;taking liberties&dquo; and, in other words, by &dquo;staying in one’s place&dquo;) Even those forms of interaction most apparently susceptible to description in terms of the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo;, such as sympathy, friendship or love, are dominated through the mediation of the harmony of habitus and taste doubtless sensed in the imperceptible or, more precisely, of indices of bodily by the objective structure of the relations between conditions and positions, as is confirmed by class homogamy The illusion of elective aflinity or mutual predestination arises out of ignorance of the social conditions of the harmony of aesthetic tastes or ethical inclinations, thus perceived as a proof of the ineffable afhnities it originates In short, the habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices, hence history, in conformity with the generative schemes generated by history More precisely, as a past which has survived into the present and which tends to perpetuate itself into the future by generating practices structured in accordance with its principles, as the internal law through which the law of external necessities irreducible to the immediate constraints of the circumstances continually operates, the habitus generates on the one hand the continuity and the regularity which objectivism observes in the social world without being able to present a rational explanation for them, and, on the other hand, the regulated transformations and revolutions which neither the extrinsic and instantaneous determinisms of mechanistic sociologism nor the purely internal though equally punctual determination of voluntarist or spontaneist subjectivism are capable of accounting for It is just as true, and just as untrue to say that collective actions produce the event or that they are the product of the event: in fact they are the product of a conjuncture that is, of the necessary conjunction of dispositions and an objective event For example, the conditional stimulation of the revolutionary conjuncture calls forth a determinate response on the part of all those who perceive it as such, that is those who are disposed to perceive it as such because they possess a determinate type of habitus, which may be duplicated and reinforced by the awakening of class consciousness, that is, the possession, direct or indirect, of a form of discourse capable of ensuring symbolic mastery of the practically mastered principles of class habitus ~ space) and as existethos - - - - - 32 The illusion of free creation probably finds some of its justification in the characteristic circle of any conditional stimulation: habitus can only give rise to the type of response objectively contained within its logic insofar as it bestows its effectiveness as a cue upon the conjuncture by constituting it according to its own principles, in other words, by making it exist as a question in reference to a particular manner of interrogating reality 74 The conjuncture capable of transforming practices which are objectively coordinated because adapted to partially or totally identical objective necessities into collective action is the product of the dialectical relationship between the dispositions and the event Without ever being totally coordinated, since they are the product of &dquo;causal series&dquo; characterized by different structural durations, the dispositions and the situation, which combine synchronically in order to constitute a determinate conjuncture, are never totally independent, since they are engendered by objective structures, that is, in the final analysis, by the economic structures: the hysteresis of habitus, which is implied in the logic of the process of reproduction of the structures within habitus, is one of the foundations of the structural gap between opportunities and the disposition to grasp them which leads to missed opportunities and, in particular, to the incapacity to analyse historical crises according to categories of perception other than those of the past, even revolutionary ones So, the objective structures are products of historical practices continuously reproduced (with or without transformations) by historical practices whose productive principle is, itself, the product of structures which, because of this, it tends to reproduce When one is unaware of the dialectical relationship between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures they produce and which tend to reproduce them, one has no choice but to reduce the relationship between the different social agencies seen as &dquo;different translations of the same sentence&dquo;, according to a Spinozist metaphor to the logical formula which permits us to rediscover any one of them on the basis of any other and to find the principle of the development of structures in a kind of theoretical parthenogenesis, thus offering an unexpected revenge to the Hegel of the Philosophy of history and to his Ti’eltgeist, who &dquo;develops his unique nature&dquo; while always remaining identical to itself As long as one accepts the canonic opposition which continually reappears in new forms throughout the history of social thought and today, for example, places the &dquo;humanist&dquo; interpretations of the early Marx in opposition to &dquo;structuralist&dquo; readings of Capital, one can only escape subjectivism by falling into fetishism of social laws: by establishing the relationship of the potential to the actual, of the musical score to the execution, of the essence to the existence, between structure and practice, objectivism merely substitutes a man subjugated by the dead laws of natural history for the creator man of subjectivism The, challenging of the indiridual, considered as ens realissimum, leads merely to his being treated as an epiphenomenon of hypostasized structure, and the assertion of the primacy of objective relations leads to bestowing upon these products of human action the power to develop according to structures their own laws and to determine, or to overdetermine, other structures The problem is not a new one, and the attempt to transcend the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism always came up against that epistemological obstacle, the individual, still capable of haunting the theory of history, even when he is reduced, as with Engels, to the state of a molecule which, in its - - - - 75 relations with other molecules, in a kind of Brownian motion, produces an objective meaning reducible to the mechanical composition of singular chances 33 Just as the opposition of language to speech as simple execution, or even as preconstructed object, masks the opposition between the objective relations of language and the dispositions of linguistic competence, so, the opposition between structure and individual (against which structure has to be conquered, and conquered over and over again), obstructs the construction of the dialectical relationship between the structures and the dispositions of the habitus The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation which is necessary to make possible the reproduction of these products of collective history: thanks to this work, objective structures (e.g of language, economics, etc.) come to reproduce themselves, in the form of durable dispositions, in all individual organisms (which one may call individuals) durably subjected to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of existence In other words, sociology treats all those biological individuals which, being the product of the same objective conditions, act as supports for the same habitus, as identical: social class, as a system of objective relations, must be related, not to the individual or to the &dquo;class&dquo; as a population, i.e as the sum of enumerable and measurable biological individuals, but to the class habitus as a system of dispositions which are (partially) common to all the products of the same structures If it is not possible that all members of the same class (or even two of them) can have had the same experiences in the same order, it is nonetheless clear that any member of the same class has a greater chance than any member of another class of having found himself confronted, either as an actor or as a witness, by those situations which are most common for the members of that class The objective structures, which science grasps in the form of statistical regularities (for example, in the form of rates of employment, of income curves, of chances of access to secondary education, etc.) and which confer its physiognomy upon a collective landscape, with its closed careers, its &dquo;inaccessible&dquo; positions, its &dquo;blocked horizons&dquo;, inculcate, through convergent experiences, that kind of &dquo;art of evaluating 33 "History is made in such a way that the final result always emerges from the conflict of a great number of individual wills, of which each one in turn is made what it is as the result of a crowd of specific conditions of existence; in it, consequently, innumerable forces mutually cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which one resultant which may, in turn, be seen as the product of a force acting the historical event emerges as a whole, unconsciously and blindly Because, what an individual desires is obstructed by every other individual and what emerges is something that nobody wanted In this way, up till now, history has unfolded like a natural process and is also subject, in its entirety, to the same laws of movement" (F Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, sept 21, 1890) "Men make their history themselves, but, not, up till the present, with the collective will of an overall plan, not even in a given, clearly delimited society Their efforts cancel each other out and that is precisely why necessity, completed and expressed by chance, reigns in all societies of this type" (F Engels, Letter to Hans Starkenburg, jan 25, 1894) — — 76 likelihoods&dquo;, as Leibniz puts it, that is, of anticipating the objective forthcoming, in short, that sense of reality, or realities The relationship between class, habitus and organic individuality, which can never entirely be removed from sociological discourse insofar as being immediately available to perception (intuitus personae), it is also socially designated and recognized (name, legal person, etc.) and insofar as it is defined by a social trajectory irreducible to any other can be expressed, at least metaphorically, as those who use the notion of the unconscious sometimes implicitly, within the language of transcendental idealism Considering the habitus as a subjective, but not individual, system of internalized structures, of perception, conception and action schemes common to all the members of the same group or class which constitutes the condition of all objectification we are, in this perspective, brought to found the objective concertation of practices and the uniqueness of the world view on the perfect impersonality and substitutability of singular practices and views But this amounts to claiming that all practices or views produced by identical schemes are impersonal and interchangeable, in the manner of individual intuitions of space which, according to Kant, reflect none of the peculiarities of the empirical ego In fact, the diversity within homogeneity, which is characteristic of the - - - - individual habitus of the different members of the same class and which reflects the diversity within the homogeneity of the social conditions of production of these habitus, is based on the fundamental relationship of homology which develops between the habitus of the members of a single group or class because they are the product of the internalization of the same fundamental structures: to employ Leibnizian language, the homology of world views correlative with the identity of perceptual schemes does not exclude the systematic differences and yet conseparating individual world views, developed from individual certed points of view Owing to the very logic of its genesis, the habitus is a chronologically ordered series of structures, a structure of definite rank specifying the structures of lower rank (hence genetically antecedent), and structuring the higher ranking structures through the intermediary of its structuring action upon the structured experiences which generate these structures : thus, for example, the habitus acquired in the family gives its structure to school experiences (and in particular to the reception and assimilation of the specifically educational message), the habitus transformed by scholastic action itself, in turn, giving its structure to all subsequent experiences (for example, to the reception and assimilation of messages produced and diffused by the cultural industry, or professional experiences) These experiences are integrated into the unity of a systematic biography which is developed on the basis of the original situation of class, experienced in a determinate type of family structure The history of the individual is never any more than a certain specific case of the collective history of his group or class and, in consequence, the systems of individual dispositions are structural variants of the group or class habitus, - - 77 even in the differences which separate them and which reflect the differences between trajectories and positions within, or outside the class &dquo;Personal&dquo; style, that is, the particular mark borne by all the products of a single habitus, practices or works, is simply a deviation, itself regulated and sometimes even codified, in relation to the style of a period or a class As such, it relates back to the common style, not only by its conformity, in the manner of Phydias who, according to Hegel, had no &dquo;style&dquo;, but also by the difference which makes the &dquo;style&dquo; systematically arranged APPENDIX (note 25) Sartre offers ultra-subjectivist response to the ritual question underlying the endless objectivism and subjectivism Treating revolutionary consciousness as the product of a kind of imaginary variation, he claims for it the power to create present meaning by creating the revolutionary future which negates it: &dquo;For it is necessary here to reverse the common opinion and on the basis of what it is not, to acknowledge the harshness of a situation or the sufferings it imposes, both of which are motives for conceiving another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody It is on the day that we can conceive a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide that these are unbearable&dquo; (J.P Sartre, Bering and nothingness, London, Methuen, 1957, pp 434-435) Having ignored or rejected the question of the economic and social conditions of awakening of consciousness of economic and social conditions, Sartre can put an absolute act of attribution of meaning, an &dquo;invention&dquo; or a conversion, at the origin of action (J.P Sartre, &dquo;R6ponse A Lefort&dquo;, Les temps modemes 89, apr 1953, pp 15711629) If the world of action is nothing other than an imaginary universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent upon the decrees of the consciousness which creates it and hence totally void of objectivity, if it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved, revolting because he chooses to be revolted, emotions, passions and actions are merely games, of &dquo;bad faith&dquo; and of &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo;, sad farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience: &dquo;It is not by chance that materialism is serious; it is not by chance that it is found at all times and places as the favorite doctrine of the revolutionary This is because revolutionaries are serious They come to know themselves first in terms of the world which oppresses them [ ] The serious man is ’of the world’ and has no resource in himself He does not even imagine any longer the possibility of getting out of the world [ ]he is in bad faith.&dquo; (Sartre, Beirrg and rrothirrgrress, op cit., p 580.) The same incapacity to treat &dquo;seriousness&dquo; other than in the disapproved form of the &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo; can be seen in an analysis of emotion which, and this is significant, is separated by the Imaginary from the less radically subjectivist descriptions of The outline of a theory of emotions (L’esquisse d’une theorie des émotions): &dquo;What will make me decide to choose the magical aspect or the technical aspect of the world? It cannot be the world itself, for this in order debate over an 78 to be manifested waits to be discovered Therefore it is necessary that the for-itself in its project must choose being the one by whom the world is revealed as magical or rational; that is, the for-itself must as a free project of itself give to itself magical or rational existence It is responsible for either one, for the for-itself can be only if it has chosen itself Therefore the for-itself appears as the free foundation of its emotions as of its volitions My fear is free and manifests my freedom.&dquo; (Ibid., p 445.) This theory of action ought inevitably to lead to the desperate project of a transcendental genesis of society and of history (one recognizes here the Critigue de la raison dialectique, Paris, Gallimard, 1960) which Durkheim seems to be pointing to when he writes in Les règles de la métllOde sociologigue (Paris, Alcan, 1895): &dquo;It is because the imaginary offers no resistance to the spirit that the latter, feeling itself contained within nothing, indulges in limitless ambitions and believes in the possibility of constructing, or rather, of reconstructing the world with his own strength alone and according to its wishes&dquo; (Durkheim, ibid., p 18) Although we can oppose, to this analysis of Sartrean anthropology, numerous texts (especially among his earliest and his latest works) in which Sartre recognizes, for example, the &dquo;passive syntheses&dquo; of a universe of already constituted significations, or in which he expressly rejects the very principles of his philosophy, such as the passage from L’etre et le néant (Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p 543) in which he proposes to distinguish himself from Descartes’ instantaneiste philosophy or the sentence from the Critique de la raison dialectique (op cit., p 161) in which he announces a study of &dquo;agentless actions, of totalizations having no totalizer, of counter-finalities, of vicious circles&dquo;, Sartre nonetheless rejects, and with visceral repugnance, &dquo;those gelatinous realities, more or less vaguely haunted by a supra-individual consciouness which shameful organicism is still seeking to retrieve, against all likelihood, in the rough, complex but clearcut field of passive activity in which there are individual organisms of indefinite number and inorganic material realities&dquo; (ibid., p 305) Objective sociology is given the highly suspect, because essentialist, task of studying the &dquo;sociality of inertia&dquo;, that is, for example, class reduced to inertia, hence to impotence, class as a thing, &dquo;viscous&dquo; and &dquo;sticky&dquo; in its being, in other words, in its &dquo;having been&dquo;: &dquo;The seriality of class turns the individual (whoever he is and whatever his class) into a being who defines himself as a humanized thing [ ] The other form of class, that is the group adding up to a praxis, is born at the heart of the passive form and as its negation&dquo; (ibid., p 357) The social world, where those &dquo;bastard&dquo; compromises take place between the thing and the meaning which define &dquo;objective meaning&dquo; as meaning transformed into thing, constitutes a positive challenge to those who are only able to breath in the pure and transparent universe of consciousness or of individual &dquo;praxis&dquo; This artificialism recognizes no other limit to the liberty of the ego than that which liberty imposes upon itself by the free abdication of an oath or through the resignation of &dquo;bad faith&dquo;, the Sartrean term for alienation, or that which the alienating liberty of the alter ego imposes upon it in Hegelian struggles between master and slave; consequently, unable to see in &dquo;social arrangements, anything other than artificial and more or less arbitrary combinations&dquo;, as Durkheim puts it (op cit., p 19), he subordinates, without a second thought, the transcendance of the social - reduced to the &dquo;reciprocity of constraints and autonomies&dquo; to the &dquo;transcendance of the ego&dquo;, as the early Sartre said: &dquo;In the course of this action, the individual sees the dialectic as rational transparency, inasmuch as he produces it, and as absolute necessity inasmuch as it escapes him, in other words, quite simply, inasmuch as others produce it; finally, insofar as he recognizes himself in transcending his needs, he recognizes the law imposed on him by others in transcending their needs (to say that he recognizes it is not, however, to say that he submits to it), he recognizes his own autonomy (inasmuch as it can be utilized by another and inasmuch as it is, daily, in the form of blutTs, manoeuvrcs, etc.) as a foreign power and the autonomy of others as the inexorable law which permits him to constrain them&dquo; (Critique , op cit., p 133) The transcendance of the social can only be the effect of &dquo;recurrence&dquo;, that is, in the last analysis, of number (hence, the importance accorded to &dquo;series&dquo;) or of the &dquo;materialization of recurrence&dquo; in cultural objects (ibid., p 234, 281), alienation consisting in the free abdication of liberty in favour of the demands - 79 of &dquo;worked upon matter&dquo;: &dquo;The nineteenth century worker makes hinrselfwhat he is, that is, he practically and rationally determines the order of his expenditure hence he decides within his free praxis and by this liberty he makcs himself what he was, what he is and what he must be: a machine whose salary amounts to no more than running costs [ I The - - classbeing as practico-inert being comes to men through men, through the passive syntheses of worked upon matter&dquo; (ibid., p 294) Elsewhere, the affirmation of the &dquo;logical&dquo; primacy of &dquo;individual praxis&dquo; as constituent Reason, over History as constituted Reason, leads us to pose the problem of the genesis of society in the same terms as those employed by theoreticians of the social contract: &dquo;History determines the content of human relations in its totality and these relations [ ]refer to everything But human relations in general are not the result of History It is not problems of organization and the division of labour which have led to the development of relationships between those primarily separate objccts, namely men&dquo; (ibid., p 179) Just as for Descartes, &dquo;Creation is continuous, as Jean Wahl says, because duration is not&dquo; and because extended substance does not contain within itself the power to subsist, God finding himself charged with the continuously renewed task of creating the world ex nihilo, by a free act of w ill, so, the typically Cartesian rejection of the viscuous opacity of &dquo;objective potentialities&dquo; and of objective meaning leads Sartre to entrust the undefined task of ripping the social w hole, or class, from the inertia of the &dquo;practico-inert&dquo; to the absolute initiative of &dquo;historical agents&dquo;, whether individual or collective, such as &dquo;The Party&dquo;, which is a hypostasis of the Sartrean subject At the finish of his immense imaginary novel of the death and resurrection of liberty, with its dual movement, &dquo;the externalization of internality&dquo; leading from liberty to alienation, from consciousness to the materialization of consciousness or, as the title puts it, &dquo;from praxis to the practicoinert&dquo;, and the &dquo;internalization of externality&dquo; which, by abrupt shortcuts in awakening of consciousness and &dquo;fusion of consciousnesses&dquo;, leads &dquo;from the group to history&dquo;, from the reified state of the alienated group to the authentic existence of the historical agent, consciousness and thing are as irremediably separated as at the outset, without there ever being any possibility of observing or constructing anything resembling an institution or a sj mbolic system in the sense of an autonomous universe (the very choice of examples bears this out) The appearance of a dialectical course (which is nothing more than the dialectical appearance of discourse) cannot hide the infinite oscillation between the en-soi and the pOllr-soi or, in the new language, between materiality and praxis, between the inertia of the group reduced to its &dquo;essence&dquo;, in other words, to its outlived past and to its necessity (w hich is abandoned to sociologists), and the continued creation of the free collective project, seen as a series of deciding acts indispensable for saving the group from annihilation in pure materiality So, the objective intentions of Sartrean philosophy are fulfilled, with certain differences in language, against the author’s subjective intentions, against a permanent project of &dquo;conversion&dquo;, never so manifest and manifestly sincere as in certain of his anathema, which would probably be less violent if they savoured less of conscious or unconscious self-criticism Thus, for example, one must bear in mind the famous analysis of the café waiter in order fully to appreciate a sentence such as this one : &dquo;To all those w ho take themselves for angels, their neighbour’s activities seem absurd because of the former’s claim to transcend the human enterprise by refusing to take part in it&dquo; (ibid., pp 182-183) The constancy of the project of conversion finds its principle in the permanence of the habitus which renders this project at the same time necessary and necessarily doomed to failure Sartre’s theory concerning Flaubert’s relationship with the bourgeoisie is probably the most manifest and most direct expression of the bourgeois relationship to existence and to the material conditions of existence which, by turning the awakening of consciousness into the generator of an existence and a work, demonstrates that it is not enough to become conscious of one’s class condition in order to free oneself of the durable dispositions it produces (cf P Bourdieu, &dquo;Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectucl et habitus de classe&dquo;, Scolies 1, 1971, pp 7-26, esp 12-14) The project of devcloping a &dquo;sociology of action&dquo;, defined as the &dquo;sociology of freedom&dquo; an expression already used by Le Play belongs, mutatis mutandis, to the same logic (cf - 80 Touraine, Sociologie de I’action, Paris, Seuil, 1965, and &dquo;La raison d’être de la sociologie 1’action&dquo;, Revue francaise de sociologie 7, oct.-déc., 1966, pp 518-527) The rejection of the &dquo;reductive&dquo; definition of sociology finds here those eternal themes and language of which Bergson supplied the archetype, that of the closed and the open, of continuity and rupture, routine and creation, the institution and the person A de e Section, is head Pierre Bourdieu, Professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, VI of its Centre de Sociologie Européenne Among his numerous publications, we particularly wish to mention the following titles concerning the Ethnology of North Africa: The Algerians (1962); Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963) (with others); Le déracinement: La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (1964), (with A Sayad); and in the same theoretical approach, a recent article: "Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système des stratégies de reproduction", Annales 3, mai-juin 1972 [...]... structure to the principle of the production of this observed order: the construction of the theory of practice or, more precisely, of the mode of generation of practices, is the condition of the construction of an experimental science of the dialectic of internality and externality, that is, of the ititet-iializatioti of externality and of the extertiali.:atiof2 of internality The structures of a particular... fact, the diversity within homogeneity, which is characteristic of the - - - - individual habitus of the different members of the same class and which reflects the diversity within the homogeneity of the social conditions of production of these habitus, is based on the fundamental relationship of homology which develops between the habitus of the members of a single group or class because they are the. .. generic as the law of the restructuring of borrowings or specific as those established by the analysis of the structures specific to the languages or cultures in contact The realism of the sensible emphasizes contacts between the societies involved (in the sense of populations, reducible to a set of individuals) and ignores most of the time even the objective structure of the relations between the societies... obstructs the construction of the dialectical relationship between the structures and the dispositions of the habitus The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation which is necessary to make possible the reproduction of these products of collective history: thanks to this work, objective structures (e.g of language, economics, etc.) come to reproduce themselves, in the form of durable... habitus to the conscious level 72 the interacting agents and which assign them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere The apparently limitless universe of theories of acculturation and cultural contacts can be reduced to an opposition between the realism of ideas and the realism of the sensible The first category of theories treat cultural or linguistic changes as the result of contacts... part of practices which remains obscure in the eyes of their own producers is the aspect whereby they are objectively adjusted to the other practices and structures of which the principle of their own production is, itself, the product In order to be finished with chitchat concerning the &dquo;comprehension&dquo; which constitutes the last resort of those who defend the rights of subjectivity against the. .. minimum of agreement between the habitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g prophet or party leader, etc.) and the dispositions of those whose aspirations they attempt to express Far from the concertation of practices always being the product of concertation, one of the prime functions of the orchestration of habitus might be to allow a saving in &dquo;intention&dquo; and in the &dquo;intentional transfer to the. .. other than in the disapproved form of the &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo; can be seen in an analysis of emotion which, and this is significant, is separated by the Imaginary from the less radically subjectivist descriptions of The outline of a theory of emotions (L’esquisse d’une theorie des émotions): &dquo;What will make me decide to choose the magical aspect or the technical aspect of the. .. facilitating the break with primary experience and as an instrument for the construction of objective relations To escape from the realism of the structure, which treats systems of objective relations as substances by converting them into wholes already constituted outside of the history of the individual and the history of the group, it is both necessary and sufficient to pass from the opus operatum to the. .. one of the merits of subjectivism and moralism that it demonstrates, per absurdum, in analyses in which it condemns actions subject to the world’s objective sollicitations as unauthentic (whether Heideggerian analyses of daily existence and of "das Man" or Sartrean analyses of "the spirit of serious-mindedness"), the impossibility of the "authentic" existence which would gather into a project of liberty ... characteristic of the - - - - individual habitus of the different members of the same class and which reflects the diversity within the homogeneity of the social conditions of production of these habitus,... structure to the principle of the production of this observed order: the construction of the theory of practice or, more precisely, of the mode of generation of practices, is the condition of the construction... metaphor to the logical formula which permits us to rediscover any one of them on the basis of any other and to find the principle of the development of structures in a kind of theoretical parthenogenesis,