Материал: Robbins - Sociology and Philosophy in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, 1965-75

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established as a lecturer in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and as a researcher in Aron’s research group, the Centre de Sociologie Europ´eenne. He had undertaken studies of the experience of students in French higher education, particularly students of philosophy and sociology at the University of Lille when he was teaching there. The same mixture of concerns was present in this work as had been present in the Algerian research. Les h´eritiers: les etudiants´ et la culture

(1964) focused on the curriculum as a mechanism of acculturation, and Bourdieu published the results of questionnaires that attempted to generate a profile of the cultures of students prior to their academic studies. He had been involved with a project on photography and photographic clubs, which resulted in the publication of Un art moyen: les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965, and also with a project analysing the attendance at French, and then selected European, museums/art galleries, which resulted in the publication of L’amour de l’art in 1966 (1966a). That year saw the publication of ‘Condition de classe et position de classe’ (1966b) and ‘Une sociologie de l’action est-elle possible?’ (1966c), both of which were essentially theoretical, the former in relation to structuralism and the latter in opposition to Alain Touraine, but there had been very little reason to anticipate the developed argument of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ – neither the articulation of the concept of ‘field’ nor the application to cultural history. The opening paragraph needs to be given in full. Bourdieu began:

In order that the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation be assigned its proper object and at the same time its limits, the principle must be perceived and stated that the relationship between a creative artist and his work, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, or to be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure of the intellectual field (which is itself, in part at any rate, a function of his past work, and the reception it has met with). The intellectual field, which cannot be reduced to a simple aggregate of isolated agents or to the sum of the elements merely juxtaposed, is, like a magnetic field, made up of a system of power lines. In other words, the constituting agents or systems of agents may be described as so many forces which, by their existence, opposition or combination, determine its specific structure at a given moment in time. In return, each of these is defined by its particular position within this field from which it derives positional properties which cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. Each is also defined by a specific type of participation in the cultural field taken as a system of relations between themes and problems; it is a determined type of cultural unconscious, while at the same time it intrinsically possesses what could be called a functional weight, because its own ‘mass’, that is, its power (or

better, its authority) in the field cannot be defined independently of its position within it.

(1966d: 865/1971d: 161)

This was a new voice and a new approach. Bourdieu was announcing that the sociology of knowledge in general and of artistic production in particular should not be predicated on the autonomisation of historical producers studied in relation to a currently imposed construction of their supposed social contexts. Rather it should be founded on the analysis of those impersonal, objective systems within which communication takes place and within which meanings are immanently established. Although Bourdieu cited Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) in his article, nevertheless that book exemplified the approach that he was seeking to criticize. For Bourdieu, Williams’s work placed texts and authors that had been selected, evaluated and esteemed within the literary critical discourse of high culture in relation to a hypostatized context that was the construct of the equally high-culture discourse of social and economic history. The resulting ‘sociology of literature’ was not an analysis of the system of historical social relations within which texts functioned but, instead, a current construction of a representation of the past that was dependent on elements that had been falsely rendered independent and that functioned ideologically in the present as a creative project within a present intellectual field. Bourdieu’s fundamental objection was to the post hoc or detached imposition of a structure on phenomena that, in fact, participate in the construction of their own structures.

Although this summary represents the emphasis of Bourdieu’s position, it is, nevertheless, falsely realist. Bourdieu’s opening sentence is very important in indicating the epistemology that he was taking for granted. There are two components. There is, first of all, the insistence that sociological analysis entails the analysis of the system of social relations within which individuals operate and within which their individualities are defined, but, secondly, there is the insistence that this way of seeing intellectual and artistic production is a necessary corollary of adopting a sociological perspective. The ‘principle must be perceived and stated’ concerning the boundaries of sociological explanation rather in terms comparable to mathematical proof. There is no claim here that reality is being analysed. The account of reality that is disclosed by sociology is a function of the sociological mode of perception. It does not exclude other modes of perceiving the same phenomena and offering alternative accounts of those phenomena. Bourdieu was clearly committed to the sociological account that he was explicating but, nevertheless, the attainment of dominance in representations of reality had nothing to do with the objective phenomena and everything to do with the conflict between modes of perception or the contest between faculties. Although the opening half-sentence may seem an almost casual introduction, it does disclose Bourdieu’s attachment to a neo-Kantian epistemology and, already, a willingness to apply that epistemology reflexively. As we shall see, it was also a neo-

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Kantianism that was derived from the Marburg School and, in particular, Ernst Cassirer, rather than from Rickert, Windelband and the south-west German School of neo-Kantianism. Rickert had written The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (1986) in order to argue that contingent individual behaviour in history could be analysed not by adopting the procedures of natural science but only by adopting an alternative methodology specific to and inherent in the different phenomena. Bourdieu appears to have believed, instead, that delimitations of explanatory discourses are themselves historically contingent. Limits have to be acknowledged and declared, but they are not intrinsic. Bourdieu’s disquiet about Weber’s methodology derives, in part, from the latter’s attachment to the philosophical orientation of the south-west German neo-Kantian School. Bourdieu’s neo-Kantianism merged with Bachelard’s historical epistemology and resisted transcendentalism. We have to accept that we proceed ‘as if’ sociological explanation were valid (to use the title of a text by another influential neoKantian, Hans Vaihinger [1924]), but we seek to make this provisionality dominant for extraneous reasons.

Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945

There is no need to consider further here the substance of ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’. For our purposes, the introductory passage of the article clarifies Bourdieu’s purpose in writing ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’ in the following year (1967a). This was an article that was never published in French but only, internationally, in Social Research. Within the international field of sociology, Bourdieu was seeking to offer an ‘insider’ view of the sub-field of French sociology to an ‘outsider’ readership. Within the article, therefore, he attempted to provide an objective social history of intellectual relations in France between 1945 and 1966 from a systematically sociological perspective adopted at the end of this period, whilst, at the same time, he endeavoured to contextualize his own intellectual agency during those years. The experiment was as much an attempt in the intellectual field to explore the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity as, in the anthropological field, his ‘C´elibat et condition paysanne’ (1962a) had been in respect of the social situation in his native B´earn. Publication in Social Research was an attempt to place the article outside the immediate field of production and consumption that was the object of the article’s inquiry. The connection with ‘Champ intellectuel et projet cr´eateur’ was made explicit in the opening paragraph. From the outset, therefore, the methodology adopted in the article was linked to the position that Bourdieu had already articulated within the social and intellectual trajectory under consideration:

The reader will find in this paper neither a systematic history of the sociological or philosophical events and schools which have succeeded one

another in France since 1945, nor a philosophy of the history of philosophy or of the history of sociology, but a sociology of the main trends of sociology which, in order to restore their full meaning to works and to doctrines, tries to relate them to their cultural context, in other words, tries to show how positions and oppositions in the intellectual field are connected with explicitly or implicitly philosophical attitudes. It is with this in mind that we have prepared this outline of a sociology of French sociology, which aims at uncovering unconscious affinities rather than describing declared affiliations, and at deciphering implicit purposes rather than accepting literally declarations of intent.

(1967a: 162)

As this passage indicates, Bourdieu’s article focused on the changing relations between philosophy and sociology in the particular socio-economic conditions of post-World War II France. In Les h´eritiers (1964), Bourdieu had already inspected the social contingency of the student selection of these subjects of study, and it could be said that he was now analysing the social contingency of how these subjects were themselves constituted for student consumption. It was an approach that anticipated the abstract discussion of the ‘arbitrariness’ of curriculum content in La reproduction (1970a), but the constant, tacit frame of reference was Bourdieu’s own position-taking between the two intellectual disciplines – the one within which he was trained and the other that he was employed to transmit. The sub-text of his argument and of his position-taking related to the contemporary vogue for quantitative sociological research ‘as it has developed in the United States’. He contended, however, that such research ‘is ultimately nothing but a neo-positivism that seeks its guarantee in American sociology and civilization’ (1967a: 164). He claimed, in other words, that the apparent indifference of American empirical social science to philosophy and theoretical speculation was predicated on positivist philosophy. Bourdieu found it ironical that empirical social science could only re-establish itself in France by resurrecting the antiphilosophical philosophy of the Comtist tradition.

The view that Bourdieu tried to express in the article was, essentially, that the empiricist social science that was a form of neo-positivism was inadequate precisely because it was founded on an inadequate philosophy of social science. What was required was a new kind of empirical practice grounded in postpositivist philosophy of science. Again, the irony for Bourdieu was that structuralism had generated humanist reaction because, like Durkheimianism, it seemed to treat social facts as things, but the shortcoming of structuralism, as of Durkheimianism, was that it was methodologically insufficiently anti-humanist. Bourdieu paid specific attention to some articles by Merleau-Ponty, and argued that in his ‘De Mauss a` L´evi-Strauss’ (1959) Merleau-Ponty ‘granted ethnology its philosophical emancipation, but he did not fail to reserve to philosophy the right to re-interpret – or, better, to arouse – the existential significance of the

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inanimate structures built up or discovered by the ethnologist’ (1967a: 167). Bourdieu claimed that the accommodation between existential philosophy and social science achieved by the intellectuals of the previous generation was one that preserved freedom and voluntarism within a pseudo-scientistic and pseudodeterministic structural analysis whereas what was needed was the delimitation of a social science theory and practice that, by concentrating on the systemic relationalism of observed phenomena, would rule out any explanatory recourse to the supposition of the existence of free human agency within those systems. Such a supposition was, for Bourdieu, an interpolation from outside the immanent system that was merely a projection of the disposition towards existentialist philosophy on the part of the ‘scientific’ observers.

Bourdieu accused L´evi-Strauss of the same underlying humanist orientation, arguing that he ‘brought out in the role of the ethnologist what must have surpassed the fondest expectations of a phenomenologist’ (1967a: 167) in the following passage from his Foreword to Sociologie et anthropologie:

The apprehension (which cannot be objective) of the unconscious forms of the activity of the mind nevertheless leads to subjectivation; for, after all, it is a similar process that, in psychoanalysis, enables us to recover our self, however alienated and, in ethnological investigation, to reach the most alien of other persons as if he were another self of ours.

(L´evi-Strauss, 1950: xxxi, quoted in Bourdieu, 1967a: 167)

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that this humanist social science found support in the intellectual climate of the years of Occupation, Resistance and Liberation. The existential philosophy that was homologuous with social and political experience during the period of its production did a disservice to social science by downgrading it for 15 years. Bourdieu discussed the stance adopted by Sartre and was only prepared to acknowledge that the latter’s intellectual endeavours were beneficial in ‘breaking with the canonical rules and subject-matter of university philosophy’, which had the effect of liberating ‘anthropological science from the conventions that had held it prisoner’ (1967a: 180).

This was an influence that Bourdieu was recognizing as of latent value for his own project, but the article looked next at the reaction to existentialism in the early 1960s and he claimed that the emergent empirical sociology in France ‘was founded on the illusion of a first beginning and, by the same token, on ignorance of the epistemological problems posed by any scientific practice, as well as on deliberate or unwitting disregard of the theoretical past of European science’ (1967a: 184). This epistemological ignorance was encouraged by the social and economic conditions in which public and private bureaucracies began to look to sociology to provide legitimation of their policy intentions. Bourdieu quoted Lucien Goldmann’s then recent comment that ‘future historians will probably identify the years 1955 to 1960 as the sociological turning-point in France