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Pierre Bourdieu's Political Turn? Willem Schinkel Theory Culture Society 2003 20: 69 DOI: 10.1177/0263276403206004 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/20/6/69

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Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Turn?

Willem Schinkel

For a Critical Sociology PRIMARY FEATURE of Pierre Bourdieu’s later work is that it consists of ‘contre-feux’ (literally, counter-fire) and acts of resistance. Bourdieu saw injustice, was dissatisfied and put forward his critique. Alongside his academic career, Bourdieu seemed to want to live up to his reputation as the contemporary Sartre. Sartre, after his Marxist turn, saw no harm in the use of violence by the proletariat in precipitating the class struggle; Bourdieu, aged 67, confined himself to speaking to workers at the Gare de Lyon. In this article I intend to give a reading of Bourdieu that connects his later, more polemical work with the work that earned him his academic esteem. I don’t intend simply to review his later work; rather, I wish to show that a continuity exists throughout Bourdieu’s writings. Particularly as a result of his later ‘political’ interventions, there might seem to be a ‘political turn’ in his work, that is to say, a turn towards political engagement, towards the normative as the subject of his writings. A ‘political turn’ would be an appropriate description of Bourdieu’s later work if that work actually displayed discontinuities. I will argue that it does not, that there is no real ‘turn’ of this kind in his work. His work, as I intend to show by means of a reading of La Distinction, which focuses on his methodological startingpoint, was always critical. What changed in the later years was the directness with which that critique was put forward. The polemical character of his later interventions might give the impression that Bourdieu had undergone a radical change, but I will argue that his polemics were largely due to the specific position he occupied in the French intellectual field during the 1990s. This is the period on which I will mainly focus, for although a work like Les Héritiers was already very political, Bourdieu’s international fame as a critical intellectual was then still in the future. Also, the very early work (such as Sociologie de l’Algérie and Les Héritiers) will be largely ignored here,

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 Theory, Culture & Society 2003 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 20(6): 69–93 [0263-2764(200312)20:6;69–93;039275]

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since it lacked the fully developed basic concepts of habitus, field and capital.1 I have two aims here: one is to show that there is a methodological continuity in Bourdieu’s work. I will focus especially on La Distinction as an example par excellence of a book with a consistent Bourdieusian analysis. Here I will stress the critical potential of Bourdieu’s chief methodological starting-point: relational logic. My second aim is to point out that it is possible to critique Bourdieu precisely on the basis of that relational logic. Moreover, it is his later work that makes the internal friction in Bourdieu’s thinking especially apparent. I will indicate how his anti-essentialist relational logic clashes with his strong polemical claims and his harshness in political debates. This critique of Bourdieu is, nonetheless, precisely what Bourdieu himself advocated. Bourdieu stated on several occasions his conviction of the need for a critical sociology. In Sur la télévision, he gives his opinion on the role of sociology. He states that sociology can be used in two distinct ways, one of which he calls cynical, the other clinical (1998b: 70). A cynical sociology makes use of its knowledge in order to make its own strategies more effective, while a clinical sociology uses its knowledge of social laws to challenge them effectively. In his collection Contre-feux 2, he explicitly stated how strongly he felt about a clinical sociology: For reasons which seem unquestionable to me . . . I have come to think that those that have the opportunity to dedicate their life to the study of the social world, cannot keep aloof, far from the conflicts in which the future of the world is at stake. (2001a: 7, my trans.)

The following parallel with medical science, drawn by Bourdieu, best clarifies what he sees as a ‘clinical sociology’ or, to him, a sociology per se: The physician must strive to discover illnesses that are not obvious . . . precisely the ones that the practitioner can ‘neither see with his eyes nor hear with his ears.’ Patients’ complaints are vague and uncertain; body signals are obscure and convey their meaning only very slowly, and often after the event. So we must look to reasoning (logismos) to uncover the structural causes that statements and apparent signs unveil only by veiling. (1999: 628)

Bourdieu saw himself as a social surgeon. As such, he felt a Beruf, as Max Weber would have said, to sociology as a vocation. First of all, Bourdieu’s recent work will be investigated for its critical content. If we are to become aware of any possible changes in Bourdieu’s writing, we have to know what is at stake in his later work. The Later Work Some of Bourdieu’s earliest writings were already very political. This is especially true of Les Héritiers and La Réproduction. The reproduction-thesis concerning education, which is repeated in Noblesse d’état, was very much a Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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political statement. The later works in no way mark a radical political ‘turn’ if that means a change towards engaged analyses that are laden with normativity. But the later work does have a different tone, which I now want to discuss. The aforementioned Contre-feux 2 consists of articles such as ‘Pour un mouvement social européen’ (which is also the collection’s subtitle) and ‘La Culture est en danger’ – not exactly titles one would expect from an academic sociologist. This collection of ‘interventions’ is a sequel. The first volume, translated as Acts of Resistance, appeared in 1998. Its subtitle also leaves no doubt as to the tone of the articles contained in it: Against the Tyranny of the Market, or, in its French edition, Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale. These titles are indicative of the two main subjects of Bourdieu’s critical interventions. Two recurring and related themes in Bourdieu’s later writings are the threat of the demise of culture and the danger of neo-liberal economics. By ‘culture’ Bourdieu means autonomous spheres such as art, literature and science. These are in danger of becoming overgrown by, or dependent on, an economic market. This shows the intricate link of this theme with Bourdieu’s other grave concern, the dominance of neo-liberal economics. Neo-liberal economics is a notion of the economy closely related to neo-classical academic economics which is seen by Bourdieu as emphasizing the self-regulative power of the market without governmental interference. This particular particularism, according to Bourdieu, has been universalized. He sees its ideas exemplified in monetary institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and in his later writings he continuously points at its dangers, counterproposing a more Keynesian notion of a state-regulated market. These are the two dominant themes in Bourdieu’s later writings. Other themes include the inequalities between men and women, and issues of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. Let’s take a closer look at some of Bourdieu’s critical interventions by starting with the latter, then moving on to the dominant themes of his acts of resistance. In 1999, together with Loïc Wacquant, Bourdieu wrote an article called ‘On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason’, the English version of which, published in Theory, Culture & Society, evoked a lot of reactions, some of which were very fierce. ‘On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason’ concerns what Bourdieu and Wacquant see as a grave danger, namely an assumed Americanization of culture. In provocative language, sometimes in ad hominem and other rhetorical forms of argumentation, both European and American ‘multiculturalists’ get their due. And, ‘to turn to a domain closer to political realities, a debate such as that swirling around “race” and identity has given rise to similar, if more brutal, ethnocentric intrusions’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 44). What Bourdieu and Wacquant in fact argue is that many theories (they bracket this word and call it ‘but thinly conceptualized transformations’) on the areas they discuss, contribute to the reproduction of existing relations of inequality between white and black people. The origin of such theories, according to Bourdieu and Wacquant, lies in the universalization of an ethnocentric American model. And thus Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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they feel justified in attaching to those ‘theories’ the adjective ‘racist’ (1999: 45). This ‘Americanism’ is also treated elsewhere by Bourdieu, where he says it leads to ‘passivity of the mind, scientism, snobbism (paradoxically) or quite simply conservatism, and this with complicity of the Europeans themselves, in a logic not unlike that of the colonization’ (2001a: 31). Here is a link between the debate around ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ and the more encompassing theme of neo-liberal economics, in that both are examples of the universalization of an American particularism. This ‘universalization of a particularism’ has certainly been one of the greatest stumbling blocks for Bourdieu. One of his latest book-length works, Les Structures sociales de l’économie (2000a), is an attempt, by means of an empirical analysis of the (French) housing market, to correct what Bourdieu sees as the dominant strand in economic thought – as the sociologist, according to Bertrand Russell, will always do once engaged in economics. By ‘dominant economic discourse’ Bourdieu means neo-classical economics, of which Friedman is one of the most notable advocates. Economics, in Bourdieu’s reasoning, is in effect nothing more than a part of sociology, and an analysis of the economic field provides him with a correction of the neo-classical picture of the economy with its mechanistic model of utility-seeking atomistic agents (2000a: 240–1). Bourdieu’s analysis in Les Structures sociales de l’économie, together with his earlier critique of homo economicus in The Logic of Practice (1990), can be seen as a basis for his more engaged and popular articles, in that it demystifies neo-liberal thought (read: American thought). In this work he provides the theoretical basis for his critique of neo-liberalism, in which he comes to the conclusion that the core of this ideology, the homo economicus, is ‘une sorte de monstre anthropologique’ (2000a: 256). But it is a monster with a performative capacity, for there exists ‘a fatalistic discourse which consists of transforming economic tendencies into destiny’ (1998a: 55). The authority of laissez-faire economics is, for Bourdieu, a mere indicator of conservative power, since ‘laissez-faire conserves’, and conservatives ‘need laissez-faire to conserve’ (1998a: 55). But the performative power of neo-liberal economics installs a kind of structural violence. Financial markets exert structural violence, and Bourdieu maintains that this violence, by way of the ‘law of the conservation of violence’ will backfire in the form of suicides and crime (1998a: 40). These negative effects, Bourdieu maintains, can also be found in culture, the state of which is the other main theme in his critical interventions. One example concerns the media, where the competing press will do anything for a scoop, a headline which Bourdieu says is in fact uninteresting, but which is aimed at higher viewer ratings. In Sur la télévision (Dutch trans. 1998b) Bourdieu offers a field analysis of the ‘circular circulation’ of information in the news media. He criticizes the media fiercely. Television, he says, has a ‘banalizing effect’, it conforms and depoliticizes due to a ‘mentality of viewers’ ratings’. Moreover, journalists lose their autonomy due to external constraints that are, in the end, none Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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other than demands of an economic market. The principal danger Bourdieu sees as threatening culture is that of a loss of autonomy. In Les Règles de l’art (Dutch trans. 1994b) Bourdieu had given an extensive account of the genesis of an autonomous field of literature. Now, under the pressure of economic constraints, he slowly sees that autonomy turn into heteronomy. Where the fields of art and literature used to be relatively free of the laws of money, this is changing under the influence of what Bourdieu calls ‘the prophets of the new Gospel of neo-liberalism’ (2001a: 76). Whereas the argument given for (neo-)liberalization is that competition will lead to greater choice, Bourdieu sees a future of cultural censorship by the market, and of a general levelling out of cultural creativity. This connection between neo-liberal economics and the demise of cultural autonomy is one reason Bourdieu calls upon intellectuals to use their relative autonomy as a counterforce, perhaps before it’s too late, since the intellectual institutions, Bourdieu expects, will also erode under the pressures of neo-liberal market constraints. The Intellectual and the Surgeon Bourdieu went into battle, and this made many sociologists suspicious of him – especially those far away from ‘theory’ – who wished to remain ‘neutral’. In his final years, Bourdieu’s fighting spirit was stronger than it ever had been before. Although he had always written ‘interventions’ of a political kind, their tone grew harsher.2 Following his call in 1992 (Les Règles de l’art) for a united movement of intellectuals and a ‘corporatism of the universal’ (1994b: 399–411), he became more and more explicit in his calls, for instance for a ‘mouvement social européen’, an international union of labourers that could face up to transnational competition on the labour market, which plays workers from different countries off against each other. Similarly critical is Masculine Domination (2001b), which first appeared in 1998. Here, Bourdieu analyses the inequality between men and women in a way in which women, especially, have taken offence; so much so, that the book set off a debate in the French press called ‘le cas Bourdieu’. Bourdieu basically says in this book that the inequality between men and women is structural, and as such it is continuously being reproduced. ‘Hidden constants’ (that is, influences below the level of conscious experience) perpetuate the separations between both. The implication of this is that feminism has failed to produce tangible and lasting results. But in this case, too, Bourdieu did not stop at a sociological analysis of what he perceived; at the same time, he spoke of the necessity for a different perspective on men–women relations (and on homosexuals), for which, a ‘durable transformation of the internalized categories’ is required (2001a: 121). The title of The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (1999) (orig. La Misère du monde) is indicative of the engagement of the fieldwork that is presented in it. Bourdieu and his team tell many small and personal stories, by which they mean to give an exposition of existing ‘social suffering’. In the postscript to this work, Bourdieu states his intentions most explicitly. Politics, he says, is caught in its own internal struggles and Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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in a world of technocrats. The same goes for the field of journalism and for intellectuals in general. But, according to Bourdieu, even if ‘producing awareness of these mechanisms that make life painful, even unliveable, does not neutralise them’ (1999: 629), uncovering the causes of the misery can, in time, lead to a remedy: ‘what the social world has done, it can, armed with this knowledge, undo’ (1999: 629). In his Propos sur le champ politique, Bourdieu tries to conceptually capture the ‘political field’ as a historically developed field of forces. At the end of this lecture he repeats what he conceives to be the task of the intellectual: ‘this consists of intervening in the political universe . . . with the authority and competence that are associated with the autonomous universes of art, philosophy or science’ (2000b: 105). There exists, according to Bourdieu, no contradiction between such autonomy and social commitment. And his plea for a corporatism of the universal is characterized by a will to preserve the autonomy of the various spheres of culture and to prevent them from becoming overpowered by a neoliberal economic rationale. ‘Against the withering away of the state’, Bourdieu chooses to prioritize ‘the critical efforts of intellectuals, trade unions or associations’ (1998a: 40). Again, a decisive role is given to intellectuals. In this last period of his writings, Bourdieu placed himself in the seat of the social surgeon. Hence his plea for a clinical sociology in Sur la télévision and Les Usages sociaux de la science. But to show that he always had the intention of working to better the social body is important in order to relativize the idea that there has been a radical turn in his work. It also clarifies the point of departure of Bourdieu’s ‘medical science’, thus making his own praxis more intelligible. Bourdieu’s Critical Methodology Habitus, Field and the Critique of Kantian Aesthetics Montaigne said it is foolish to depend on our critical capacity in matters of truth. Yet whoever wishes to use his critical capacity in a practical respect, will have to team up with some kind of truth. Truth and the possibility of criticism are, in Bourdieu’s work, intertwined. Bourdieu offers a view on the social that is consistently developed and that, as I intend to show, is the basis of both his earlier and his later, most openly critical, work. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I will restrict myself to a methodological discussion of La Distinction. I will show how this work gains its critical potential, a potential that it shares with Bourdieu’s analyses of the field of cultural production, of the reproduction in education, etc. To start with, it is necessary to define the concept of habitus. Bourdieu sees the habitus as a compromise between mechanistic and rationalist (or: finalist, subjectivist) theories (1990: 56). The habitus consists of ‘durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (1977: 72). It is an acquired system of dispositions. It is generative of actions and interpretations. Furthermore, the habitus is a Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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structured structure, for it is adjusted to external social conditions that Bourdieu calls ‘objective’. In Distinction, he clarifies the concept of habitus as follows: The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will. (1996: 466)

Most simply, the habitus is described by Panofsky, who reintroduced the concept much utilized in scholastic philosophy (to which he also applied it).3 Panofsky speaks of this habitude mentale as a ‘principe qui règle l’acte’ (1967: 83). With the help of this key concept it is possible to reach the core of Distinction. The theoretical and methodological background of this work is often less known than the main point Bourdieu makes in it, but that background is precisely what is important here. Distinction carries the subtitle A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. From this, it can be deduced that the book is basically a critique of, or at least a supplement to, the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. ‘Critique’ thus has to be seen in a Kantian sense of an enquiry into conditions of possibility. The ‘reflective judgement’, distinguished by Kant (Kant, 1957 [1790]), is the subject of Bourdieu’s enquiry. Yet his critique, unlike Kant’s, is not transcendental: it is not concerned with a prioris that lie before the realm of the empirical. Bourdieu’s social critique of the judgement of taste is an empirical analysis of the social conditions to which Kantian aesthetics are restricted. Bourdieu thereby denies the universalist basis of Kant’s reflective judgement. In a similar way, Durkheim’s ideas on socialization (or, for that matter, Bourdieu’s habitus; see also 2001c: 155)4 can be seen as supplementary to the system of a priori categories (and ideas) that was developed by Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason). Thus, on the basis of an empirical analysis, Bourdieu marks the social parameters of reflective judgement. Each class and each class-fraction has its own class-specific habitus and therefore its specific aesthetic preferences. Reflective judgement, characterized for Kant by, among other aspects, a disinterested pleasure and a preconceptual grasping of the beautiful, can, according to Bourdieu, be found only in the ‘cultural’ fraction of the dominant class. For among the lower class, pleasure at the sight of the beautiful is not at all connected to a disinterested distance from the object of aesthetic pleasure; instead, functionality plays an important role in the classification of a thing as aesthetically desirable. Whereas the habitus can be seen as the set of dispositions of individual agents, the concept of field, or in the case of Distinction, the entire social space of the classes, can be seen as the positions occupied by these agents. To Bourdieu, each social space is an arena of struggle over symbolic capital, that is, struggle over a specific form of capital (social, cultural or economic, Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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to name the most prevalent ones) that is denied as such and that, because such capital is perceived as legitimate, is one of the structuring properties of the specific social space. And it is Bourdieu’s conception of the structure of the social space that deserves attention now. Relational Logic A field, but also the social space of the classes, is the entirety of the positions taken together, in which these positions always exist relative to each other. To trace exactly what this means, it is vital to clarify Bourdieu’s relational logic. This relational logic is Bourdieu’s most fundamental methodological principle, but it is at the same time a theoretical starting point, a choice. Bourdieu was trained in a relational mode of thought from several sources, among them Bachelard and Cassirer (see Vandenberghe, 1999). Though it is not of primary importance to trace Bourdieu’s relations to structuralism here, it is certain that, for the most part, his relational logic stems from structuralism’s ‘founding father’, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. When Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics (1983 [1916]), searches for the way in which a sign (signifiant) is connected to a referent (signifié), he states that the relation between the two is arbitrary. There is no intrinsic connection between sign and referent. How does a signifier get its ‘correct’ signified, the sign its meaning? First of all by means of what Saussure calls the principle of difference. This means that the difference of a sign relative to every other sign within the total system of signs gives the sign the possibility of a singular meaning. We thus give meaning to the sign ‘A’ because of the fact that A B, C, or all other signs. Saussure states on the ‘principle of arbitrariness’: ‘The term implies simply that the signal is unmotivated: that is to say arbitrary in relation to its signification, with which it has no natural connexion in reality’ (Saussure, 1983[1916]: 68–9). This leads him to the famous: ‘In the language itself, there are only differences’ (Saussure, 1983[1916]: 118). Yet, without a further connective principle, signs, being no more than differences relative to each other, could never gain any positive substance. A second aspect is necessary to create a meaningful referent. If the relation between the two is arbitrary in principle, only convention can decide what referent belongs to which signal. Only by means of ‘habit’, Saussure states (1983[1916]: 48), are we able to attribute a meaningful positivity to the negativity that the sign is. Now where does this take Bourdieu? First, Bourdieu rejects, on the basis of a sociological analysis of language, the langue–parole dichotomy (see for instance Language and Symbolic Power, 1991: 107). He does, however, make use of the principle of difference and the idea of the arbitrary nature of the sign. The latter fits with the distinction between Substanz- and Funktionsbegriff that he took from Cassirer. But what are the equivalents, for Bourdieu, of what signs are for Saussure? First, as becomes clear in Distinction, they are consumption goods. Works of art are such goods as well: ‘of all the objects offered for consumers’ choice, there are none more classifying than legitimate works of art’ (1996: 16). But also the positions Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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occupied by agents in the social space are, with regard to the distribution of their relative autonomy, arbitrary for Bourdieu. Positions are always relative positions. Bourdieu’s use of the Saussurean principle of difference emerges everywhere in his work. In his words: I think that the core of my thought is that the properties attached to different individuals, constitutive of a society, constitute an system (ensemble) of differences which, when they are perceived by agents gifted with the necessary discernment . . . function like the elements of a system of differences, or of distinction, which is totally structurally comparable to a system of phonemes – the material properties attached to an individual and to the individual’s properties function like distinctive signs.5

What is convention or ‘habit’ to Saussure, stems for Bourdieu from the habitus, the internalized schemes of classification and interpretation by means of which signifier and signified are combined in a way attuned to the relative position of the agent or interpreter and his or her objective external conditions. A field mechanism existing in internalized state in the habitus, is the illusio that can be found in each field. Where doxa stands for the faith or belief in the presuppositions of a field, illusio refers to the specific ‘stake’ of the ‘game’ in that field. The field of (restricted) cultural production for example, is characterized by a charismatic illusion, which functions as an ordering principle stating that ‘true art’ is produced out of economic disinterestedness by the artist as a singular producer, an artistic talent, in short, the auctor of the work of art (1993a, 1994b). The illusio creates a kind of belief in the naturalness of the affairs of a field, and this facilitates a (re)production of specific actions. The illusio of a field tells the actors within that field (and it tells the sociologist as well) what is important in that field. The hierarchy of positions within a field is indeed – on the basis of illusio – perceived as a hierarchy. The signs of domination only become meaningful in light of the field’s illusio and, as such, the illusio functions as a binding convention between signal and referent. In each field, what counts is to gain a dominant position by means of the actions that are seen as legitimate in each field. In Raisons pratiques, Bourdieu stresses the relational character of his analysis, stating: ‘Le réel est relationel’ (1994a: 17). Here, he explains the title La Distinction by saying: The very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate (one speaks of distinction naturelle, ‘natural refinement’), is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties. (1994a: 20)

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with the use of symbolic violence. And so the legitimate aesthetic disposition (the Kantian view of the beautiful) only exists within the dominant class. This disposition is not ‘legitimate’ due to some natural or essential surplus value, but because it is consecrated in the habitus of members of the dominant class, as a result of which the actions and interpretations generated by it lead to an ‘automatic’ distinctive advantage. Since the objective conditions (such as education) of members of the middle class are less favourable, try as they might, they will never really master ‘distinguished’ taste. They will, for instance, go en masse to the Jeroen Bosch exhibition, which was held in the Netherlands recently, whereas, in order to be really culturally up to date, they should wait for the new Jeff Koons exhibition. That however, as Bourdieu would say, has got nothing to do with any intrinsic characteristics of the work of Jeroen Bosch or Jeff Koons. The title La Distinction thus shows the prominence of the signes distinctifs (1994a: 24), the signs of dominance. Where Saussure states: ‘language does not present itself to us as a set of signs already delimited. . . . It is an indistinct mass, in which attention and habit alone enable us to distinguish particular elements’ (1983[1916]: 102), Bourdieu says, as a summary of La Distinction: What is at stake in the struggles about the meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization: the evocative power of an utterance which puts things in a different light . . . shows something else . . . a separative power, a distinction, diacrisis, discretio, drawing discrete units out of indivisible continuity, difference out of the undifferentiated. (1996: 479)

Relational Logic and Critical Potential By now, it is perhaps clear how Bourdieu’s use of a relational logic brings with it a critical potential. His analyses are unmasking and demythologizing. This is a direct consequence of his anti-essentialism. Bourdieu wants to show that dominant relations within the social space are maintained by means of a belief in the basis of that dominance as ‘essential’ and ‘naturally real’. This line of thought, which appears in all of Bourdieu’s analyses, is what has always made Bourdieu a critical sociologist. On the basis of this idea, for instance, Bourdieu was able to characterize the (French) system of education as a kind of racisme de l’intelligence, because there exists a systematic reproduction of the legitimate linguistic disposition that is only possessed by children from the ‘best’ milieus, as a result of which many have no chance in the system of education before they even begin: ‘elimination without exams’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). Baudrillard has stated that an analysis of the social logic regulating the practice of conveying meaning through objects within different classes cannot but be a critique of the ideology of consumption (1972: 7). Whoever makes use of a relational logic, places the convictions and beliefs of those he analyses between brackets and concludes that these are merely a socially Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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constructed docta ignorantia. And so, in Les Règles de l’art, Bourdieu wonders why so many writers and philosophers state so smugly that the experience of art cannot be capured in words (1994b: 12). Bourdieu’s analysis of the autonomization of the field of cultural production attempts to uncover what practice in the art world is really about; ‘the real nature of the practices’ (1993a: 74). Thus, in Bourdieu’s sociology of art, as is usual in the ‘production’ perspective in that field of sociology, artistic creativity is reduced to the original meaning of the verb creare: to make, to produce. The ‘stories’ within different fields are analysed by Bourdieu as systems of signs without a direct external referent. The idea of ‘masculinity as nobility’ is arbitrary, Bourdieu says (2001b: 56 ff.). But that also goes for the ‘charismatic illusion’ within art, for the signs of distinction within the societal classes, for the nomos of the political field (1997b, 2000b), for ‘l’économie des pratiques économiques’ (2000a), etc. Wherever Bourdieu utilizes his relational analysis, he uncovers, he demystifies. Critique, therefore, has always been a prominent feature of his work. But has this critique changed in the last period of Bourdieu’s life and work, the time when, more and more, he became known as a socially and politically engaged thinker? Old and New Critique: Difference and Continuity La Distinction cannot but be an immanent critique of the ideology of the classes. In a similar way, the psychoanalytic definition of the ‘unconscious’ in the first quarter of the last century contained a critical potential with regard to the bourgeoisie, for the supremacy of the bourgeoisie (such was the hidden message of psychoanalysis) might be based on something completely different from (in Bourdieu’s terms) the illusio cultivated within the space created by the classes. Bourdieu’s later analyses held on to the relational perspective of the field and to the concept of habitus. In that sense, there is continuity in the critique. Therefore, the idea of a ‘political turn’ seems misplaced. Yet there definitely was a change in his later work. This change mainly concerns the tone of the critique. Bourdieu seemed, to some, to become frustrated by the reproduction of inequality he had described so many times, and by his own powerlessness to change it. The ‘oral testimonies’ of The Weight of the World (1999) are the result of a choice: to let the sufferings of the ordinary man speak for themselves. Those who have made the study of the social world their work, Bourdieu stated in the passage quoted earlier, cannot remain indifferent with regard to that world. More and more, Bourdieu practised this conviction. And his analyses became more and more harsh in tone. While the earlier work is critical in the sense that it uncovers relations of power and thus questions the arbitrary relations between ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’, these are mainly implicit consequences of the analyses. The later Bourdieu was much more direct in aiming at his targets. In the last years of his life, Bourdieu attacked ‘The Negative Intellectual’: ‘adversaries’ writing articles (for instance on the Algerian situation, one of Bourdieu’s old loves), ‘full of platitudes and errors and entirely oriented towards a simplistic conclusion calculated to give satisfaction to superficial Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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pity and racist hatred’ (1998a: 92). But Bourdieu himself also got involved in the ‘superficial’ debates of the popular press. He was especially scornful of neo-liberal institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, and of the intellectuals who promoted the corresponding strands of thought. Not without rhetoric himself, he dismissed the ‘hollow rhetoric’ of those intellectuals who were his most direct opponents in public debates. He called them doxosophers, ‘these technicians of opinion who think themselves wise’ (1998a: 7). It seems as if Bourdieu took the role of the ‘public intellectual’, propagated by him, on himself. Like a contemporary Zola, he accused. In Pour un savoir engagé (2001a), he elucidates the role of the ‘public intellectual’ as someone who: . . . incorporates into a political struggle his specific competence and authority, and the values that are involved in exercising his profession, such as the truth or disinterestedness; in other words, someone who enters the political terrain without abandoning his research-obligations and competences. (2001a: 33, my trans.)

And so, ‘scholarship’ and ‘commitment’ go hand in hand. Intermezzo: Bourdieu at the Left of the Field As indicated earlier, Bourdieu was always a committed scholar. One of the reasons his later commitment took on a more polemical form may be found in the context of his position, that is, in the structure of the intellectual field. Being an established anti-establishment sociologist may be explained by Bourdieu’s habitus. First, he was a philosopher by education, which gave him a distinctive advantage in social science. Bourdieu himself said the same with regard to Latour: being able to cross academic boundaries gives one a considerable amount of cultural or intellectual, and in this case, symbolic capital (2001c: 65). Though he had come from a relatively isolated part of France, he made it to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). There, his antiestablishment sentiment grew, as is apparent in his joining a group of students (among them Derrida) that critiqued the Stalinist atmosphere at the ENS at the time. This was one reason not to develop his philosophical studies further. Having set his sights on social science, his philosophical capital allowed him easily to come to a distinctive position, denouncing both structuralist objectivism and Sartrean subjectivism. As Randall Collins has said: ‘a plague on both houses is always a viable intellectual strategy’ (1998: 81). Collins also gives an example of an intellectual who became established precisely because he kept on critiquing the establishment. Wittgenstein, Collins argues, reached the height of his fame in Cambridge in part by shocking the Apostles (as the group of ‘hottest scholars’ of the moment was called), by showing no interest in them at all and by never visiting them again after an initial visit, thus drawing attention to himself – whether consciously or not. Dissimilar as the situations are, Bourdieu also gained in fame because of his critical attitude towards the (academic) establishment: ‘I think that the concern to nicht mitmachen, as Adorno put it – the refusal to compromise Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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with institutions, beginning with intellectual institutions – has never left me’ (1987: 4). His studies, Les Héritiers and La Réproduction, appeared at a time when their subject, the reproduction of establishment in education, was a major topic. It is not surprising that Les Héritiers was seen as one of the important texts of the May ’68 student revolt. Over a decade later, Bourdieu showed he still had the same anti-establishment attitude, precisely at the moment of his ultimate consecration in the French educational establishment. His inaugural speech at the Collège de France was, of course, an acceptance of the chair of sociology, but it was at the same time a critical reflection on the social nature of such things as inaugural lectures. In that year, 1981, Bourdieu also stressed his dissatisfaction with the political establishment in France, in this case by publicly supporting Coluche, more a maverick comedian than a politician, in his campaign to become a candidate for presidency. From that time on, Bourdieu became more and more involved in public debates. And he always took sides against the establishment, including the established left. The political left in France – especially under Mitterrand – like the left in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, was rapidly moving away from the position of the critical left in the political spectrum. What was once the left now became established conventional politics, at best a ‘third way’, and in any case much less critical of dominant neo-liberal economics. The French socialist party became a target of Bourdieu’s critique, and, consequently, they spoke of him as a dangerous ‘gauche Bourdieusienne’. Thus, also in the ‘public’ or political arena, Bourdieu was a master of distinction. He responded with a plea ‘pour une gauche de la gauche’, for a ‘left of the left’. The transnational consequences of neo-liberal economics increasingly worried him, and in order to put forward a critique of the European unification and of globalization in general, he edited the book-journal Liber from 1989 to 2000. This was later followed by a chairmanship of the Raisons d’Agir society, which also published Bourdieu’s own ‘contre-feux’. It thus becomes apparent that his long-term strategy was to align himself with the underprivileged and repressed. He spoke, in his words, ‘for everyone who doesn’t count as a politician’. It is not surprising, therefore, that he defended the rights of illegal immigrants, ‘les sans papiers’. Towards the end of his life, his publications became more polemical, and he came to be seen as the unofficial ideologue of the anti-globalization movement(s). And so José Bové, the French farmer who drove his tractor into a McDonald’s ‘drive-in’, and who was openly supported by Bourdieu, said that his ‘life itself was a commitment’. Yet this is but one side of the context. It does not explain why Bourdieu’s critical, anti-establishment habitus led him to become the foremost left-wing intellectual of France. This, I want to propose, can be partly explained by the positions of other leading intellectuals. At the time Bourdieu came to the Collège de France, there were very few intellectuals of his stature who could fulfil the role ‘conscience of the left’. In 1981 Bourdieu won his chair at the Collège, leaving both Boudon and Touraine behind (and of these two, only Touraine could have come close to being the left-wing Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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intellectual Bourdieu would become). At that time, Lévi-Strauss had already retired. The same year, Roland Barthes died. Three years later, Foucault died. Both Lyotard (who died in 1998) and Derrida probably enjoyed greater fame in the USA than in France. Consequently, they were away too much to be considered as Parisian intellectuals pur sang. Nor did they make it as far as the Collège de France. Apart from that, Bourdieu managed to distinguish himself from what he saw as ‘postmodern philosophy’. It has been said that such philosophies don’t easily lend themselves to a critique of society, that the philosophy of difference leads to indifference (see Dallmayr, 1989: 90). Bourdieu fiercely critiqued these philosophies (see, for instance, Méditations pascaliennes [1997a], or the English Preface to Homo Academicus) that, in his eyes, flirt with the social sciences without wanting to really associate themselves with such ‘vulgar sociology’. Bourdieu’s analyses were probably indeed more easily recognizable to a larger audience as being critical. As for some remaining positions in the field: Baudrillard (also flirting with America) was far less influential than Bourdieu. And Latour has been seen, by Bourdieu (2001c) and others (e.g. Fuller, 2000) as rather more right-wing, at least more (neo-)liberal. Others not mentioned here did not have the impact that Bourdieu had at the Collège de France. In short, the structure of the field was such that the later Bourdieu was the ideal person to fulfil the role of spokesman of the left. Not only did this fit with his habitus, which was characterized by a disposition of being anti-establishment (which may be related to his having been an outsider: in France in general, because of his peripheral origins, at the ENS, later in Algeria [see Jenkins, 2002: 14] and then in the social sciences), but it also fitted with the fact that this was a vacant position, given the structure of the French intellectual field at the time. A Public Intellectual But where Bourdieu himself acted as public intellectual, the strength and tenor of his analysis tended to decline. Indeed, the reason Bourdieu had always refrained from engaging in public debates was that such interventions would, he feared, result in a loss of analytical strength. And he seems to have been correct in assuming this. For his articles in Le Monde are highly rhetorical. In popular interventions, in newspapers and at meetings of, for instance, workers’ unions and labour organizations, his thoughts were inevitably less substantiated than they were in his scientific publications. The people he addressed at such meetings did not have the habitus to understand concepts such as habitus and field; they often lacked the ability to grasp the real as relational, and therefore Bourdieu’s analyses were reduced to their critical outcome, without the analytic background that substantiated that critical content. Therefore, if there is after all a political turn in Bourdieu’s career, it is more than anything else related to his practice of the role of the ‘public intellectual’. And yet, this shift in tenor and tone did not seem to be limited solely to his ‘popular’ interventions. For his dialogue with the scientific community Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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also changed in tone. Where previously he had carried out a relational analysis of the French intellectual scene, paying special attention to the debate between Barthes and Picard (1984), Bourdieu now simply wrote that Sollers (who headed the Tel Quel movement, which included Barthes and Derrida) was a terrible writer (a ‘fake avant-garde of literature’) (1998a: 11). Furthermore, there is the aforementioned Theory, Culture & Society article, where one would not expect to find the amount of rhetoric it actually contains. ‘Classical works’ cited by ‘opponents’ are rhetorically cut down to size, yet Bourdieu and Wacquant themselves don’t hesitate to use the rhetorical figure of the ‘classical work’, in some cases referring to works no more than five years old. When speaking of the concept of ‘globalization’, the authors almost become functionalists. Elsewhere, Bourdieu also accuses his colleagues of unwanted political participation on this issue: The word ‘globalization’ is . . . a pseudo-concept that is at once descriptive and prescriptive that has taken the place of the word ‘modernization’, which has long been used by the American social sciences as a euphemism in order to impose a naïve ethnocentric evolutionary model, that allows different societies to be classified by their distance from American society . . . (2001a: 96–7, my trans.)

And, to take a final example of Bourdieu’s later acts of resistance, the Theory, Culture & Society article displays the kind of ad hominem rhetoric one would not expect after reading Bourdieu in his earlier years. When speaking of Michel Wieviorka’s book La France raciste (1993), Bourdieu and Wacquant state: ‘under the guise of science, it is the logic of trial which asserts itself (and ensures book sales, for lack of success based on intellectual esteem)’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 44–5). And to this they add in a note: ‘the scientifically scandalous Racist France of a French sociologist more attentive to the expectations of the field of journalism than to the complexities of social reality’ (1999: 53). But is this Bourdieu’s ‘science’? It seems to me that in contributions such as these, Bourdieu’s own scientific esteem is certainly at stake. For he himself had written on the use of arguments ad hominem that, when one practises sociology, one comes to understand that, although people have their responsibilities, their possibilities largely depend on the structure in which they reside, and on their relative position within that structure. Arguments ad hominem miss the point, for a single philosopher or journalist is nothing more than a kind of ‘epiphenomenon of a structure’, like an electron, an exponent of a field (1998b: 64–5).6 When Bourdieu himself threatened to lose sight of presuppositions that had always been, and, paradoxically, still were, at the core of his work, he seemed, in this fiercely critical stage of his career, to come into conflict with the basis of his critique: relational logic. Did he go too far? Did he risk being included in an actualized version of Lombroso’s Genie und Entartung (1910 [1897])? Should he be remembered not as a contemporary Durkheim, but as a Comte? Certainly not, for that would be to overstate matters and to lose sight of the positive contributions made by the later Bourdieu. But, in order Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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to make a proper assessment of his work, the critique of his critique cannot be omitted. The Critique of the Critique There is a continuity in Bourdieu’s work in that his later writings do not move away from his relational analysis. But, at the same time, nothing makes existing frictions in his work – the result of that starting-point – more visible than his later work. This may be attributed to the polemical character of that work, which seems inconsistent with Bourdieu’s relational anti-essentialism. First, I will discuss some reactions of others to that work. Then I wish to investigate the tension that seems to exist between the tone of Bourdieu’s critique and the theoretical basis thereof: relational logic. Wholly in line with Bourdieu’s own teachings, to conclude, I will try to let Bourdieu speak against himself. Reactions to the Critique: ‘Ni Dieu ni Bourdieu’? To start with Bourdieu and Wacquant’s contribution to Theory, Culture & Society (1999): a special issue of the journal was devoted to this article. At the time of its publication, it was already labelled as a ‘bull in a china-shop’. Roughly speaking, the reactions to Bourdieu and Wacquant are divided between criticisms of the tone and criticisms of the content of the article. Wieviorka (2000) defends himself, and shows, by means of a discussion of Bourdieu’s place in the French intellectual field, how Bourdieu also makes use of concepts he himself contests. J.D. French (2000) contends that, by siding with Brazil as a victim of American imperialism, Bourdieu and Wacquant show their own ‘vainglorious nationalism’. Werbner (2000) is even more critical. She states that Bourdieu and Wacquant err when they suggest that global impact of American (racial) imperialism is something new, and again when they assume that there exists an ‘American’ sociology of race relations, and finally when they hold that American dominance in sociology is still present. Friedman (2000) and Lemert (2000) are more mild in their commentaries. But they do show amazement over the tone of ‘The Cunning of Imperialist Reason’, as well as over the – for Bourdieu – very unusual lack of theoretical foundation. The publication of the article in question, and the reactions it provoked, suggest that Bourdieu’s academic work shifted towards a harshness in tone that came close to simple accusation. Les Structures sociales de l’économie may be a field analysis like Bourdieu’s earlier works, but it focuses, in its critique of academic economics, on an oversimplified caricature of the subject. The ‘dominant paradigm’ Bourdieu challenges (2000a: 235) is not nearly so dominant as it once was. The neo-classical homo economicus can indeed only be found in the neo-classical branch of academic economics, whereas institutional economics and economic discourse theory are only a couple of examples of the alternatives to the neoclassical paradigm within economics itself. Bourdieu seems to want to make an easy target of neo-classical academic economics, in order to dismiss the Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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neo-liberal politics of America and Western Europe that are mainly inspired by this paradigm. Therefore, in this work too, the critical tone seems to overshadow the critical potential of his method. But there exists another, more fundamental, kind of critique of Bourdieu. As an example, I take Bruno Latour’s remarks on ‘classical sociology’. In his Aramis, or The Love of Technology, Latour distinguishes between two kinds of sociology, the one being ‘classical sociology’ and the other ‘relativist (or rather, relationist) sociology’ (Latour, 1996: 199). He then defines ‘classical sociology’ as follows: ‘Classical sociology knows more than the “actors”; it sees right through them to the social structure or the destiny of which they are the patients’ (1996: 199). According to Latour, classical sociology has a ‘metalanguage’: it penetrates reality to see what really goes on (compare Bourdieu’s remark in The Field of Cultural Production on ‘the real nature of the practices’ [1993a: 74]). And what really is going on, may be very different from what the ‘actants’ think is going on. It is obvious that Bourdieu’s field analyses, with their doxa and illusio as core-concepts would qualify for the label of ‘classical sociology’ in Latour’s terminology. This kind of sociology, so far as Latour is concerned, seems to have an arrogant stance. Latour says: ‘Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do’ (1996: 199). Indeed, Bourdieu’s remarks in Sur la télévision, in which he explains how the sociologist knows not to blame individuals who are no more than ‘exponents of a field’, does seem to have an air of tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. Latour thus explicitly questions the basis of Bourdieu’s critique. And Bourdieu poses a similar question regarding science in general in his plea for interdisciplinarity in science in Les Usages sociaux de la science: ‘The question here is . . . who judges the legitimacy of the judges’ (1997b: 56). According to Latour, ‘classical sociology’ thinks it can indeed ‘judge the behaviour’ of the actors studied. Latour’s critique is fundamental. It concerns the question whether or not the sociologist ‘knows’ anything more than the non-sociologist in the analysis of the social. Geertz has tried to answer this question by saying: ‘Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular: another country heard from. To regard them as anything more (or anything less) than that distorts both them and their implications . . . for social theory’ (Geertz, 1973: 23). But for Bourdieu, sociological findings are very much ‘privileged’. Latour has given another critique of Bourdieu, which links this claim of Bourdieu’s precisely to the critical potential of Bourdieu’s work and to the actors analysed in that work. Latour states: Can one call this reduction of the communicative capacities, of innovation and resistance of those on whose behalf one pretends to speak, leftist? (Latour, 1998)

Indeed, Bourdieu often seems to have reduced people to either ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’. As such he seems to have been observing the world from an Archimedean point of view, just like Marx, who was in the unique position Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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of being able to step out of his own base–superstructure dichotomy in order to ‘see’ the reality of bourgeoisie and proletariat, to have been observing the world from an Archimedean point of view. Thus, the critique that Bourdieu paid too little attention to the emancipatory potential in people themselves does seem to hit home. Indicative of this is the title of one of Bourdieu’s ‘Acts of Resistance’: ‘The Protest Movement of the Unemployed, a Social Miracle’ (1998a). Although most emancipatory movements do not find their origin in sociology, to Bourdieu it was a ‘miracle’ for one to appear without its guidance. This was based on the sociological theory according to which certain deprived groups do not have the means to come to organized protest. Plausible as that may be, it seems rather improper to label a falsification of that theory a ‘miracle’. With some justice, Bourdieu’s ideas on the social docta ignorantia might be called a sociological doxa arrogantia. Demythologizing Bourdieu’s Mythology? Latour’s critique of Bourdieu touches the basic presuppositions of Bourdieu’s work. What if we were to relate these presuppositions to Bourdieu’s most recent writings? And does this involve a critique of the relational logic itself? To begin, we may point out some inconsistencies in Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the ‘public intellectual’, whom he defined as someone who takes the values that belong to his or her profession, with him/her to the ‘combat politique’ (2001a: 33). One of the values may be disinterestedness. Yet this disinterestedness is precisely what Bourdieu has always questioned. It functions, as he showed in Les Règles de l’art (1994b) and in The Field of Cultural Production (1993a), as a mask for the interests (i.e. the symbolic capital) that are at stake. Someone who really has a ‘feel for the game’ knows how to play it in such a way that it looks as if he or she isn’t playing a game at all. The ‘other side’ of a field, according to Bourdieu, can only be uncovered when the field is investigated taking the illusio as indeed an illusio. If we continue demythologizing, we will see through the doxa of the game, which is the silent ‘agreement’ (not in the sense of Rousseau’s ‘volonté générale’) that is the basis of the game, and which, since it is the reproduced basis of change within a field, has an orthodox character. So how was Bourdieu able to make appeal for a ‘public intellectual’ who acts out of disinterestedness from his or her background (habitus, field, capital),7 while exactly that background necessarily presupposes (see, for instance, 1996: 101) that real ‘disinterestedness’ is an impossibility? Seen from the point of view of the fifth chapter of Raisons pratiques, called ‘Un acte désintéressé est-il possible?’ (1994a), Bourdieu’s plea for such an ‘intellectual ascesis’ is remarkable. For his answer to that question is that there are only ‘interested disinterested’ actions. Being in a field means wanting to make a difference (faire des différences). No one can remain indifferent, therefore, with regard to the specific stakes within that field. There is always something at stake, and thus there is always some ‘interest’. The disinterestedness that may appear to be present in some fields springs from a habitus attuned to the interests of the field. That is how it is possible that ‘one can be interested in Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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a game (in the sense of not indifferent) whist being at the same time disinterested’ (1994a: 152). Disinterestedness is in fact a form of symbolic capital. In the end, in ‘disinterested’ actions as much as all other actions, what matters is le prix au jeu (1994a: 153). Bourdieu even begins his text by noting that he himself has been criticized so many times for unmasking intellectual interests: ‘the intellectual games also have their stakes . . . those stakes create interests’ (1994a: 149). Intellectuals who may appear disinterested are immersed in a field in which certain interests are at stake. Within the intellectual world, people may dress themselves with a ‘statut d’exception ou d’extraterritorialité’ (1994a: 149), but they are, in reality, emperors without clothes. It is this line of analysis that the later Bourdieu seemed, at times, to abandon. Perhaps Bourdieu did not mean to say that the public intellectual really acts out of disinterestedness, but rather that he takes the disinterestedness that has symbolic value within his field into the political arena, in order to make a contribution from his or her specific point of view. But then, where does Bourdieu’s positive valuation of what he always unmasked with a certain cynicism8 come from? And whence the thought that the intellectual won’t, in the first place, seek his or her own interests? One of Bourdieu’s problems with the fields of politics and academia was, after all, that politicians and intellectuals were preoccupied with their own field-interests as opposed to doing ‘real’ politics and exerting ‘honest’ critique. But Bourdieu also thought of these problems when he appealed for a role for public intellectuals. He came up with the solution of letting intellectuals be the guardians of intellectualism: ‘The intellectual world must permanently subject itself to the critique of all misuse of power or of authority that is exerted in the name of intellectual authority’ (2001a: 35). But what if one intellectual accuses another of unjust use of intellectual capacities? Isn’t that precisely what the struggle in the intellectual field is all about? For then there would be a struggle over the legitimate definition of intellectual authority and over the legitimate schemes of classification and interpretation of the public intellectual. The same problem of judging (juger) appears, and it is precisely the struggle over this problem that is an example of the meaning of the intellectual game par excellence. What Bourdieu in fact wanted to do was to give the intellectual game room to play, to autonomize further. Precisely based on Bourdieu’s earlier descriptions of the intellectual field, one should conclude that, were it granted that privilege, this would result in a battle over the legitimate form of the combat politique rather than in such combat itself. Bourdieu quite simply seemed to give one specific field room to play. Why not another field? Doesn’t the failure of Bourdieu’s own attempts to unite intellectuals world-wide show that intellectuals are one specific species that will never agree? I feel that a consistent Bourdieu should have stated that, in essence, intellectuals do not exist; there is only intellectualism.

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‘Le Combat Politique’ and the Heat of the Battle More inconsistencies of this kind can be observed in Bourdieu’s later work. His critique of Soller’s capacities as a writer is one. How come Bourdieu suddenly immersed himself in the ‘charismatic illusion’ of the literary field? How did he become an advocate of ‘true literature’, which had always been the product of ‘the field of production, a universe of belief that produces the value of the work of art as fetish with its belief in the creative power of the artist’ (1994b: 277, my trans.)? This seems to be inconsistent, for, according to his own analyses, every statement in a debate concerning ‘true literature’ should immediately be stripped of its denotative content in order to be seen in its performative capacity, which is its only function. For such a statement would only gain meaning by means of its being different in relation to other such statements, and not on the basis of any intrinsic meaningful characteristic. And then there is the ‘cunning of imperialist reason’. Although ‘philosophy’ is quite simply the legitimate name of the activities within the field of philosophy (1993b), Bourdieu and Wacquant feel that postmodern thought is unworthy of that name. Yet postmodern philosophy, like most philosophy, consists of the revaluation of existing ideas and concepts, and the invention of new ones. In the postscript to La Distinction Bourdieu reacts to the treatment of Kant’s aesthetics in the Parergon (in The Truth in Painting) by Jacques Derrida, an example, many would say, of a postmodern philosopher par excellence. Bourdieu shows here how Derrida ‘never withdraws from the philosophical game’ (1996: 495). So how come postmodern thought came to be ridiculed by the later Bourdieu as ‘unworthy’ of the name ‘philosophy’? Did Bourdieu himself not mix Substanz and Funktion? The same goes for the treatment of Wieviorka’s work (and person). Bourdieu and Wacquant call it ‘scientifically scandalous’, but the question is why, all of a sudden, ‘science’ is no longer seen in terms of distinctive profit and symbolic capital. Did Bourdieu, in his own actions in the scientific field, set aside the point of view he took in his work? He seems to have got into some problems as a result of his relational logic. To conclude, I would like to highlight this as the main source of some inconsistencies that I feel can be found in Bourdieu’s work. A Sociology without Essences Bourdieu’s ideas on ‘the real nature of the practices’ (1993a: 74) have been illustrated. The question now remains: how could Bourdieu claim that he saw the true nature of things? His unmasking of the charismatic illusion (or rather, of every illusio) is based on a radical anti-essentialism. What is this based on? Lévi-Strauss, who himself drew heavily on Saussure, states in his Anthropologie structurale: ‘The Saussurean principle of the arbitrary character of linguistic signs is certainly in need of revision’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1958: 238). And yet Bourdieu maintained, with regard to its application in sociology:

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All appearances notwithstanding, the value of the properties capable of functioning as symbolic capital lies not in any intrinsic characteristics of the practices or goods in question, but in their marginal value. (1990: 136)

Bourdieu rejected the intrinsic aspect of positions, capital, etc. ‘Value’ is only used ‘in Saussure’s sense’ (1996: 247). But where is the ‘view from nowhere’ from where Bourdieu can see that the cultural is essentially arbitrary? One would, in Putnam’s words, need a ‘God’s eye point of view’ in order to see the social world of substantially different, yet fundamentally similarly organized fields ‘from above’. Whoever denies everything intrinsic to the specific points of view within particular fields will have a hard time justifying his own stance. Bourdieu does not seem to have an Archimedean point from where to see ‘the real nature of the practices’. In Foucault’s words, the problem is: ‘D’où parles-tu?’ If there are inconsistencies in Bourdieu’s work, they exist between its methodological basis and the often harsh conclusions Bourdieu arrives at. This can be seen in Bourdieu’s recent discussion of the field of science (2001c). Latour had predicted that, with respect to that particular field, Bourdieu would have to make an exception. For a Bourdieusian demystifying analysis of science would cut off the branch of objectivity on which Bourdieu himself was sitting. And indeed, in Science de la science et réflexivité, Bourdieu comes up with what is, to me, an exceptional statement. He says: ‘It is true that in the scientific field, the strategies are always Janus-faced. They have a pure and purely scientific function and a social function in the field’ (2001c: 109). But nowhere else – not in his analysis of consumption goods, of art, of education, philosophy or economics – does Bourdieu leave his object as intact as he does the first time he elaborates on the laboratory. It is unthinkable that Bourdieu would have said this in Les Règles de l’art. But this is an inconsistency that reveals a fundamental tension between Bourdieu’s anti-essentialist relational logic and his will to have ‘his view of that field, to be accepted as the authoritative one’ (Jenkins, 2002: xviii). In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Bourdieu stated: ‘all propositions which that science [sociology] formulates can and must be applicable to the subject that makes the science’ (1982: 8). What if we analyse Bourdieu using his own modus operandi? We then place his scientific ideas, among which is the idea of the arbitrariness of capital and positions within a field, between brackets, as he does, to name but one example, in the case of the ‘belief’ in ‘true art’, which he calls an illusio. For Bourdieu himself the same goes as – according to him – goes for all actors: that his particular point de vue comes from ‘a position (in a field) from which their particular outlook on the world and the field itself is formed’ (1992: 66). In thus analysing Bourdieu, we must ignore the meaning of his relational logic and focus entirely on its form, or rather on its functioning in a field, reduced to the effect it has as a specific form of capital. The idea that ‘le réel est relationel’, in our ‘externalist’ reading, now no longer refers to ‘le réel’, instead it functions as a distinction by means of which Bourdieu has gained Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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himself a profitable position in the field of sociology. It becomes clear that we run into problems if we try to analyse a relational logic by means of the same relational logic. It would mean stripping a methodology of all its claims, yet doing so on the basis of that very same methodology. Although there is certainly no relativism in Bourdieu’s work, its consequences do seem to have relativist characteristics. Conclusion So it is possible to criticize Bourdieu’s critique. But I believe I have shown that any inconsistencies in Bourdieu’s thinking are not exclusively a feature of his later work. I have tried to offer a comprehensive reading of Bourdieu, one that covers his writings from the start of his conceptual and methodological maturity to the end of his life. There is no ‘political turn’ in his oeuvre in the sense of a change in general themes and methodological underpinnings. The later and more polemical Bourdieu based his critical analyses on the same methodological principle: relational logic. This means that Bourdieu’s analyses have always been inherently critical, because of his anti-essentialist mode of approaching social inequality. But the main problem of a relational analysis such as his is that a ‘view from nowhere’ is missing. That is why the inconsistencies in Bourdieu’s analyses became more readily visible when his writings became more polemical, his statements more harsh, his accusations more direct. The later Bourdieu was given the role of the ‘public intellectual’. This was a role that, in part, came his way because of the structure of the intellectual field in Paris at the time of his professorship at the Collège de France. But it was also a role that fitted with his habitus. Bourdieu seems to have been socialized in distinction, in taking another point of view, in taking sides with minorities, in marking a position that was always outside conventional categories: he was left of the left. And in that role of public intellectual he may have felt frustration over signalling inequalities time and again, struggles for legitimate classifications at the cost of social suffering. Perhaps that frustration was a motor for his critique, and the reason for its later polemical form. But it was not the critique itself that changed. It was only its tone, and perhaps its volume: at a time when marketoriented economic thought is poisoning all autonomous spheres of culture, Bourdieu knew that the antidote had to be strong. I have ended with a critique of Bourdieu himself, by highlighting some of the apparent inconsistencies that arise out of the combination of antiessentialism and polemical acts of resistance. But any critique of Bourdieu is also a tribute to him and his writings. Richard Jenkins has even said that ‘nothing less will serve as an adequate testimony to their significance’ (2002: xx). Bourdieu’s was a daring venture, which first and foremost deserves respect. In a way, the sociologist’s view will probably always differ from that of the people he or she analyses: it marks, as Bourdieu said, ‘a break with common sense’ (1992: 166). And according to Bauman, to be involved in sociology is ‘to defamiliarize the familiar’ (1990: 15). To question the taken for granted will necessarily be perceived as an act of violence. And yet, is Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Erasmus Univ Rotterdam on June 23, 2014

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Bourdieu’s questioning of beliefs and allodoxa not an example of sociology par excellence? For, as Max Weber has said: ‘der radikalste Zweifel ist der Vater der Erkenntnis [radical doubt is the father of knowledge]’ (1988 [1922]: 496). Bourdieu was like the man in Plato’s cave who broke free from his chains and left the cave. And whoever breaks free, according to Plato, has two options. He can either enjoy his newly gained wisdom in contemplative peace, or he can put his knowledge to use in political practice. Bourdieu clearly chose the latter, and, as chained people, immersed in doxa, the inhabitants of the cave have often been reluctant to find Bourdieu’s pleas convincing. Yet I feel we must be aware of the moral imperative Bourdieu recognized as being part of the work of the social scientist. For few have had the courage to return to the cave in order to unchain the chained. Notes I wish to thank the editors and two anonymous referees for very useful comments, and I thank Anders Schinkel and Eva Moraal for their help with the manuscript. 1. This will avoid the danger of, as Bourdieu says, ‘synchronizing different moments’ in his work (1993c: 264). The key concept, that of habitus, came after 1967. 2. See most of his interventions collected in: Interventions 1961–2001: science sociale et action politique (2002). 3. Yet it can be found in many later writers as well, for instance in Kant, Hegel and Durkheim. 4. ‘C’est pourtant dans une perspective kantienne, mais totalement exclue par Kant, au nom de la coupure entre le transcendental et l’empirique, que je me suis placé, en me donnant pour objet la recherche des conditions socio-transcendentales de la connaissance [It is nevertheless a Kantian perspective, though entirely omitted by Kant in the name of the rift between the transcendental and the empirical, in which I am placed, in taking as my research-object the socio-transcendental conditions of knowledge]’ (2001c: 155). 5. Letter to author, 23 October 2000. 6. Bourdieu’s choice of words here seems to undermine his attempts to formulate a compromise between subjectivism and objectivism. 7. In La Distinction, Bourdieu captures this in a formula which serves as a perfect way of summarizing his praxeology: ‘[(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice’ (1996: 101). 8. It needs to be said here that Bourdieu himself, in Raisons pratiques (1994a: 149), denies that his analyses show a certain cynicism. References Baudrillard, J. (1972) Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe. Paris: Gallimard. Bauman, Z. (1990) Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1982) Leçon sur la leçon. Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Homo academicus. Paris: Minuit.

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Willem Schinkel is a Sociologist at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is currently working on a PhD project on violence. He is also working on a theoretical sociology. Contact: [email protected]

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