Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.

Unless saved by exceptional talent, he necessarily pays a price for clarity.

In the case of sociology however, we are always walking on hot coals, and the things we discuss are alive, they're not dead and buried

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

Femininity is imposed for the most part through an unremitting discipline that concerns every part of the body and is continuously recalled through the constraints of clothing or hairstyle.

While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don’t have any choice to make. Bertrand Russell

The radical questionnings announced by philosophy are in fact circumscribed by the interests linked to membership in the philosophical field, that is, to the very existence of this field and the corresponding censorships.

To subject to scrutiny the mechanisms which render life painful, even untenable, is not to neutralize them; to bring to light contradictions is not to resolve them. But, as skeptical as one might be about the efficacy of the sociological message, we cannot dismiss the effect it can have by allowing sufferers to discover the possible social causes of their suffering and, thus, to be relieved of blame.

As if femininity were measured by the art of 'shrinking'... women are held in a kind of invisible enclosure (of which the veil is only the visible manifestation) circumscribing the space allowed for the movements and postures of their bodies (whereas men occupy more space, especially in public places). This symbolic confinement is secured practically by their clothing by their clothing which (as was even more visible in former times) has the effect not only of masking the body but of continuously calling it to order.

Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural.” —Pierre Bourdieu1

I have analyzed the peculiarity of cultural capital, which we should in fact call informational capital to give the notion its full generality, and which itself exists in three forms, embodied, objectified, or institutionalized.

Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the “active aspect” of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.

Le néo-libéralisme reprend les plus vieilles idées du patronat, sous un message chic et moderne. C'est une "révolution" conservatrice qui veut imposer un retour à une forme de capitalisme sauvage et cynique, qui organise l'insécurité et la précarité, qui se réclame du progrès mais qui glorifie l'archaïque loi du plus fort.

The science called ‘economics’ is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed.

We need some heterodoxy in social science in order for them to avoid death by suffocation under dogmatism.

Historical anthropologist Francois Richard finds it helpful to use a term coined by the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calling Goree a site of 'sincere fiction.

The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden." Pierre Bourdieu

[W]hen habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a "fish in water": it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted could, to make sure that I am well understood, explicate Pascal's formula: the world encompasses me (me comprend) but I comprehend it (je le comprends) precisely because it comprises me. It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident.

And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe resistance to domination in the language of consciousness - as does the whole Marxist tradition and also the feminist theorists who, giving way to habits of thought, expect political liberation to come from the ‘raising of consciousness’ - ignoring the extraordinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of practices. While making things explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing process of countertraining, involving repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform habitus.

The field as a whole is defined as a system of deviations on different levels and nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or discourses they produce, has meaning except relationally, by virtue of the interplay of oppositions and distinctions.

everything conspires to make us forget the socially constructed, and hence arbitrary and artificial, character of investment in the economic game and its stakes: the ultimate reasons for commitment to work, a career or the pursuit of profit in fact lie beyond or outside calculation and calculating reason in the obscure depths of a historically constituted habitus, which means that, in normal circumstances, one gets up every day to go to work without deliberating on the issue, as indeed one did yesterday and will do tomorrow.)

fast-thinkers ... think in cliches, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about--banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem.

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

As Pierre Bourdieu signalled as long as two decades ago, coercion has by and large been replaced by stimulation, the once obligatory patterns of conduct by seduction, the policing of behaviour by PR and advertising, and normative regulation by the arousal of new needs and desires.

In sociological literature, meritocracy is widely recognized as a system for sorting, selecting, and then differentially rewarding people; it is a system for legitimizing the process and outcomes of sorting, based on narrow notions of what is worth rewarding and what is not. And it works well when there is, what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “misrecognition.” Misrecognition happens when we think that a system is based on a certain set of principles when it really works on the basis of another, when we think it rewards each individual’s hard work when in reality it rewards economic and cultural capital passed on from parents to children.

Why did I revive that old word? Because with the notion of habitus you can refer to something that is close to what is suggested by the idea of habit, while differing from it in one important respect. The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term constantly reminds us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of thought (like the notion of competence which is part of the Chomskian lexis). Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a property, a capital. And indeed, the habitus is a capital, but one which, because it is embodied, appears as innate.

what I defend above all is the possibility and the necessity of the critical intellectual, who is firstly critical of the intellectual doxa secreted by the doxosophers. there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical powers. the intellectual is one of those, of the first magnitude. that is why I think that the work of demolishing the critical intellectual, living or dead - marx, nietzsche, sartre, foucault, and some others who are grouped together under the label pansee 68- is as dangerous as the demolition of the public interest and that it is part of the same process of restoration. of course I would prefer it if intellectuals had all, and always, lived up to the immense historical responsibility they bear and if they had always invested in their actions not only their moral authority but also their intellectual competence- like, to cite just one example, pierre vidal-naquet, who has engaged all his mastery of historical method in a critique of the abuses of history. having said that, in the words of karl kraus, 'between two evils, I refuse to choose the lesser.' whole I have little indulgence for 'irresponsible' intellectuals, I have even less respect for the 'intellectuals' of the political-administrative establishment, polymorphous polygraphs who polish their annual essays between two meetings of boards of directors, three publishers' parties and miscellaneous television appearances.

In order fully to transcend the artificial opposition that tends to be established between structures and representations, one also has to break away from the mode of thought that Cassirer calls substantialist and which leads people to recognize no realities except those that are available to direct intuition in ordinary experience, individuals and groups.

Le coup de foudre est la rencontre miraculeuse entre une attente et sa réalisation.

O pedante compreende sem sentimento profundo, enquanto o mundano usufrui sem compreender.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

Pour les fils de paysans, d'ouvriers, d'employés ou de petits commerçants, l'acquisition de la culture scolaire est acculturation.

El cuestionamiento de las formas de pensamiento vigentes que efectúa la revolución simbólica y la originalidad absoluta de lo que engendra tiene como contra partida la soledad absoluta que implica la transgresión de los límites de lo pensable. Este pensamiento que así se ha convertido en su propia medida no puede esperar en efecto que mentes estructuradas según esas mismas categorías que cuestiona puedan pensar este impensable.

For the rest of us—members of that peculiar, prosaic species classified by Pierre Bourdieu as homo academicus9—dwelling poetically could mean gauging the dimensions of our own habits and mindfully inhabiting the rhythms of our writing lives: taking pride in a beautifully crafted sentence, lingering in the hallway for a friendly chat with a colleague, and working with our neighbors to rebuild our academic habitus into a place of possibilities.

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess.

Saya sudah menunjukkan secara panjang lebar dalam La distinction di mana cinta itu juga bisa dideskripsikan sebagai bentuk dari amor fati, bahwa mencintai sampai titik tertentu selalu berarti mencintai seseorang sebagai cara lain untuk memenuhi takdir sosialnya sendiri.

Symbolic power is a power of creating things with words. It is only if it is true, that is, adequate to things, that a description can create things. In this sense, symbolic power is a power of consecration or revelation, a power to conceal or reveal things which are already there.

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects.

A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence.

Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

As for the women, it is true to say, with Erikson, that male domination tends to "restrict their verbal consciousness" so long as this is taken to mean not that they are forbidden all talk of sex, but that their discourse is dominated by the male virtues of virility, so that all reference to specifically female sexual "interests" is excluded from this aggressive and shame-filled cult of male potency.

Pernyataan Sartre bahwa Marxisme adalah filsafat yang tidak bisa dilampaui di zaman kita jelas bukan ucapan paling cerdas dari seorang tokoh yang sangat cerdas. Mungkin saja ada filsafat yang tidak bisa dilampaui, tetapi tidak ada ilmu yang tidak bisa dilampaui. Berdasarkan definisinya, ilmu pengetahuan dibangun untuk dilampaui. dan Marx memang sedemikian rupa mengklaim dirinya ilmuwan yang ilmiah, maka penghargaan yang layak buat dia adalah memakai dan memanfaatkan apa yang telah dia lakukan, dan apa yang telah dilakukan orang lain terhadapa apa yang dia lakukan, dan dengan begitu melampaui apa yang dia kira sudah dia lakukan

Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.

If I had to characterize my work in two words, that is, as is the fashion these days, to label it, I would speak of constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructivism, taking the word structuralism in a sense very different from the one it has acquired in the Saussurean or Lévi-Straussian tradition. By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representation. By constructivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notable those we ordinarily call social classes.

Bourdieu posits the notion of a “feel for the game”, one that is never perfect and that takes prolonged immersion to develop. This is a particularly practical understanding of practice – highlighted by Bourdieu’s use of terms such as “practical mastery”, “sense of practice” and “practical knowledge” – that he claims is missing from structuralist accounts and the objectivism of Lévi Strauss. Bourdieu contrasts the abstract logic of such approaches, with their notion of practice as “rule-following”, with the practical logic of social agents. Even this notion of a game, he warns, must be handled with caution: You can use the analogy of the game in order to say that a set of people take part in a rule-bound activity, an activity which, without necessarily being the product of obedience to rules, obeys certain regularities . . . Should one talk of a rule? Yes and no. You can do so on condition that you distinguish clearly between rule and regularity. The social game is regulated, it is the locus of certain regularities. To understand practice, then, one must relate these regularities of social fields to the practical logic of social agents; their “feel for the game” is a feel for these regularities. The source of this practical logic is the habitus.

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

Pierre Bourdieu once noted that, if the academic field is a game in which scholars strive for dominance, then you know you have won when other scholars start wondering how to make an adjective out of your name

optimism absent feedback from school suggests world view differences across social lines in the nature of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus (1990; Swartz 1977). Here it is the sense that “schooling is not for the likes of us.

EXISTIR PARA LA MIRADA MASCULINA: LA MUJER EJECUTIVA, LA SECRETARIA Y SU FALDA Entrevista Con El Sociólogo Francés Pierre Bourdieu

Parece necessário interrogar-se sobre essa ausência de interrogação.

A comunicação é instantânea porque, em certo sentido, ela não existe.

Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus tells the extraordinary story of Musa Shanib from Abkhazia, the leading intellectual of this turbulent region whose incredible career passed from Soviet dissident intellectual through democratic political reformer and Muslim fundamentalist war leader up to respected professor of philosophy, his entire career marked by the strange admiration for Pierre Bourdieu's thought. There are two ways to approach such a figure. The first reaction is to dismiss it as local eccentricity, to treat it with benevolent irony - "what a strange choice, Bourdieu - who knows what this folkloric guy sees in Bourdieu...". The second reaction is to directly assert the universal scope of theory - "see how universal theory is: every intellectual from Paris to Chechenia and Abkhazia can debate his theories..." The true task, of course, is to avoid both these options and to assert the universality of a theory as the result of a hard theoretical work and struggle, a struggle that is not external to theory: the point is not (only) that Shanib had to do a lot of work to break the constraints of his local context and penetrate Bourdieu - this appropriation of Bourdieu by an Abkhazian intellectual also affects the substance of the theory itself, transposing it into a different universe. Did - mutatis mutandis - Lenin not do something similar with Marx? The shift of Mao with regard to Lenin AND Stalin concerns the relationship between the working class and peasants: both Lenin and Stalin were deeply distrustful towards the peasants, they saw as one of the main tasks of the Soviet power to break the inertia of the peasants, their substantial attachment to land, to "proletarize" them and thus fully expose them to the dynamics of modernization - in clear contrast to Mao who, in his critical notes on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (from 1958) remarked that "Stalin's point of view /.../ is almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants." The theoretical and political consequences of this shift are properly shattering: they imply no less than a thorough reworking of Marx's Hegelian notion of proletarian position as the position of "substanceless subjectivity," of those who are reduced to the abyss of their subjectivity.

Habitus is the link not only between past, present and future, but also between the social and the individual, the objective and subjective, and structure and agency.

Habitus thereby brings together both objective social structure and subjective personal experiences: “the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality

Habitus conceptualizes the relation between the objective and subjective or “outer” and “inner” by describing how these social facts become internalized. Habitus is, Bourdieu states, “a socialized subjectivity” and “the social embodied

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness—indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer—definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says.

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

The history of the transformation of myth into religion (ideology) is not separable from the history of the constitution of a corps of specialized producers of religious rites and discourses, i.e. the progress of the division of religious labour, which is itself a dimension of the progress of the division of social labour, and hence the division into classes.

Anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is very useful for understanding white fragility—the predictability of the white response to having our racial positions challenged.2 According to Bourdieu, habitus is the result of socialization, the repetitive practices of actors and their interactions with each other and with the rest of their social environment. Because it is repetitive, our socialization produces and reproduces thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions. Thus, habitus can be thought of as a person’s familiar ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the social cues around him or her.

Det är just strukturen hos världens ekonomiska fält som utövar ett strukturellt tvång, vilket ger mekanismen ett sken av ödesbestämdhet.

Si consideramos la hipótesis de que la gente no es leída, se entienden muchas cosas que no se han comprendido durante mucho tiempo pensando que ha sido leída.

Anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is very useful for understanding white fragility—the predictability of the white response to having our racial positions challenged.2 According to Bourdieu, habitus is the result of socialization, the repetitive practices of actors and their interactions with each other and with the rest of their social environment.

Everything economic science posits as given, that is, the range of dispositions of the economic agent which ground the illusion of the ahistorical universality of the categories and concepts employed by that science, is, in fact, the paradoxical product of a long collective history, endlessly reproduced in individual histories, which can be fully accounted for only by historical analysis: it is because history has inscribed these concomitantly in social and cognitive structures, practical patterns of thinking, perception and action, that it has conferred the appearance of natural, universal self-evidence on the institutions economics claims to theorize ahistorically; it has done this by, among other things, the amnesia of genesis that is encouraged, in this field as in others, by the immediate accord between the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’, between dispositions and positions, between anticipations (or hopes) and opportunities. Against the ahistorical vision of economics, we must, then, reconstitute, on the one hand, the genesis of the economic dispositions of economic agents and, especially, of their tastes, needs, propensities or aptitudes (for calculation, saving or work itself) and, on the other, the genesis of the economic field itself, that is to say, we must trace the history of the process of differentiation and autonomization which leads to the constitution of this specific game: the economic field as a cosmos obeying its own laws and thereby conferring a (limited) validity on the radical autonomization which pure theory effects by constituting the economic sphere as a separate world. It was only very gradually that the sphere of commodity exchange separated itself out from the other fields of existence and its specific nomos asserted itself – the nomos expressed in the tautology ‘business is business’; that economic transactions ceased to be conceived on the model of domestic exchanges, and hence as governed by social or family obligations (‘there’s no sentiment in business’); and that the calculation of individual gain, and hence economic interest, won out as the dominant, if not indeed exclusive, principle of business against the collectively imposed and controlled repression of calculating inclinations associated with the domestic economy. The

Unlike sociology, a pariah science that is always under suspicion for its supposed political leanings, and from which the powerful expect nothing but a minor, generally somewhat ancillary knowledge of techniques of manipulation or legitimation, and which, as a result, is less exposed than other disciplines to demands likely to threaten its independence, economics is always more of a state science and is, as a result, haunted by state thinking: being constantly preoccupied with the normative concerns of an applied science, it is dependent on responding politically to political demands, while at the same time defending itself against any charge of political involvement by the ostentatiously lofty character of its formal, and preferably mathematical, constructions. It

Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural.

La force particulière de la sociodicée masculine lui vient de ce qu'elle cumule et condense deux opérations : elle légitime une relation de domination en l'inscrivant dans une nature biologique qui est elle-même une construction sociale naturalisée.

Marx inspired Bourdieu’s understanding of society as the embodiment of concrete relationships rather than separate, abstract entities, like individuals and rules. Weber had formulated concepts such as domination, which Bourdieu developed as unconscious internalization of relations of subjugation. Ernst Cassirer* wrote about violence, power, and capital as “symbolic forms,” which is very similar to the symbolic capital conceptualized by Bourdieu. From Durkheim, as much as from structural linguistics, Bourdieu borrowed the notion of structure and its reproducing mechanisms

Bourdieu was conscious of the criticisms advanced against structuralist theories of human action: (1) while practices change through time, structuralism does not account for change; (2) structuralists are not interested in how structure is played out in real life; and (3) they may just be imagining structures where there might well be nothing but practice.

Bourdieu challenged and modified the ideas of his contemporaries rather than dismissing or accepting them. He synthesized them and came up with a third way that was more than a mere continuation of, or opposition to them.

His book should not be read as an attempt to generate another theoretical body of ideas, but as a theory as embodied in practice.

Pierre Bourdieu clearly expressed his challenge in the following sentence: “all of my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?

Bourdieu also noted that, like all actors, social scientists are always part of the practice that they observe. As a consequence, they influence it with their observation and therefore cannot be unbiased. This is an example of how the definition of social phenomena,* rather than being either objective or subjective, depends on interactions.

Cultural capital does not include material goods. Rather, it belongs to those people who have access to, and understand the meanings of, cultural goods (museums, philosophical debates, movies, etc.), which they can translate into educational success and social mobility. This conceptualization of cultural capital became one of the most widely adopted concepts in Bourdieu’s work.

Anthony King* argued that the concept of habitus did not resolve the opposition between subjectivity* and objectivity* in social sciences. Still, King admits that “despite the failings of the habitus,” Bourdieu “offers a way out of the structure-agency problem without relapsing into either subjectivism* or objectivism.”*2

thinking with Bourdieu is more fruitful and rewarding than dismissing it.

I have never accepted the separation between the theoretical construction of the object of research and the set of practical procedures without which there can be no real knowledge. I have combated untheoretical empiricism* vigorously enough to be also able to reject the unempirical conceptualization of the pure ‘theorician’.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Struggle for Symbolic Order

Une des difficultés de la lutte politique aujourd'hui, c'est que les dominants, technocrates ou épistémocrates de droite ou de gauche, ont partie liée avec la raison et l'universel : on se dirige vers des univers dans lesquels il faudra de plus en plus de justifications techniques, rationnelles, pour dominer et dans lesquels les dominés, eux aussi, pourront et devront de plus en plus se servir de la raison pour se défendre contre la domination, puisque les dominants devront de plus en plus invoquer la raison, et la science, pour exercer leur domination. Ce qui fait que les progrès de la raison iront sans doute de pair avec le développement de formes hautement rationalisées de domination [...], et que la sociologie, seule en mesure de porter au jour ces mécanismes, devra plus que jamais choisir entre le parti de mettre ses instruments rationnels de connaissance au service d'une domination toujours plus rationnelle ou d'analyser rationnellement la domination et tout spécialement la contribution que la connaissance rationnelle peut apporter à la domination.

C’est dans l’histoire que réside le principe de la liberté à l’égard de l’histoire.

se réalisent effectivement qu’en relation avec une structure déterminée de positions socialement marquées (entre autres choses par les propriétés sociales de leurs occupants, à travers lesquelles elles se donnent à percevoir) ; mais, à l’inverse, c’est au travers des dispositions, qui sont elles-mêmes plus ou moins complètement ajustées aux positions, que se réalisent telles ou telles des potentialités qui se trouvaient inscrites dans les positions.

l’espace des possibles, sorte de code spécifique, à la fois juridique et communicatif, dont la connaissance et la reconnaissance constituent le véritable droit d’entrée dans le champ. A la façon d’une langue, ce code constitue à la fois une censure, par les possibles qu’il exclut en fait ou en droit, et un moyen d’expression enfermant dans des limites définies les possibilités d’invention infinie qu’il procure ; il fonctionne comme un système historiquement situé et daté de schèmes de perception, d’appréciation et d’expression qui définissent les conditions sociales de possibilité – et, du même coup, les limites – de la production et de la circulation des œuvres culturelles, et qui existent à la fois à l’état objectivé, dans les structures constitutives du champ, et à l’état incorporé, dans les structures mentales et les dispositions constitutives des habitus.

transcendante à tous les actes privés et circonstanciels qui le visent : il donne ainsi les apparences d’un fondement au platonisme déclaré ou larvé de ceux qui, comme Husserl ou Meinong, entendent fonder l’activité proprement philosophique sur l’irréductibilité des contenus de conscience (noèmes) aux actes de conscience (noèses), du nombre aux opérations (psychologiques) de calcul, ou de ceux qui, comme Popper, et bien d’autres, affirment l’autonomie du monde des idées, de son fonctionnement et de son devenir, par rapport aux sujets connaissants83

Ainsi, ce « troisième monde », ni physique ni psychique, dans lequel Husserl, et d’autres après lui, ont cru tenir l’objet propre de la philosophie, doit d’exister et de subsister, au-delà de toutes les appropriations individuelles, à la concurrence même pour l’appropriation : c’est dans et par la concurrence entre des agents qui ne peuvent participer à ce capital collectif que pour autant qu’ils l’ont (plus ou moins complètement) incorporé sous la forme des dispositions cognitives et évaluatives d’un habitus spécifique (celui qu’ils mettent en œuvre dans

problème « objectif » et à en faire son affaire (on peut penser à l’exemple, analysé par Panofsky, du problème de la rose de la façade Ouest, légué par Suger aux architectes qui inventeront l’art gothique) que se détermine la solution spécifique, produite à partir d’un art d’inventer déjà inventé ou grâce à l’invention d’un nouvel art d’inventer.

comme la vérité même de l’être qui se dévoile4 » ?

Est-il vrai que l’analyse scientifique soit condamnée à détruire ce qui fait la spécificité de l’œuvre littéraire et de la lecture, à commencer par le plaisir esthétique ? Et que le sociologue soit voué au relativisme, au nivellement des valeurs, à l’abaissement des grandeurs, à l’abolition des différences qui font la singularité du « créateur », toujours situé du côté de l’Unique ? Cela parce qu’il aurait partie liée avec les grands nombres, la moyenne, le moyen, et, par conséquent, avec le médiocre, le mineur, les minores, la masse des petits auteurs obscurs, justement méconnus, et avec ce qui répugne par-dessus tout aux « créateurs » de ce temps, le contenu et le contexte, le « référent » et le hors-texte, le dehors de la littérature ?

Et je crois que Kant exprime bien la représentation que les savants se font de leur entreprise lorsqu’il pose que la réconciliation du connaître et de l’être est une sorte de focus imaginarius, de point de fuite imaginaire, sur lequel la science doit se régler sans jamais pouvoir prétendre s’y établir (cela contre l’illusion du savoir absolu et de la fin de l’histoire, plus commune chez les philosophes que chez les savants…).

prophétique de la grande critique d’auteur et le ronron sacerdotal de la tradition scolaire ? Mais,

mieux la retrouver au terme du travail de reconstruction de l’espace dans lequel l’auteur se trouve englobé et « compris comme un point ».

En réalité, comprendre la genèse sociale du champ littéraire, de la croyance qui le soutient, du jeu de langage qui s’y joue, des intérêts et des enjeux matériels ou symboliques qui s’y engendrent, ce n’est pas sacrifier au plaisir de réduire ou de détruire

intérêts » les plus désintéressés, le principe de l’existence de l’œuvre d’art dans ce qu’elle a d’historique, mais aussi de transhistorique, c’est traiter cette œuvre comme un signe intentionnel hanté et réglé par quelque chose d’autre, dont elle est aussi symptôme. C’est supposer qu’il s’y énonce une pulsion expressive que la mise en forme imposée par la nécessité sociale du champ tend à rendre méconnaissable. Le renoncement à l’angélisme de l’intérêt pur pour la forme pure est le prix qu’il faut payer pour comprendre la logique de ces univers sociaux qui, à travers l’alchimie sociale de leurs lois historiques de fonctionnement, parviennent à extraire de l’affrontement souvent impitoyable des passions et des intérêts particuliers l’essence sublimée de l’universel ;

l’analyse de la structure interne du champ littéraire (etc.), univers obéissant à ses propres lois de fonctionnement et de transformation, c’est-à-dire la structure des relations objectives entre les positions qu’y occupent des individus ou des groupes placés en situation de concurrence pour la légitimité ; enfin, l’analyse de la genèse des habitus des occupants de ces positions, c’est-à-dire les systèmes de dispositions qui, étant le produit d’une trajectoire sociale et d’une position à l’intérieur du champ littéraire (etc.), trouvent dans cette position une occasion plus ou moins favorable de s’actualiser

(Pour le lui rappeler toutes les fois que cela sera nécessaire, c’est-à-dire toutes les fois qu’on n’aura pas pu avoir recours à la désignation générique de producteur culturel, choisie, sans plaisir particulier, pour marquer la rupture avec l’idéologie charismatique du « créateur », on fera suivre le mot écrivain de etc.).

Nombre des pratiques et des représentations des artistes et des écrivains (par exemple leur ambivalence tant envers le « peuple » qu’envers les « bourgeois ») ne se laissent expliquer que par référence au champ du pouvoir, à l’intérieur duquel le champ littéraire (etc.) occupe lui-même une position dominée. Le champ du pouvoir est l’espace des rapports de force entre des agents ou des institutions ayant en commun de posséder le capital nécessaire pour occuper des positions dominantes dans les différents

Véritable défi à toutes les formes d’économisme, l’ordre littéraire (etc.) qui s’est progressivement institué au terme d’un long et lent processus d’autonomisation se présente comme un monde économique renversé : ceux qui y entrent ont intérêt au désintéressement ; comme la prophétie, et spécialement la prophétie de malheur, qui,

Comprendre, c’est ressaisir une nécessité, une raison d’être, en reconstruisant, dans le cas particulier d’un auteur particulier, une formule génératrice, dont la connaissance permet de reproduire, sur un autre mode, la production même de l’œuvre, d’en éprouver la nécessité s’accomplissant, en dehors même de toute expérience empathique : l’écart entre la reconstruction nécessitante et la compréhension participante n’est jamais aussi manifeste que lorsque l’interprète est conduit par son travail à éprouver comme nécessaires les pratiques d’agents occupant dans le champ intellectuel ou dans l’espace social des positions tout à fait éloignées des siennes, donc propres à lui apparaître au demeurant comme profondément « antipathiques

Dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, moment où le champ littéraire parvient à un degré d’autonomie qu’il n’a jamais dépassé depuis, on