Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason, Chapters 4-6

 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)

Chapter 4. Is a Disinterested Act Possible?

Bourdieu starts by contemplating about the concept of “interest” when it comes to the explanation of agents’ acts. He claims that this concept is the key to the understanding of social behaviour, even in such seemingly disinterested domains like academic research.

He then emphasized that while we should look for reason behind all social acts, we should not assume believe that all these acts are rational. As there is always a reason, even if it is not though of consciously by the agent of the social act, then, consequently, “social agents do not engage in gratuitous acts,” i.e. acts which are, first, unmotivated and , second, not profitable.  “Telescoping these two meaning, the search for the raison d’etre <sense > of a behavior is identified with the explanation of that behavior as the pursuit of economic ends.” (76)

Bourdieu then introduces a number of other concepts aimed to clarify and refine his argument about the interest. First is illusio, which is “the fact of being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is "worth the candle," or, more simply, that playing it worth the effort.” (76-77) One of the implications of the Bourdieu’s concept interest is, then, that “<social> games which matter to you are important and interesting because they have been imposed and introduced in your mind, in your body, in a form called the feel for the game.” (77) He then argues that two other concepts—investment and libido—can illuminate the ideas of the concept illusio, and are interchangeable to a degree. Social games transform biological libido into social libido in the process of socializing agents into a game. At the same time, by socializing into a game, social agents make investments, in form of their time, effort, etc. And it is this socialization of agents into a certain game which transform his or her impulses into social interests “which only exist in relation to a social space in which certain things are important and others don’t matter and for socialized agents who are constituted in such a way as to make distinctions corresponding to the objective differences in that space.” (79)

The concept of illusio is also important because of its (false) etymology, since “what is experienced as obvious in illusio appears as an illusion to those who do not participate in the game.” (79) The illusion can also be eliminated by knowledge, even though it is not that simple. The reason is that the game penetrates into agents bodies and souls deeply: “agents well-adjusted to the game are possessed by the game and doubtless all the more so the better they master it.” (79) Bourdieu argues that this eliminates “utilitarian” theories of actions, which say that social behavior of agents is, first, rational and conscious and, second, aimed at economic ends. That social behaviour is not (necessarily) rational speaks the fact that “between agents and the social world there is a relationship of infraconscious, infralinguistic complicity: in their practice agents engage in these which are not posed as such.” (79-80) Bourdieu claims that social behaviour does not always have an end, i.e. a goal, and yet social agents “aim at certain ends without posing them as such.” (80) He then explains:

Social agents who have a feel for the game, who have embodied a host of practical schemes of perception and appreciation functioning as instruments of reality construction, as principles of vision and division of the universe in which they act, do not need to pose the objectives of their practice as ends. (80)

Consequently, social agents are not “subjects,” who operate by pursuing goals in intellectual acts of cognition, their interest change as the current situation in their social game (“the present of the game”) changes.

Bourdieu then demands that a differentiation between two kinds of temporal experience of social agents should be introduced into social analysis: drawing on Husserl, he differentiates between “the relationship to the future that might be called a project, and which poses future as future,” and “the relationship to the future that <Husserl> calls pretension or preperceptive anticipation, a relationship to a future that is not a future, to a future that is almost present.” (80) The second type of temporal experience is not personal, Bourdieu claims, but rather “the fact of the habitus as a feel for the game. Having the feel for the game is having the game under the skin; it is to master in a practical way the future of the game; it is to have a sense of the history of the game.” (80) A good player “has the immanent tendencies of the game in her body, in an incorporated state: she embodies the game.” (81)

Bourdieu states that habitus also plays another function:

The habitus fulfills a function which another philosophy consigns to a transcendental conscience: it is a socialized body, a structure body, a body which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world – a field – and which structures the perception of that world as well as action in that world. (81)

He provides a following example: the opposition of theory and practice exists, on the one hand, socially objectively in academia and socially subjectively in minds of professors, who then train students in these very categories. When these subjective and objective social structures coincide, “everything seems obvious and goes without saying.” (81)

Consequently, “one can, for example, be adjusted to the necessities of a game—one can have a magnificent academic career—without ever needing to give oneself such an objective.” (82) It is, therefore, misleading to apply the categories of logical logic to practical logic, i.e. to try to describe human behaviors as a coherent set of conscious acts:

If what I am saying is true, it happens quite differently. Agents who clash over the ends under considerations can be possessed by those ends. They may be ready to die for those ends, independently of all considerations of specific, lucrative profits, career profits, or other forms of profit. Their relation to the end involved is not at all the conscious calculation of usefulness that utilitarianism lends them, a philosophy that is readily applied to the action of others. They have a feel for the game; for example, in games where it is necessary to be “disinterested” in order to succeed, they can undertake, in a spontaneously disinterested manner, actions in accordance with their interests. (83)

To refute the scholarly approach that human behaviour is governed by the economic interest, Bourdieu mentions that in the contemporary societies, there is a number of “social universes,” such as religion, economy, art, science, which “are autonomous and have their own laws… which evaluate what is done in them, the stakes at play, according to principles and criteria that are irreducible to those of other universes.” (83-84) As the laws which define interests in different universes are also different, “what makes people enter and compete in the scientific field is not the same thing that makes them enter and compete in the economic field.” (84)

As different social universes have different laws, this observation “leads to a breaking up of the notion of interest; there are as many forms of libido, as many kinds of interest, as there are fields. Any field, in producing itself, produces a form of interest which, from the point of view of another field, may seem like disinterestedness (or absurdity, lack of realism, folly, etc.).” (84-85)

Bourdieu then asks how his theory of sociology can, then, exist if there are social universes which are built on a refusal of economic interests, i.e. disinterestedness from a common point of view. To this, he answers that “there must exist a form of interest that one can describe, for the sake of communication, and at the risk of falling into a reductionist vision, as interest in disinterestedness or, better still, as a disinterested or generous disposition.” (85) His concept of disposition, thus, becomes a driving force of social universes: social agents occupy these dispositions and start pursue interests, which are imposed on them by the rule of the game, according to these same rules.

But to what their interests would lead them, in this case? Bourdieu answers: to everything symbolic: symbolic capital, symbolic interest, symbolic profit. He uses the example of Louis XIV’s court, which was a social field of its own and where agents – courtiers – struggled against each other for these symbolic benefits that were expressed in small differences in dress, practices, etiquette and rank, but that brought to the person who excelled in them  a significant advantage over his/her competitors. These small differences should be mutually recognized, therefore “symbolic capital is capital with a cognitive base, which rests on cognition and recognition.” (85)

Bourdieu then discusses how certain social conditions—such as aristocratic education in a pre-capitalist society—“produce "disinterested" habitus, anti-economic habitus, disposed to repress interests, in the narrow sense of the term (that is, the pursuit of economic profits), especially in domestic relations.” (86)

Life in a “disinterested” habitus, such as state bureaucracy, where “disinterestedness is the official norm,” is not always governed by disinterestedness: while its social agent “is caught up in mechanisms <of habitus, i.e. principles of practices>, <and> there are sanctions which remind him of the obligation of disinterestedness,” at the same time “behind the appearance of piety, virtue, disinterestedness, there are subtle, camouflaged interests; the bureaucrat is not just the servant of the state, he is also the one who puts the state at his service.” (87)

Bourdieu concludes the chapter by discussing if universal interests—i.e., interests common for all groups (all social universes)—are possible. He points out that sometimes particular interests become universalized—this is what Marxism calls ideology and criticizes: “the ideologue is the one who posits as universal, as disinterested, that which is in accordance with their particular interest.” (89) Yet, he claims that such a social world is possible, in case the state officially recognizes “the primacy of the group and its interests over the individual and the individual’s interests, which all groups profess in the very fact of affirming themselves as groups.” (89-90). And yet, “all universal values are in fact particular, universalized values… (universal culture is the culture of the dominants, etc.”).” (90) They serve the interests of the dominant group by the very fact that they are recognized universally, by all other social groups, and yet the representatives of the latter also receive symbolic form from recognizing them (the profit of conformity or distinction). This gives “a reasonable probability of existing” to universal(ized) values. (90)

Bourdieu considers bureaucracy as one of the creators of such universal values: while is assumes that it serves to the universal, to the common good, and thus is neutral, is above conflicts, it in fact has an interest in the universal (to legitimate its own existence as a social group) and therefore, it historically had to invent the universal (“the law, the idea of public service, the idea of general interest, etc.” – p. 90). Thus, it invented “domination in the name of the universal in order to accede to domination.” (90)

He then notes that, currently, “technocrats and epistemocrats,” dominate in the contemporary society by increasing and more skilful appeal to “reason and the universal.” Consequently, the current strategy of the social struggle is:

One makes one’s way through universes in which more and more technical, rational justifications will be necessary in order to dominate and in which the dominated can and must also use reason to defend themselves against domination, because the dominants must increasingly invoke reason, and science, to exert their domination.” (90)

Sociology, then should turn from “putting its rational instruments of knowledge at the service of an increasingly rational domination” to bringing “these mechanisms to light” in order to “rationally analyze the domination and especially the contribution that rational knowledge can make to domination.” (91)

Chapter 5. The Economy of Symbolic Goods

In this chapter, Bourdieu analyses how symbolic economy, whose operation requires demonstration of disinterestedness, can still function as economy, i.e. involve operations of calculations of profit, etc. Bourdieu emphasises that the first condition for the economy of gifts is a temporal interval between a gift and a countergift: “the interval had the function of creating a screen between the gift and the countergift and allowing two perfectly symmetrical acts to appear as unique and unrelated acts.” (94)

In societies, there is an understanding that a gift requires reciprocation, which is expressed, e.g., in proverbs. “But this collective truth is collectively repressed. The time interval can only be understood by hypothesizing that the giver and the receiver collaborate, without knowing it, in a work of dissimulation tending to deny the truth of the exchange, the exchange of exact equivalents, which represents the destruction of the exchange of gifts.” (94—95)

Therefore, the social practices “always have double truths, which are difficult to hold together,” (95) as in the case of gift giving. A certain self-deception is involved, on both personal and collective level, which is inscribed in objective social structures (the logic of practice) and which governs the individual behaviour—being, still, not a rule, but a strategy: you can violate it, at the price of losing social capital.

The economy of symbolic goods works under the condition of “the taboo of making things explicit.” (96) Thus, social agents are obliged to behave under conditions which cannot be explicitly pronounced at the risk of being destroyed/devaluated. Yet Bourdieu rejects that this state of things is a sort of “common knowledge,” when each agent consciously knows of the nature of gift exchange, and it becomes an open secret. In his theory of action, human behaviours—including gift giving—“have as a basis something  different from intention, that is, acquired dispositions which make it so that an action can and should be interpreted as oriented toward one objective or another without anyone being able to claim that that objective was a conscious design (it is here that the “everything occurs as if” is very important).” (97-98) He compares dispositions with a feel for the game:

The player, having deeply internalized the regularities of a game, does what he must do at the moment it is necessary, without needing to ask explicitly what is to be done. He does not need to know consciously what he does in order to do it and even less to raise explicitly the question… of what others might do in return… (98)

In other words, dispositions impose on people certain forms of behaviour, which means that these rules of society can be followed only formally, without really putting one’s heart into them. “Social agents are not expected to be perfectly in order, but rather to observe order, to give visible signs that, if they can, they will respect the rules.” (98)

The hypocrisy of symbolic economy is part of the social patterns of dominations: in many societies, e.g., it is reflected in the fact that men are responsible for symbolic economy, while women—for “economic” economy. Gifts, therefore, can serve two purposes: they create social ties through the relationship of reciprocity, and they reinforce patterns of domination, as in case of potlatch, where actual goods are sacrificed to get symbolic capital—something which is then converted into social inequality.

The economy of symbolic goods is objectified in social structures of a whole social group:

For the alchemy <of symbolic economy> to function, as in the exchange of gifts, it must be sustained by the entire social structure, therefore by the mental structures and disposition produced by that social structure; there must be a market for like symbolic actions, there must be rewards, symbolic profits, often reconvertible into material profit, people must be able to have an interest in disinterestedness… But these relations remain very ambiguous and perverse. (101)

In a way, the symbolic economy acts as a form of violence, as it enables social agents standing on higher positions of the social hierarchy to impose their will on other social agents through objective social structures. It often can convert “relations of domination and submission into affective relations,” transform “power into charisma or into charm suited to evoke affective enchantment.” (102) This is how symbolic capital is acquired:

Symbolic alchemy… produces… transfiguration, or imposition of form, a capital of recognition which permits him to exert symbolic effects. This is what I call symbolic capital… Symbolic capital is an ordinary property (physical strength, wealth, warlike valor, etc.) which, perceived by social agents endowed with the categoories of perception and appreciation permitting them to perceive, know and recognize it, becomes symbolically efficient <and> exercises a sort of action from a distance, without physical contact.” (102)

For symbolic capital to work, historically there have to be certain actions which imposed on the social group certain forms of domination. Later, they were forgotten or repressed, and those dispositions which force social agents to obey the magic of symbolic capital work “without even posing the question of obedience.” (103) Therefore, symbolic violence is never perceived as violence, as agents are socially educated (inculcated) in the way to make them believe it is natural. The work of socialization, consequently, is done to produce social agents which would recognize and appropriate all necessary schemes of perception and appreciation which will later force them to obey.

Bourdieu then concentrates on the family as one of the units where symbolic capital is reproduced and which, as other venues of symbolic capital, works through a double logic: that of economic capital, which undermines family relations by introducing into families tensions, contradictions and conflicts; on the other hand, the reproduction of capital—particularly, symbolic, but also other forms of it—depends on the reproduction of the family:

The rich and powerful have large families (which is, I believe, a general anthropological law); they have a specific interest in maintaining extended family relations and, through these relations, a particular form of concentration of capital. (107)

He next turns to analyse how symbolic capital works in the fine arts, where symbolic capital is, to a great degree, opposed to economic capital. This scheme works, because a shared system of values has been created among artists in which mutual recognition of symbolic capital is achieved—a necessary preconditions for people to value “honor” over “money.”

In the last section, he applies the same analytical model to the church. He looks at the clergy as economic agents who repress in themselves homo oeconomicus, because the necessary preconditions for its economic welfare is denial of hidden economic motivations:

… The Church is also an economic enterprise; but … it is an economic enterprise that can only function as it does because it is not really a business, because it denies that it is a business. (113)

The social agents living within the Church are necessarily involved in self-deception: they must pretend they behave disinterestedly, while their behaviour is governed by economic motivations. This is how it works:

The work of self-deception is a collective work, sustained by a whole set of social institiutions of assistance, the first and most powerful of which is language, which is not only a means of expression but also a principle of structuration functioning with the support of a group which benefits from it: collective bad faith is inscribed in the objectivity of language (in particulary in euphemisms…)… and also in the bodies, in the habitus, the ways of being, of speaking, and so forth. (119)

 In conclusion, Bourdieu summarizes his observations over the logic of functioning of the symbolic capital. It is based on the repression and self-censorship of economic interests. Therefore, its laws are always imprecise and implicit (making things explicit is a taboo). Since the economic motivations behind the economy of symbolic goods are repressed, its practices and discourse are ambiguous, which is an evidence not of hypocrisy, but of the only mode of co-existence of opposites (economic motivations and their rejection in the name of symbolic capital).

The repression of economic interests is always a collective act, because symbolic capital requires collective recognition. Also, since practices related to symbolic economy are double-sided by nature, they are not rational, but rather are driven by the agents’ dispositions within habitus:

These common dispositions… are the product of an identical or similar socialization leading to the generalized incorporation of the structures of the market of symbolic goods in the form of cognitive structures in agreement with the objective structures of that market. (121)

6. The Scholastic Point of View

Bourdieu starts by discussing the concept of “scholastic vision,” which is possible only under certain circumstances, when the state provides individuals with means that allow them to use free time for the sake of, first, apprenticeship and then scholarship:

Adoption of this scholastic point of view is the admission fee tacitly demanded by all scholarly fields: the neutralizing disposition (in Jusserl’s sense), implying the bracketing of all theses of existence and all practical intentions, is the condition—at least as much as the possession of a specific competence –for access to useums and works of arts. It is also the condition for the academic exercise as a gratuitous game, as a mental experience that is an end in and of itself. (128)

Yet this very position—freedom of economic and temporal necessity—should be necessarily taken into account by scholars, because the scholastic vision is determined by it:

To the extent that it engages in a mode of thinking which presupposes the bracketing of practical necessity and the use of instruments of thought constructed against the logic of practice, such as game theory, the theory of probability, etc., the scholastic vision risks destroying its object or creating pure artifacts whenever it is applied without critical reflection to practices that are the product of an altogether different vision. (130)

 Without an awareness of his/her own scientific gaze, a scholar is always at risk of reading into his/her sources “scholastic fallacies,” such as this example:

We would also need to uncover all the unnoticed theoretical effects produced by the mere use of instruments of thought that, having been produced in a “scholastic situation” – such as means of recording, writing, transcription, as well as tools of “modelling,” genealogies, diagrams, tables, and so forth – reproduce in their functioning the presuppositions inscribed in the social conditions of their construction, such as the bracketing of time, of temporal urgency, or the philosophy of gratuitousness, of the neutralization of practical ends. (133)

In short… I would say that ignoring everything that is implicated in the “shcholastic point of view” leads to the most serious epistemological mistake in the human sciences, namely, that which consists in putting “a scholar inside the machine,” in picturing all social agents in the image of the scientist… or, more precisely, to place the models that the scientist must construct to account for practices into the consciousness of agents, to operate as if the constructions that the scientist must produce to understand and account for practices were the main determinants, the actual cause of practices. (133)

Bourdieu then attacks universalism as an explanatory model. Even in such seemingly universal spheres as science or arts, it is impossible to dissociate works of arts, or science, or ethics, or religion,

from the scholastic point of view and from the social and economic conditions which make the latter possible. They have been engendered in these very peculiar social universes which are the fields of cultural production—the juridical field, the scientific field, the artistic field, the philosophical field—and in which agents are engaged who have in common the privilege of fighting for the monopoly of the universal, and thereby effectively of promoting the advancement of truths and values that are held, at each moment, to be universal, indeed eternal. (135)

He concedes that one system of dispositions can be regarded as an exception, as a field in which shared (but still not universal) aesthetics, or modes of thinking, etc., are possible—that is, skhole:

Potentialities <of certain fundamental modes of construction of reality (aesthetic, scientific, etc.)> are actualized only in definite conditions and … these definite conditions, starting with skhole, as distance from necessity and urgency, and especially academic skhole and the whole accumulated product of prior skhole that it carries, are unevenly distributed across civilizations… and within our own societies, across social classes or ethnic groups or, in a more rigorous language, across positions in social space. (137)

Bourdieu concludes by summarizing his ideas about the nature of science and similar social fields (like fine arts). He argues that this is a unique type of social field, because logical constrains become embodies in the objective social structures, such as discussion, refutation, different positive (e.g., PhD defense) and negative (a pejorative book review) sanctions. Therefore, there is no need to try to search in sciences or fine arts any immanent transcendental reality. The objectivity of science is social, not “natural”: science emerges in different social realities, but the social constraints invoked to create it would work more or less in the same way everywhere or anywhere. And since the foundations of science (including its pretence for being “universal”) are social, Bourdieu concludes:

We can expect the progress of reason only from a political struggle rationally oriented toward defending and promoting the social conditions for the exercise of reason, a permanent mobilization of all cultural producers in order to defend, through continuous and modest interventions, the institutional bases of intellectual activity. Every project for the development of the human spirit which, forgetting the historical grounding of reason, depends on the sole force of reason and rational discourse to advance the causes of reason, and which does not appeal to political struggle aimed at endowing reason and freedom with the properly political instruments which are the precondition of their realization in history, remains prisoner of the scholastic illusion. (139-140)

A Paradoxical Foundation of Ethics

Among possible social strategies, there is a subset of strategies which social agents can use to pretend, or appear, that they conform to the universal social rules of their society. This is done to receive the recognition, because “groups always reward conduct that conforms universally (in reality, or at least in intention) to virtue.” (142) Display of disinterestedness is particularly valued, “the subordination of the I to the us, or the sacrificing of individual interest of the general interest, which defines precisely the passage to the ethical order.” (142) The social mechanism invoked here is “the universal strategy of legitimation”:

Those who act according to the rule have the group on their side and at the same time ostensibly place themselves on the group’s side through a public act of recognition of a communal norm, which is universal because it is universally approved within the limits of the group. (142)

However, the interest in disinterestedness can also pursue certain interests (read: symbolic capital), which is well-known in all social groups, therefore “a formally universal behavior can always be suspected of being the product of an effort to please or to gain the group’s approval, of attempting to appropriate the symbolic force…” (143)

Yet even this hypocritical pursuit of interest by behaving as if one is disinterested is important, because it, despite everything, still is a “vehicle of progress toward the universal.” (143) Both hypocrisy in the name of the universal (read: human values) and its apparently nihilistic criticism in fact contribute to the universalization. The conclusion which Bourdieu draws is that in order to have a morally/ethically virtuous politics, it is necessary to create social conditions in which being virtuous/ethical will bring reward in form of symbolic/economic capital:

Political morality does not fall from heaven, and it is not innate to human nature. Only a realpolitik of reason and morality can contribute favorably to the institution of a universe where all agents and their acts would be subject—notably through critique—to a kind of permanent test of universalizability which is practically instituted in the very logic of the field. (144)