Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
In the preface, Bourdieu claims that this book represents the essence of his previous writing. He intends to discuss, first, that his theory is relational, in the sense that they should address not objects or agents, but relations which emerge in their interactions. Second, his works look at dispositions: social agents have a number of possible moves, which are restricted by possible developments of situations, in which they act. First and second combined, dispositions are relational, in the sense that possibilities are opened by relations between agents and their situations.
He also mentions the key concepts of his theory: habitus, field, capital, as well as the driving force of the social change in his theory: “the two-way relationship between objective structures (those of social fields)) and incorporated structures (those of the habitus).” (vii) He rejects the use of such terms as “subject,” “motivation,” “role,” “actor,” as well as some commonplace oppositions: “individual/society, individual/collective, conscious/unconscious, interested/disinterested,o bjective/subjective.” (viii)
Social Space and Symbolic Space
Bourdieu opens this section with a criticism of substantialism in social sciences, which
characterizes common sense - and racism - and which is inclined to treat the activities and preferences specific to certain individuals or groups in a society at a certain moment as if they were substantial properties, inscribed once and for all in a sort of biological or cultural essence… (4)
Bourdieu argues that, instead, certain social practices belong to certain social groups only at a given moment of time, which can be changed quickly (he analyzes hobbies and culinary preferences of French social classes and professional groups):
Thus, at every moment of each society, one has to deal with a set of social positions which is bound by a relation of homology to a set of activities (the practice of golf or piano) or of goods (a second home or an old master painting) that are themselves characterized relationally. (4-5)
Consequently, what is conventionally called “distinctions” (between, e.g., French and Japanese cultures) in reality is a “relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties.” (6) The practice of playing golf in Japan can be absolutely incomparable with the practice of playing golf in France, as they are formed in relation with different social phenomena. It is not a distinction, but rather a gap, or difference.
Hence the definition of social space, which is “a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through their mutual exteriority and their relations of proximity, vicinity, or distance, as well as through relations of order, such as above, below, and between.” (6)
“Social space is constructed in such a way that agents or groups are distributed in it according to their position in statistical distributions based on the two principles of differentiation <…>: economic capital and cultural capital.” (6)
Agents are distributed, first, on the basis of the overall volume of their capital and then on the basis of different kinds of capital—cultural and economic—within this volume.
One’s role on the grand scheme of the social space defines his/her social actions (including the choice of food, clothes, or politicians), but not in a direct manner: there’s a mediator, HABITUS. “To each class of positions <in the social space> there corresponds a class of habitus (or tastes) produced by the social conditioning associated with the corresponding condition and, through the mediation of the habitus and its generative capability, a systematic set of goods and properties, which are united by an affinity of style.” (7-8).
Habitus as a system of dispositions is responsible for making people belonging to one social position share the same “things”:
The habitus is this generative and unifying principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices. (8)
The principles of visions and divisions of things, which belong to a specific habitus, work as a language:
Differences associated with different positions, that is, goods, practices, and especially manners, function <…> in the same way as differences which constitute symbolic systems, such as the set of phonemes of a language… (8-9)
Bourdieu makes an emphasis on difference (gap), because “to exist within a social space, to occupy a point or to be an individual within a social space, is to differ, to be different.” (9) One can belong to the upper class by demonstrating signs of the upper class (by being different from other classes): what differentiates Bourdieu’s positions from, say, functionalists is that drinking champagne is not something inherent for the upper class: drinking champagne should be comprehended by other social agents occupying other social positions as a sign of the upper class. Not drinking champagne itself is a sign: the difference between drinking champagne and drinking something else is a sign.
Habitus forms social classes. According to Bourdieu, a social class is created by the place which people who constitute it occupy in the social space (amount of capital and distribution of cultural/economic capital within capital) and by practices (“things”) which belonging to this place involves. Ideally, (he speaks of “theoretical classes”) a class should be as homogeneous as possible. One’s place within a certain “theoretical class” is important for one’s social behaviour, including, as Bourdieu writes, marital patters: people from different classes are unlikely to meet, and even if they do, they have too different interests, hobbies, etc. (“things”) to have much in common:
Proximity in social space predisposes to closer relations: people who are inscribed in a restricted sector of the space will be both closer (in their properties and in their dispositions, their tastes) and more disposed to get closer, as well as being easier to bring together, to mobilize. (10-11)
This observation leads Bourdieu to comment of Marx’s theory of classes: according to Bourdieu, “real classes,” of which Marx speaks, do not exist. He says that while “theoretical classes” do exist, they do not exist in practice: there are no “real classes.” Theoretical classes exist because there are social distinctions which aspire to form them (“difference exists and persists” – p. 12), but instead of real social classes there’s a different phenomenon:
What exists is a social space, a space of differences, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done. (12)
Appendix: The “Soviet” Variant and Political Capital
Bourdieu argues that in order to understand “socialist” societies, his schema of construction of social space through distribution of capital (first, absolute capital and, second, proportion of economic/cultural capital) should be altered by replacing economic capital for political:
/\ high
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+cultural capital || +political capital
-political capital || -cultural capital
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absolute capital
The New Capital
Bourdieu starts by arguing that family relations play an important role in the reproduction of the distribution of capital and, consequently, of the structure of social space. Families tend “to perpetuate their social being, with all its powers and privileges, which is at the basis of reproduction strategies: fertility strategies, matrimonial strategies, successional strategies, economic strategies, and last but not least, educational strategies.” (19) Families with a higher cultural capital tend to invest more in education, which leads to the situation when “highest school institutions, hose which give access to the highest social positions, become increasingly monopolized by the children of privileged categories.” (20) Bourdieu compares the school to Maxwell’s demon, separating “the holders of inherited cultural capital from those who lack it.” (20)
I’d say here that it give a clue to understand why movies like Spanglish or The Nanny Diaries: they show that if you work hard, you’ll get access to cultural (and then economic) capital, while in reality social inequality in education is not decreased. A Barthes-like analysis. Just a note.
Bourdieu then gives an outline of how this system works: how social (mainly cultural) capital is reinvested (or reincarnated) in education. He then makes a reference to his book The State Nobility in which he observed the formation of the institution of public education as an effort of bourgeoisie to secure reproduction of its capital in the struggle against clergy and aristocracy, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In order to find popular support, bourgeoisie attacked the concepts of inherited capital by emphasizing merit and competence acquired through education. To succeed,
the new class, the power and authority of which rests on the new cultural capital, has to elevate its particular interests to a superior degree of universalization and invent a version of the ideology of public service and of meritocracy that could be considered “progressive” <…> in order to prevail in its struggles with the other dominant fractions, <including> the industrial and mercantile bourgeoisie. Demanding power in the name of the universal <meaning freedom, equality and other stuff of this kind>, the nobility and bourgeoisie of the robe promote the objectivfication and therefore the historical efficacy of the universal; they cannot make use of the state they claim to serve unless they also serve, however slightly, the universal values with which they identify it. (24)
To explain why the metaphor of Maxwell’s demon is, actually, incorrect, and how objective conditions and subjective intentions both determine social action, Bourdieu returns to his theory of practice:
In fact, “subjects” are active and knowing agents endowed with a practical sense, that is, an acquired system of preferences, of principles of vision and division (what is usually called taste), and also a system of durable cognitive structures (which are essentially the product of the internalization of objective structures) and of schemes of action which orient the perception of the situation and the appropriate response. The habitus is this kind of practical sense for what is to be done in a given situation—what is called in sport a “feel” for the game, that is, the art of anticipating the future of the game… (25)
He then explains how practical sense is involved in a choice of educational institutions, with profit of this action being a better educational investment and maximum return of a family’s cultural capital.
Bourdieu then analyzes how the overproduction in the field of education leads to social tensions (taking such examples of May 1968 in France or school delinquency in Japan), making an emphasis on the fact that social distinctions within the education are secured by very tough competition, objectified in exams and tests, including mathematics, and the culture of the final verdict (i.e., the future career being jeopardized by low results received during education).
He finally argues that the primary function of education – reproduction of the social space – undermines its de-jure main function, i.e. training of qualified specialists. His example is a low social status of technical disciplines at universities.
Bourdieu concludes that stiffening of the system of public education (the best education for best families, to reproduce the established social space) will bring a future conflict, when holders of lesser capitals will try to break this function of education by revoking its universalist (freedom, equality, etc.) values.
Appendix: Social Space and Field of Power
Bourdieu explains why he insists on the term social space as vital for social sciences: in order “to break with the tendency to think of the social world in a substantialist manner.” (31) All social phenomena exist through difference, they occupy relative (to each other) positions in the social space.
Bourdieu then says that social sciences should not be preoccupied by the problem of classification (“the primary objective of social science is not to construct classes”). He repeats his criticism of Marx: real social groups (classes) can be constructed only for the sake of their political mobilization; this is a political action driven by Marx’s desire to construct proletariat as a historical force; classification in social sciences is, then, always about politics, not science. The introduction of the term social class allows to solve this problem: classification is necessary (there are “theoretical classes”) and classification is harmful, because it downgrades social science to propaganda. There is social differentiation within social space and, consequently, social antagonism and, “at times, collective confrontations between agents situated in different positions in social space.” (32)
The objective of social science, then, is to “construct and discover (beyond the opposition between constructionism and realism) the principle of differentiation which permits one to reengender theoretically the empirically observed social space.” (32) In human language, social science should be preoccupied with social difference. Any society can be understood only if scholars identify and study “the generative principle which objectively grounds <social> differences.” (32) Like the one which Bourdieu identifies for contemporary bourgeois societies (accumulation of capital and proportion of cultural/economic capital). Since capital is form of power, one can substitute in this formula capital for “forms of power.”
To describe the social field, Bourdieu introduces the notion of field and topology, which is “a dynamic analysis of the conservation and transformation of the structure of the active properties’ distribution and thus of the social space itself.” (32) Field, in its turn, is divided into “a field of forces, whose necessity is imposed on agents who are engaged in it, and… a field of struggles within which agents confront each other, with differentiated means and ends according to their position in the structure of the field of forces, thus contributing to conserving or transforming its structure.” (32)
He then moves on to argue that a social group comes into reality only “at the cost and at the end of a collective work of construction.” (33) Social groups arise from individuals located close to each other in the social space, because only then they are “inclined… to mutually recognize each other and recognize themselves in the same project.” (33)
A unified social space is a result of the genesis of the state, which unifies itself through different social, economic, cultural and political fields, as well as by gaining “the state monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence.” (33) As it concentrates in itself necessary resources, the state “is in a position to regulate the functioning of the different fields… through financial… or juridical intervention.” (33)
Finally, Bourdieu introduces the notion field of power, which is “not a field like others. It is the space of the relations of force between the different kinds of capital or, more precisely, between the agents who possess a sufficient amount of one of the different kinds of capital to be in a position to dominate the corresponding field…” (34)—in his example, economic and cultural capitals. Agents of, say, cultural capital struggle to occupy positions which would allow them to control social groups which possess economic capital, and vice versa. This makes the phenomenon of domination more complex, but at the same time more realistic.
Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field
Bourdieu starts this section by claiming that “one of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose (especially through the school system) categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world – including the state itself.” (35)
Therefore, to think of the state without thinking the state (i.e., without reproducing categories which the state imposes on its subjects), one should question all basic presuppositions and preconceptions. Bourdieu argues that this epistemological questioning is a very difficult enterprise, therefore, many thinkers (he refers to Foucault, in particular) slip into a simplified version of political questioning , which, in a way, works for the state (???) (36-37).
As an example of how people appropriate the state’s prepositions and preconceptions, Bourdieu analyzes the case of the reform of orthography in France, which was opposed by many intellectuals, even though the “old” rules of orthography were as arbitrarily imposed by the state, as the new now.
Bourdieu also show that state has a nearly total control in this symbolic production by analyzing the problems which social sciences analyze. He claims that problems and the very language of the social sciences (immigration, poverty, educational failure) are created by the state itself. As such, social sciences are a direct product of the social demand, even though they can increase their independence from it.
If the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organizational structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity, in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought. By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural (40)
As the result, the most powerful tool to disenchant the magic of the state is to trace its genesis:
By bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibles, it <reconstruction of genesis> retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise. (40)
This is VERY resonant to Koselleck, once again—in fact, it’s a pity that Bourdieu is such an arrogant researcher who does not care to refer to other’s writing and, thus, position his theory within a wider academic tradition.
Bourdieu then proceeds to his definition of the state and a sketch of its historical development. He claims that
the state is the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion,… economic capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of metacapital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders. Concetration of the different species of capital (which proceeds hand in hand with the construction of the corresponding fields) leads indeed to the emergence of a specific, properly statist capital which enables the state to exercise power over the differnet fields and over the different particular species of capital, and especially over the rates of conversion between them (and thereby over the relations of force between their respective holders). (41-42)
The construction of the state goes together with the construction of the field of power (relation between groups which accumulated a significant amount of one type of capital, e.g. economic or cultural). At stake in the struggle between social dominant groups representing different kinds of capital is possession of the statist capital which grants power over other types of capital and over their reproduction.
Bourdieu then sketches the historical evolution of how the state succeeded in accumulating different kinds of capital—military, economic, and finally symbolic, the latter being a logical result of the two fomer—through the course of the Middle Ages and the Modern Time:
The concentration of armed forces and of the financial resources necessary to maintain them does not happen without the concentration of a symbolic capital of recognition (or legitimacy). (44)
The recognition of the state legitimacy is bound up with the development of nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Together with economic capital, early in the European history the state starts to accumulate informational capital (“of which cultural capital is one dimension” – p. 45).
The state concentrates, treats and redistributes information and, most of all, effects a theoretical unification. Taking the vantage point of the Whole, of society in its totality, the state claims responsibility for all operations of totalization (especially thanks to census-taking and statistics or national accounting) and of objectivization, through cartography (the unitary representation of space from above) or more simply through writing as an instrument of accumulation of knowledge (archives, for example), as well as for all operations of codification as cognitive unification implying centralization and monopolization in the hands of clerks and men of letters. (45)
As the result, national culture becomes unifying, while those cultural elements which are regarded as obstacles to national unification (read: accumulation of power) are moved to its margins.
All these makes Bourdieu argue that there is a specific type of capital—symbolic capital, which belongs to recognized authority:
Symbolic capital is any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value. (47)
Any type of capital wants to become symbolic capital, using both external resources (its opposition to other forms of capital) and internal resources.
Bourdieu then argues that an important part in the formation of the state was accumulation of juridical capital by the royal power:
The concentration of juridical capital is one aspect, quite fundamental, of a larger process of concentration of symbolic capital in its different forms. This capital is the basis of the specific authority of the holder of state power and in particular of a very mysterious power, namely his power of nomination. (49)
Initially, the stakes in this process were to control nobility, then, when bureaucracy becomes the king’s main institution of control, this power of nomination is used to distribute people, according to their “merits” and “competence,” to offices which “allegedly” require these merits and competence. This type of power—the power of nomination—is mysterious as Bourdieu stresses several times:
Nomination is, when we stop to think of it, a very mysterious act which follows a logic quite similar to that of magic as described by Marcel Mauss. Just as the sorcerer mobilizes the capital of belief accumulated by the functioning of the magical universe, the President of the Republic who signs a decree of nomination or the physician who signs a certificate (of illness, invalidity, etc.) mobilizes a symbolic capital accumulated in and through the whole network of relations of recognition constitutive of bureaucratic universe. (51)
The power of nomination is the most effective of state powers: a grade of a professor, a sentence of a judge, official registration of a document—“all the acts meant to carry legal effects,… all manners of public summons <or, better, functions> as performed with the required formalities by the appropriate agents… and duly registered in the appropriate office, all these facts invoke the logic of officialnomination to institute socially guaranteed identities (as citizen, legal resident, voter, taxpayer, parent, property owner) as well as legitimate unions and groupings…” (52) The state, through its properly organized, legitimate officers/professors/jurists/etc., can state what thing or what subject is in truth, and thus wields “a genuinely creative, quasi-divine, power.” (52) It even grants a kind of immortality “through acts of consecration such as commemorations or scholarly canonization.” (52)
To understand how the power of the state works, Bourdieu suggests to overcome the traditional distinction between a “physicalist” vision of the social which sees social relations as constructed by relations of physical force and a “semiological” vision which depicts social relations as caused by symbolic force, “as relations of meaning or relations of communication.” (52-53) He explains this in the following logic:
a) brutal relations of force are always simultaneously symbolic relations.
b) acts of submission and obedience (“recipient” of “brutal relations of force”) are cognitive acts (“how the world works”).
c) These acts involve (I’d say are based on, but also construct) “cognitive structures, forms and categories of perception, principles of vision and division.”
d) Through these cognitive structures the social world is constructed by social agents.
These cognitive structures are arbitrary, as the language in the Saussurian model. Historically, in the contemporary society, it was formed by the state, however, which imposed the cognitive models it favoured. “In our societies, the state makes a decisive contribution to the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality.” (54)
With the evolution of the state, it establishes “common forms and categories of perception and appreciation, social frameworks of perceptions, of understanding or of memory, in short state forms of classification.” (54) The state establishes a grand scheme of orders, incentives, motives, etc., which become the framework—or, rather, background—for people’s actions.
Here, Bourdieu makes an important point that “in order to understand the immediate submission that the state order elicits,” we should think of social agents not as “actors” who operate with their intellectual abilities. Cognitive structures (those which determine our obedience) are “note forms of consciousness but dispositions of the body.” (54) Our obedience to orders of the state is neither a “mechanical submission,” nor “conscious consent to an order” (54):
The social world is riddled with calls to order that function as such only for those who are predisposed to heeding them as they awaken deeply buried corporeal dispositions, outside the channels of consciousness and calculation.” (54-55)
Hence, according to Bourdieu, Marx’s mistake when he spoke of “false consciousness,” trying to explain the non-action (or reaction) on behalf of seemingly revolutionary classes. In reality, according to Bourdieu,
submission to the established order is the product of the agreement between, on the one hand, the cognitive structures inscribed in bodies by both collective history (phylogenesis) and individual history (ontogenesis) and, on the other, the objective structures of the world to which these cognitive structures are applied. (55)
To understand further how it works, Bourdieu emphasizes that symbolic structuralism a la Levi-Strauss or Foucault in The Order of Things shows only one part of the picture (synchronic), while diachronic—modus operandi of agents, who take part actively in the symbolic production—is disregarded. The problem is that the symbolic order which the power produces is able to mimic the objective structures of the social reality so skillfully, that it “attaches us to the established order with all the ties of the unconscious.” (55)
Here, Bourdieu’s ideas resonate with what Roland Barthes wrote about the bourgeois myth and its role in the legitimation of the established social and political order.
Bourdieu then argues that all these “primordial political beliefs,” “a right, correct, dominant vision,” —everything which constitutes a “normal” view of things, a phenomenological common sense—“is a politically produced relation, as are the categories of perception that sustain it.” (56) These categories and relations were developed and imposed on the subject through struggle against competing visions: “What appears to us today as self-evident, as beneath consciousness and choice, has quite often been the stake of struggles and instituted only as the result of digged confrontations between dominant and dominated groups.” (56-57) Here, the uttermost importance which the power gives to history: it tries to conceal the process of its own genealogy in order to conceal things which were once constructed and present them as if they emerged naturally. Here, also one of the practices of struggle against the hegemony of the state: to look at its historical foundations and see their arbitrariness.
To describe and understand the genesis of the state, we need to concentrate not only on its structures of power, but also on the functions of power and here, in particular, on the particular producers of particular incarnations of power (i.e., university professors, jurists, etc.).
Appendix: The Family Spirit
Bourdieu discusses the “typical” family as a political and social construct and suggests to look at it as a discourse. In it, family would be transcendent (more than the sum of people who constitute it) and anthropomorphic, and “active agent endowed with a will.” (65) While just a word, “family” is also a “collective principle of construction of collective reality” (66) :
Every time we use a classificatory concept like “family,” we are making both a description and a prescription, which is not perceived as such because it is (more or less) universally accepted and goes without saying. (66)
Illocutive and perlocutive forces in action!
This principle of construction of the social reality is, however, socially constructed itself. It emerged in our heads when we socialized into a world divided into families. This means that family is one of constituent elements of our habitus. Therefore:
The family as an objective social category (a structuring structure) is the basis of the family as a subjective social category (a structured structure), a mental category which is the matrix of countless representations and actions (such as marriages) which help to reproduce the objective social category. (67)
Bourdieu then considers a bunch of social practices which are invoked to implement a “real” family from its social model, emphasizing those practices which create emotional involvement. He then argues that family is also the space of social reproduction of economic, cultural and symbolic privileges: for a family to emerge and—more important—to be names and recognized as a family, certain conditions have to be satisfied, including conformity to the norm. Then the family becomes the space through which privileges are accumulated and transmitted between generations. Moreover, “the family plays a decisive role in the maintenance of the social order, through social as well as biological reproduction.” (69) And this all involves the relations of power within this social group, which involves not only the nucleus family, but more often extended family.
Bourdieu then asks who constructed the modern family as the main category of the construction of the social reality—and responds, rather unsurprisingly: the state, which encouraged a certain type of family “through a whole labor of codification accompanied by economic and social effects.” (71)
Not only the state constructed the family as a social category, it imposes thinking in these categories (such as family, or family life, or private space as opposed to public space) to social science. Scholars, consequently, give this social construction even a better feeling of reality. The family discourse becomes performative discourse, which “has the means of creating the conditions of its own verification and therefore its own reinforcement.” (72)
In conclusion, Bourdieu writes:
Thus the family is indeed a fiction, a social artifact, an illusion in the ost ordinary sense of the word, but a “well-founded illusion,” because, being produced and reproduced with the guarantee of the state, it receives from the state at every moment the means to exist and persist. (73)
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