Bourdieus Critique - Scholarly.reason

Philosophy & Social Criticism
http://psc.sagepub.com Pierre Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason

Roger Foster Philosophy Social Criticism 2005; 31; 89 DOI: 10.1177/0191453705048321 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/1/89
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Roger Foster
Pierre Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason
Abstract This paper investigates the implications of Pierre Bourdieus recent reformulation of his social theory as a critique of scholarly reason. This reformulation is said to point towards a denition of social theory as a sociologically informed version of the Kantian concept of critique. It is argued that, by this means, Bourdieu is able to extend and develop the critique of intellectualism in the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty and, furthermore, to ground this critique by showing how the intellectualist error arises from a failure to reect on the social conditions of possibility of reason. The three forms of the critique of scholarly reason (pertaining to the theoretical, the moral-practical and the aesthetic forms of reason) are then briey presented. In the nal section, the critique of scholarly reason is shown to provide the basis for a convincing response to critiques of Bourdieus work from critical theorists drawing on Habermass conception of discursive rationality. In particular, it is argued that critical theorists inuenced by Habermas typically confuse practical reexivity with intellectual reection the standpoint of scholarly reason. Finally, it is shown that Bourdieus own account of the unity of theory and practice is nonetheless decient, and must be supplanted with an account centred on the idea of existential clarication. Keywords reexivity Bourdieu critical theory Habermas intellectualism
In what would turn out to be the final restatement of his social theory, Pierre Bourdieu began to develop the idea of a critique of scholarly reason.1 As well as deepening and extending his well-known theory of practice, this reformulation renders visible a number of the most significant philosophical implications of his work. I want to show, in particular, how the critique of scholarly reason allows Bourdieus
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 31 no 1 pp. 89107
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453705048321
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90 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1)

efforts to transcend the traditional dualisms of social theory to be presented as a sociologically informed version of the Kantian model of critique, that is, a form of inquiry that sets out to determine the limits of reason.2 The limits of reason, for Kant, were defined in terms of a priori conditions of possibility relating to the subject of knowledge. In other words, they are those necessary conditions which make it possible for the subject to attain knowledge concerning the object. The central idea is that, in order to be known, the objects of cognition must be constituted in advance by the a priori activities of the subject. Pierre Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason, I will argue, can be said to adhere to the framework of Kantian critique because it retains the focus of transcendental inquiry on the necessary limits of cognition, but, and importantly, it gives Kantian critique a sociological twist because it shifts the focus from subjective conditions to the social conditions of possibility of cognition. Bourdieus conception of critique differs from Kants, however, in that Bourdieu is not interested in the limits of cognition per se, but rather in a specific distortion inherent in attempts to comprehend social practice theoretically. Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason, I will argue, stipulates that social theorists and philosophers have typically misunderstood the nature of social practice because they have failed to take account of the way that the theoretical perspective is structured by the social conditions under which it takes place, in other words, its social conditions of possibility. The goal of critique, then, is to explain why theory goes wrong by showing how its typical errors follow from its failure to reflect on the constitutive social conditions which make theoretical activity possible. Before turning directly to the critique of scholarly reason, I want to discuss the oft-noted connection between Bourdieu and two hugely influential 20th-century philosophers, namely, Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. The purpose of this discussion will be to prepare the ground for my claim that the critique of scholarly reason extends the later Wittgensteins attack on the role of mental states in cognition, and Merleau-Pontys critique of the dualism of intellectualism vs. empiricism, by showing how the typical philosophical errors identified by both thinkers can be traced to a failure to reflect on the social conditions of theoretical inquiry. In the final section, I will show how the critique of scholarly reason allows Bourdieu to develop a convincing response to the charge of critical theorists that his theory deprives social agents of critical reflexivity. However, it also makes clear the shortcomings in Bourdieus own understanding of the interaction of theory and practice.
91 Foster: Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason Wittgenstein: rules and social context
Although working within divergent philosophical traditions, the works of the later Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty share a certain signicant similarity. Both thinkers are seeking to undermine a particular philosophical conception of understanding, where this is equated with the framing of mental representations, and action is considered to be explicable by means of the application of a mental insight, which somehow guides the body towards a consciously posited end. Wittgenstein sought to oppose this view by pointing to the centrality of the social contexts in which language is used. Linguistic meaning, for Wittgenstein, must be explained in terms of social contexts, rather than in terms of mental acts which somehow confer meanings on expressions. Thus if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, he argued, we should have to say that it was its use.3 Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, focused on the body as the location of what might be called an incarnate intentionality, thus providing for an analysis of embodied understanding which would correct both intellectualist and empiricist accounts of the mental. Bourdieus work draws signicantly upon these theoretical innovations, but also, or so I will claim, provides a deeper understanding of the philosophical errors detected by both thinkers by tracing those errors to the specic social presuppositions of theoretical inquiry. The importance of Wittgensteins work for Bourdieus project can be seen most clearly in the implications of Wittgensteins well-known critique of the intellectualist or mentalist picture of rule-following. Bourdieu draws upon Wittgensteins work to illuminate a widespread confusion in social theory between the idea of a rule as an explanatory hypothesis, formulated by the theorist to account for what he or she sees, and the idea of a rule as the principle actually applied by the agents themselves in their practice. This confusion, for Bourdieu, is the basis of the constitutive error of intellectualism, namely, the projection of theoretical comprehension into practice. Intellectualism, Bourdieu argues, tends inevitably to slip from the perfectly acceptable use of rules as descriptions of certain regularities within practice, to the idea of the rule as a force or mechanism guiding the conduct of social agents themselves.4 In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein develops a conception of rules as customs or conventions.5 Wittgenstein conceived this idea as a critique of the intellectualist or mentalist view that the correct application of a rule can be discerned from an intuitive grasp of the rules essence. According to the latter view, application must be seen to result on each occasion from an act of special knowledge.6 The point of speaking about customs/conventions rather than mental acts as

the basis of rule-following is, rst, that it shifts attention away from mental intentions and towards social practices as the guarantors of linguistic meaning. The bottom line of explanation, Wittgenstein argues in On Certainty, is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting (Handlungsweise).7 The account of rules as customs/conventions, secondly, suggests an explanation of rulefollowing which focuses not on a mental grasp of the meaning of a rule as the basis of correct application, but rather on a set of socially inculcated dispositions and tendencies that are the result of training and education. This would account for Wittgensteins claim that a rule is obeyed blindly rather than consciously. Blindly does not mean here without thinking, but rather points to habitual (and socially sustained) ways of acting as the basis of rule-following.8 This reading of Wittgenstein helps to elucidate an often misunderstood aspect of Bourdieus work. In his efforts to surmount the intellectualist error which portrays rules as consciously applied by social agents, Bourdieu has developed the concept of strategy. This has, unfortunately, led to a familiar mis-characterization of Bourdieus theory of action as utilitarian or economistic.9 Bourdieu, that is, is accused of positing the conscious calculation of individual interests and advantage as the basis of social action. In order to see what is wrong with this reading we need to look a little more closely at the Wittgensteinian account of rules.10 One consequence of Wittgensteins critique of the intellectualist view is the position that we can call meaning nitism.11 If the social context is the ground of linguistic meaning, then it follows that the correctness of the application of any concept or rule cannot be derived from an analysis of the essential meaning of that concept or rule. This follows from Wittgensteins critique of the philosophers search for the closed extension of concepts, that is, rm boundaries which would clearly delimit the legitimate and the illegitimate.12 Implicit in Wittgensteins critique of closed extension is the idea that a class of particular things cannot be delimited in advance of the application of a concept or label. Wittgensteins point, according to this meaning nitist picture, is that linguistic meanings are themselves continually reinterpreted and redened through their usage within the typical contexts of social practice. This means, however, that the success of any particular application can never be as certain or secure as the intellectualist picture presupposes. It is exactly this element of practical uncertainty that Bourdieus reference to social action as regulated by strategies rather than rules is intended to capture. Hence Bourdieu asserts that ritual action, which structural anthropology situates on the side of algebra, is in fact more akin to gymnastics or a dance, and is characterized by ambiguities . . . polysemic realities, undetermined or indeterminate, not to speak of partial contradictions
93 Foster: Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason

and the fuzziness that pervades the whole system and accounts for its exibility, its openness, in short, everything that makes it practical .13 By speaking of strategies rather than rules, then, Bourdieu intends to capture precisely that uncertainty and open-endedness of practice which stems from the contextual rootedness of meaning. Any ritual action, such as gift-giving in traditional societies, for example, is to be understood as an interpretation of a rule whose success cannot be determined in advance.14 There is a further aspect to Bourdieus relationship to Wittgenstein, however, which has been left unexplored thus far in philosophical engagements with Bourdieus work.15 Bourdieu, I want to argue, productively develops the social-critical implications of Wittgensteins references to the occult or queer nature of mental states.16 There seems, Wittgenstein asserts, to be something sublime about logic. Our typical accounts of the way language functions, furthermore, makes it seem as if thought is surrounded by a halo.17 Further, we tend to think of naming itself as a sacramental act creating a magic relation.18 Our ordinary notions of language, Wittgenstein is here claiming, accord to the mental a certain mysterious force or power to confer meaning on words. For Bourdieu, this process of conferring mysterious properties on the mental is a particular case of the more general process of the transguration of social forces onto objects. The locus classicus for an examination of this process is mile Durkheims discussion of primitive religion in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim argued that totemistic religions tended to incorporate a process of the projection of social forces onto specic things, animals and persons, with the result that the object thereby took on a sacred quality, marking it with mysterious powers. If, however, linguistic meaning can be said to be a function of social context, then the sacred/mysterious properties attaching to mental states must be similarly understood to be a result of the transguration of what is social in origin onto a mental/psychologistic apparatus. For Bourdieu, this process of the transguration of social forces is not merely a philosophical error, however. It is in fact essential to the workings of what he terms symbolic power, which operates by means of the naturalization of socially produced distinctions. For Bourdieu, symbolic power can be seen to be at work in any social institution (such as the school system) which operates to produce a distinction between insider (successful) and outsider (failed or unsuccessful) groups. The act which consecrates insiders (the granting of diplomas and degrees) simultaneously attributes magical properties to the agents involved, turning what are in effect socially produced distinctions between individuals and groups into natural differences, and thereby generating a political effect of legitimation with regard to the distinctions thus produced.
94 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1) Merleau-Ponty: the body and habitus
Merleau-Ponty shares with Wittgenstein a deep scepticism regarding the role of mental representations in conferring linguistic meaning. Merleau-Ponty, however, develops his critique of intellectualism by means of a phenomenology of the lived body.19 According to MerleauPonty, both empiricism and intellectualism go wrong in failing to take account of the practical intentionality of the body, and hence, fail to grasp the active, structuring role of the situated body. Both empiricism and intellectualism, Merleau-Ponty argues, reduce the body to an object. The body functions according to these accounts as either a passive receiver of stimuli (empiricism), or a mechanism for the intentional projects of a disembodied consciousness. The active role of the body in structuring experience, however, Merleau-Ponty argued, precluded the reduction of the signicance of motility to a sum of reexes and, moreover, suggested a form of incarnate intentionality which was not reducible to an act of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty describes the hollowing out of the signicance of the body in both of these perspectives:
The motor intentions of the living being were thus converted into objective movements: to the will was given only an instantaneous at, the execution of the act was delivered over entirely to the nervous mechanism. Sensation, thus detached from affectivity and the motor functions, became the simple reception of a quality and physiology believed that it could follow, from the receptors to the nervous centre, the projection of the exterior world into the living being. The living body thus transformed ceased to be my body, the visible expression of a concrete Ego, and became an object among all the others.20
The relevance of this critique for Bourdieus work comes into view when we focus on Merleau-Pontys comments concerning the signicance of habitual action. The incarnate, practical intentionality of the body, Merleau-Ponty argues, must become sedimented or xed in habitual schemes of comportment. It is, Merleau-Ponty states, an internal necessity for the most integrated existence to give itself an habituated body.21 With the emergence of the habituated body, incarnate or embodied intentionality comes to be characterized by regular, structured patterns of response and action in typical situations. In the acquisition of habit, Merleau-Ponty argues, the subject acquires the capacity to respond by a certain number of solutions to a certain number of situations.22 Like Merleau-Pontys notion of the lived body, the function of Bourdieus concept of habitus is to replace the transcendental subject with the situated body, conceived as a source of practical intentionality with the power to constitute social reality. The habitus, Bourdieu argues, avoids the twin errors of materialist and idealist accounts because it

. . . restores to the agent a generative and unifying capacity which is constructive and classicatory, at the same time recalling that this capacity to constitute social reality, itself socially constituted, is not that of a transcendental subject, but that of a socialized body, investing in practice socially constructed organizing principles acquired in the course of a situated and temporally conned social experience.23
The central theoretical innovation of the habitus, in relation to MerleauPontys phenomenology of the lived body, is that it poses the question of the origin of the structures of practical intentionality incorporated in the body from a social-historical perspective. This enables Bourdieu to take up a social-critical inquiry into the social construction of the structures or schemes that the agent puts to work in order to construct the world.24 Bourdieu, in effect, historicizes Merleau-Pontys notion of incarnate intentionality, and this allows him to pose the question of the social determinants of the understanding that is incorporated in the constructive/classicatory operations of the body. Bourdieu is thereby able to focus on the social imperatives that are encoded and incorporated in the generative schemes of the body through the work of socialization:
One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instil a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignicant as sit up straight, or dont hold your knife in your left hand, and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement.25
Like Merleau-Pontys notion of the habituated body, the habitus denotes a structured pattern of responses and adaptations rooted in the practical intentionality of the body. Yet because Bourdieu historicizes the question of the structuring of bodily intentionality, it becomes possible to obtain a critical perspective on the social forces which are at work in determining the structures of habituated action. The habitus therefore provides the key to the durability of structures of domination and social divisions. The body, Bourdieu argues, is in the social world but the social world is in the body (in the form of hexis or eidos). The very structures of the world are present in the structures (or better, the cognitive schemata) that agents put to work in order to understand it.26 Bourdieus thesis, in simple terms, is that the objective life-chances of individuals are incorporated in the form of projects, goals, aspirations, and perceptions which make up the habitus. Because they are able to be internalized in the form of class- or group-specic aspirations, structural social disadvantages are able to be transformed into relatively durable dispositions that can be transmitted intergenerationally. Bourdieu is therefore able to dispense with all accounts of ideology

which focus on false belief (or voluntary servitude). The complicity of the dominated with the conditions of their subordination is not to be understood, Bourdieu argues, in terms of a conscious and deliberate act; it is rather the effect of a power, which has durably inscribed itself in the bodies of the dominated in the form of schemes of perception and dispositions.27 The habitus is not to be understood in a mechanistic sense, however. Social disadvantages are incorporated in the form of class- and group-specic schemes of practical-bodily understanding, which generate projects, aspirations, and perceptions. Social inequalities are reproduced because these projects and aspirations are adjusted to the social conditions of their formation.28
The critique of scholarly reason

Wittgensteins thesis, as we saw, was the claim that social context, rather than mental states or representations, is the primary locus and determinant of linguistic meaning. Merleau-Pontys thesis was that the primary locus of cognitive synthesis is not a disembodied consciousness, but is rather generated through the practical intentionality of the lived body. These theoretical innovations, for Bourdieu, furnish the tools for a social theory free of the errors of intellectualism, and of the subjectivism vs. objectivism dichotomy of its recent past, which characterizes social action either as a free, presupposition-less, conscious choice, or a mechanical execution of structural laws. Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason, I now want to argue, is able to ground the Wittgensteinian critique of the magical properties attributed to mental states, and Merleau-Pontys critique of the disembodied consciousness, by showing how these philosophical errors arise in a failure to reect on the (social) limits of reason. It is Merleau-Ponty, in fact, who provides the initial clue to this analysis. In the nal section of The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the accounts of class consciousness given by historical materialism, on the one hand, and by Sartre, on the other. Merleau-Ponty perceptively presents these positions as the socialtheoretic form of the dualism of intellectualism and empiricism. Hence, for Sartre, the emergence of class consciousness is only conceivable as a purely presupposition-less, free, conscious act. For historical materialism, on the other hand, class consciousness is explicable solely as a blind or mechanical effect exerted at a particular point in the development of the forces of production. Merleau-Ponty argues that both positions miss the way that class consciousness emerges from a certain way of existing (as proletarian or bourgeois), or, in other words, from a certain pattern of interaction with society and world which

motivates revolutionary or counter-revolutionary projects.29 What is most signicant in this analysis, however, is Merleau-Pontys description of the Sartrean error. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty charges, transforms an existential project, which is lived ambiguously, into a pure intellectual project, deriving from a pure act of consciousness. This transformation, Merleau-Ponty continues, itself possesses an existential basis in the life situation of the intellectual:
Even the decision to make oneself into a revolutionary without motive, and by an act of pure freedom, must still express a certain way of being in the natural and social world, which is typically that of an intellectual. [The intellectual] only links up with the working class from out of his situation as an intellectual.30
Sartres transformation of the existential revolutionary project into an intellectual project, Merleau-Ponty is here suggesting, is attributable to the particular life-conditions which determine how the intellectual experiences the revolutionary situation. Because he fails to reect on those conditions, Sartre generalizes what is unique to the existential situation of an intellectual into a universal theory of what constitutes class consciousness. The basis of Merleau-Pontys critique, then, is that Sartre has unwittingly projected a mode of understanding which is unique to the existential situation of an intellectual into the non-scholastic world, with the result that the logic of the emergence of class consciousness at the level of (non-intellectual) practice is obscured. According to Bourdieu, this error is liable to occur in any theoretical inquiry which fails to reect on the constraints (in effect, background conditions) under which theoretical comprehension takes place. Just as, for Kant, rationalism tends to situate the principle of its judgements, not in itself, but in its object, so scholarly reason imputes to its object that which belongs to the manner of comprehending it, thereby, as in Sartres account of class consciousness, presenting as a general theory of social action what is in fact distinctive of the scholarly relation to the world.31 We have already seen another pervasive form of this error in the slippage from rules as statistical regularities to rules as active forces within social practice. Another variant is to be found in rational actor theory, insofar as it explains practices as the result of conscious decisions or intentions having economic calculation as their basis.32 The purpose of the critique of scholarly reason is to show how these errors can be traced to a failure to reect on the social conditions of possibility of theoretical comprehension. This is akin to transcendental inquiry in that it seeks to obtain a theoretical point of view on the theoretical point of view, in order to make possible a reection on the social presuppositions which structure theoretical comprehension presuppositions which, according to Bourdieu, are based on the fact which is in a sense

too evident, that the scholar (ethnologist, sociologist, historian) is not, with regard to the situation and the conduct that he/she observes and analyses, in the position of an acting agent (agent agissant), engaged in action, with an investment in the games and stakes.33 The most important social presuppositions which structure theoretical comprehension, according to Bourdieu, are those which concern the bracketing of temporal urgency and economic necessity. What Bourdieu refers to as the scholastic fallacy derives from a projection of modes of understanding, for which these social presuppositions function as conditions of possibility, into the day-to-day activities of social agents. The ethnologist, for example, is able to represent giftgiving as the execution of an underlying formula because theoretical comprehension takes place in conditions in which the uncertainty deriving from the temporal unfolding of day-to-day practice is bracketed. Similarly, the intellectuals representation of the emergence of class consciousness as a decision ex nihilo has for its condition of possibility the bracketing of the existential situation of the worker, for whom the revolutionary project matures in the immediacy (and urgency) of her or his life-experience of the economic process. The social conditions of possibility of scholarly reason thus constitute what Bourdieu calls an epistemic doxa. This is intended to express the idea that philosophers, sociologists and historians typically leave in a state of unthought (impens, doxa) the presuppositions of their thought, that is, the social conditions of possibility of the scholastic point of view and the unconscious dispositions, productive of unconscious theses, which are acquired through an academic or scholastic experience.34 The point of the critique of scholarly reason within the wider framework of Bourdieus theory is to call attention to the inherent risks of false universalization, which occurs when the theorist forgets how his or her own standpoint is itself structured by social conditions. The danger this poses is not, however, merely of theoretical import. Bourdieu believes that there are always also political implications attached to the projection of the theoretical viewpoint into social practice. This is clearest in the case of moral-practical reason, and in particular in Habermass communicative ethics, where the effort to root communicative rationality in the structures of language suppresses the question of the social conditions which make possible a capacity for systematized moral judgements.35 Bourdieus perspective, in contrast, is able to uncover the limits to the universality of communicative rationality stemming from the unequal distribution of the social, cultural and material means which make free and equal participation in public discourse possible. Bourdieu thus urges that we work to universalize the conditions of access to universality.36 The critique of scholarly reason thus takes the form of a constant vigilance, in which we are recurrently

called back from the temptation to mistake the universalization of theoretical equality with the universalization of the social conditions which would give rise to genuine equality in practice.
Bourdieu and critical theory

Bourdieus theory has consistently been criticized for its apparent failure to account for agent reexivity, and this critique has, unsurprisingly, gured particularly strongly in the reception of Bourdieus work by theorists sympathetic to critical social theory. Bourdieus account of how structural inequalities are reproduced through socialization in a habitus, it is argued, robs agents of the practical reexivity which enables them to reect upon the dispositions which they have been socialized into and to criticize the effects of social and cultural power. James Bohman has recently forcefully restated this objection. He argues that Bourdieus account of how structures of domination are reproduced by socialization in a habitus effectively turns social agents into cultural dupes.37 Bourdieus account of how inculcated dispositions reproduce structural disadvantages fails to come to terms with the possibilities of interpretation and reinterpretation of cultural meanings, which often occur in ways that contest current identities and practices. Bourdieus social actors will be symbolic fools, Bohman argues, unless they can begin to reect upon and thus to transform the dispositions that they have been socialized into, at least one at a time.38 This charge, as I will argue shortly, rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that the habitus works to adjust projects and aspirations to structural possibilities. Yet the misunderstanding is itself deeply signicant, since it rests upon the typical error which consists in the projection of the theoretical point of view into practice. Critical theorists, in their critique of Bourdieu, have typically confused agent reexivity with intellectual reection. That is to say, they have conated the adoption of a critical stance to social conditions with the adoption of a scholastic point of view on social practice. To see this more clearly, we need to look a little more closely at how the habitus works. The charge that Bourdieu portrays social agents as cultural dupes suggests that the habitus is to be understood on the Parsonian model of the internalization of social norms. According to this model, the dispositions which make up the habitus would be seen as internalized forms of social and cultural power, which agents unthinkingly sustain and reproduce by behaving as they have been socialized to behave. This has often been thought to be implicit in Bourdieus account of how the possibilities/impossibilities, freedoms/necessities, and opportunities/ prohibitions inscribed in objective conditions generate dispositions

objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands.39 Yet everything depends on what we take adaptation to mean here, and in particular whether we understand the adjustment between objective conditions and the habitus to occur at the level of the constructed identities of agents or more properly at the level of the consequences of the strategies adopted by subordinate groups for dealing with the oppressive social conditions in which they nd themselves. It is the latter possibility, I believe, which reects Bourdieus own intentions, and it is this option which allows Bourdieu to avoid the false dilemma of critical theorists, in which social agents are to be seen either as pre-programmed machines who blindly reproduce the conditions of their existence, or as agents who are able to extricate themselves from practice in order to evaluate their commitments from the perspective of pure, self-conscious freedom. The central point at issue here has been insightfully developed in the analyses of so-called resistance theorists.40 These theorists have shown convincingly how it is possible to conceive the members of subordinated social groups as intelligent, reexive agents possessed of penetrating insights into the oppressive nature of the social conditions in which they live. And yet, at the same time, we need to see how the complex strategies adopted by the oppressed on the basis of their critical insights into the social conditions which oppress them to cope with the harsh conditions of their existence, make them active agents in the intergenerational transmission of structural disadvantages.41 Thus, in Paul Williss hugely inuential study, the counter-school culture of working-class boys (the lads) is seen to follow from insightful penetrations of the prevailing ideology of the school, which is predicated on a denial of the connection between educational opportunities and class position. And yet the very strategies which these boys create and develop on the basis of their critical insights lead them towards a free afrmation of a life of manual labour (where free here signies that it has nothing to do with blind conditioning or determination by social forces). It is ironically in the form of creative penetrations that cultures live their own damnation and that, for instance, a good section of working-class kids condemn themselves to a future in manual work.42 Similarly, in Philippe Bourgoiss study, the street culture of resistance developed by young, ghettoized Puerto Ricans in East Harlem can be seen to emerge from penetrating insights into the conditions of extreme economic and social marginalization in which these agents live. And yet the very strategies that dene street culture, its oppositional celebration of street marginality, generate forms of action which entrench and stabilize the intense marginalization of the groups concerned. The strategies of resistance creatively developed by subordinated groups ironically play an active role in sustaining and reproducing structural disadvantages.

These analyses, I suggest, give us an insight into how the habitus works, and, in particular, they demonstrate why it is thoroughly misleading to portray the adjustment between objective conditions and projects/aspirations that characterizes the habitus as a functionalist thesis.43 The theory of the habitus need not (and, if my reading of Bourdieu is correct, does not) portray social agents as passive recipients of social-structural forces, which somehow reproduce themselves by pre-programming agents with certain dispositions. The theory of the habitus is not incompatible with the view that all social agents are reexive agents who, in Anthony Giddenss words, know a great deal about the conditions and consequences of what they do in their day-to-day lives.44 The central purpose of the habitus is to point to the way that the creative strategies of subordinate groups are constructed within and respond to a social context, and their strategies will have consequences within this context which the groups in question cannot control. According to the interpretation I have offered, then, Bourdieu does see subordinated groups as able to reect critically on social conditions, and their critical insights are lived out practically in the oppositional strategies which these groups develop. But and this is the decisive point the type of contestation in question does not take the form of intellectual reection. It is here that we can see how, in their critique of Bourdieu, critical theorists have projected the scholastic point of view into practice, and, unsurprisingly, they have done so in a way which frames the distinction between cultural conditioning and agent reexivity in terms of the classic dichotomy between blind determination by social forces and free, presupposition-less, self-conscious choice. The point to be made here is that critical theorists have conated critical reexivity with the adoption of the detached theoretical standpoint which denes scholarly reason. Because they dene reexivity as theoretical detachment, critical theorists have fallen prey to the illusion that resistance to the operations of social and cultural power must, and indeed can only, stem from a free, self-conscious decision originating in an act of theoretical comprehension. Hence, in his critique of Bourdieu, Hans Herbert Kgler has argued that Bourdieu effectively eliminates any possibility of power-critical praxis because he misses the difference between imposed structures that need to be rejected and, on the other hand, self-chosen and consciously accepted actions and relations.45 This same dichotomy is at work in James Bohmans charge that Bourdieus failure to ascribe to social agents that type of detached, discursive reexivity proper to theoretical comprehension implies a vision of social agents as cultural dupes. Bohmans error stems from the guiding thesis that practical reexivity requires practical agency for reasoning participants in social discourse that is much like what Bourdieu grants to the sociological theorist.46 But, as my reading of

resistance theorists sought to demonstrate, subordinated agents do reect upon social conditions, and they do criticize them, but they do so by responding practically to the demands of the social conditions in which they nd themselves they do not and cannot do so by adopting a detached theoretical point of view on social practice. This is not because they lack a certain attribute or reective capacity which social theorists possess. Rather, and as Bourdieu has consistently stressed, it is because social agents are engaged in and relate to the demands, possibilities and prohibitions of practice differently than social theorists. That type of critical reection which critical theorists chide Bourdieu for failing to ascribe to social agents, is precisely that standpoint which is rooted in the social conditions that are the conditions of possibility of detached theoretical comprehension. Critical theorists introduce into the object the intellectual relation to the object by framing reective agency in terms of an opposition between blind, imposed social determination and a free consciousness able to detach itself from its practical engagements so as to see them from the outside (that is, bereft of their social-economic urgency and their temporal unfolding). Bourdieu portrays this error as follows:
Projecting into the perception of the social world the unthought content inherent in his position in that world, that is, the monopoly of thought which he is granted de facto by the social division of labour and which leads him to identify the work of thought with an effort of expression and verbalization in speech and writing . . . the thinker betrays his secret conviction that action is fully performed only when it is understood, interpreted, expressed, by identifying the implicit with the unthought and by denying the status of authentic thought to the tacit and practical thought that is inherent in all sensible action.47
Because they have failed to reect on the social conditions of possibility of scholarly reason, then, critical theorists have equated agent reexivity with the scholastic point of view on practice. They have thereby overlooked the fact that reexivity is embedded practically in the strategies of resistance of subordinate groups who, nevertheless, cannot effectively challenge power relations. Critical theorists therefore repeat the error of equating the implicit with the unthought, as though subordinated individuals are blind dupes to social forces unless they are able to express their critical insights in the typically detached discursive mode of academic intellectuals. This may, of course, be entirely counter to the intentions of the followers of Habermas themselves, yet the implications are all too evident in Bohmans equation of agent reexivity with discourse, a reexive language use in which speakers consider and thematize the reasons or claims that are made explicitly or implicitly in speech.48 To present this type of intellectual reection as a model of practical reexivity is surely to assume that subordinated groups

primarily encounter dominant discourse as a thesis in academic debate, rather than as the hard reality of their experiential situation which demands a practical (not a theoretical) response. The opposition of subordinated groups to the dominant discourse does not take the form of a thematization of reasons, it is most often embedded in practical strategies: in the purposeful disruption of schooling (Williss lads), or, in dead-end, service-sector jobs, by foot-dragging, attitudinal opposition and petty theft.49 To identify critical reexivity with discursive challenge is to assume that subordinated groups stand in the same relation to the dominant discourse as does the academic theorist, for whom the dominant discourse is a claim to normative truth. This is not, and cannot be, the nature of the dominant discourse for the subordinated group, however. The members of the latter do not experience the dominant discourse primarily as a free-oating assertion, but rather as concretely embedded in social customs and institutions which frame possibilities and constraints of action and thus demand a practical response. It is, then, the projection of scholarly reason into practice, through a neglect of its social conditions of possibility, that is the ground of critical theorists conation of critical reexivity with intellectual detachment. The demand that social agents be conceived as reexive thus slides into the requirement that social agents learn to think like academic intellectuals. Granted, then, that Habermasian critical theorists go wrong in conceiving power-critical praxis on the model of intellectual reection, how should we conceive of a unity of theory and practice which would be free of these errors? In his suggestions on this topic, I now want to argue, Bourdieu draws the wrong conclusions from his critique of scholarly reason. In Practical Reason, Bourdieu called for a realpolitik of reason, which takes the form of a political struggle aimed at endowing reason and freedom with the properly political instruments.50 The goal of this struggle is to extend the social conditions of possibility of scholarly reason beyond their narrow connes within academic and scientic institutions. However indispensable this may be, it is clear that this delineation of the critical task rests on an approach from the top downwards; the removal of conditions of domination is here seen to rest on the effectiveness of efforts of social engineering that have little to do with practical struggle. This one might say elitist tendency in Bourdieus work has also surfaced in his more explicitly political writings where, as Alex Callinicos has argued, Bourdieu portrays neoliberalism as a programme imposed by elites who are separated from the society they are trying to transform.51 Neoliberalism is thus understood as a theory effect (Bourdieus term for the performative character of theory) of a certain intellectual discourse, rather than as bound up with the structural dynamics of capitalism. This reading pushes Bourdieu

towards a conception of social struggle as a battle among elites for the control of the theory effect. This tendency is also accentuated in Mditations pascaliennes, where Bourdieu calls for the deployment of the relative autonomy of the symbolic order, in order to exploit the margins of freedom that arise in the dis-adjustment of projects and aspirations to the objective conditions of the habitus.52 Here again we are given a top downwards solution where, it seems, an elite of knowledgeable theorists is charged with bringing subordinated actors to critical consciousness behind their backs, as it were. This, again, is far from suggestive of an optimism on Bourdieus part concerning the possibilities of a genuine creative interaction of theory and practice. I want to suggest, however, that an alternative understanding of theorypractice interaction is opened up by Bourdieus own critique of scholarly reason, which both avoids the errors of critical theorists false projection of intellectual comprehension into social practice, and evades the elitist connotations implicit in Bourdieus own account. In order to reconstruct this alternative view, we need to focus on the dynamics of what Merleau-Ponty characterized as the existential situation. The notion of the existential situation, as we saw, calls attention to the fact that, for social agents, class consciousness does not emerge ex nihilo. Rather, it germinates in the day-to-day experiences of workers lives. This implies that the critical insight available to the theorist will also be accessible to social agents themselves, but in non-discursive form. What the social theorist, in an attitude of theoretical contemplation, is able to perceive as the reproduction of structural disadvantages, will be present to the social agent in the form of experiential tensions and conicts, typically in the form of disjunctions between aspirations and lifechances, or between life-projects and objective possibilities. Here, it seems, the theorist is able to play a role which is different from that implied in Bourdieus notion of the theory effect. The theorist is here engaged, not in an exploitation of symbolic autonomy, but rather in existential clarication. The task of theory is here to offer to social agents an interpretation of the experiential tensions and conicts which characterize the existential situation. This idea points towards the possibility of a dynamic interaction of theoretical comprehension and situated experience, in which theory informs and develops experience through existential clarication and theory, in turn, takes its cue from the tensions and conicts which are the latent, practical form of the critical insights of theory. Bourdieus critique of scholarly reason, as I have tried to show, furnishes the basis for a plausible response to the central objections of (Habermasian) critical theorists to his work. Furthermore, Bourdieu identies a central weakness in the work of proponents of discursive reexivity, which stems from the projection of the standpoint of

intellectual comprehension into social practice. This causes critical theorists to miss the distinctive logic of practical resistance. The latter only comes into view if we are able to reect critically on the social conditions of possibility of theoretical comprehension. In the absence of this self-reection, as Bourdieu has convincingly shown, there is an inevitable tendency to dichotomize social action, as the work either of blind forces or of free, self-conscious insight; social agents are conceived either as mindless automata or as intellectual theorists without practical engagements. As I argued, critical reexivity typically works within (non-scholastic) practice in the form of practical strategies, which embody a concrete, practical rejection of the imperatives of dominant groups. Thus when critical theorists equate practical reexivity with discursive contestation, they are typically, and unwittingly, demanding the universalization of those social conditions of existence (the structures of socialization, as well as the institutional conditions which bracket economic and temporal urgency) which are the conditions of possibility of the existence of certain social agents as intellectual theorists. Critical theorists are thereby led to confuse the unity of theory and practice with the projection of the point of view of intellectual comprehension into social practice. I argued, however, that Bourdieus notion of the theory effect will not sufce either, since it sacrices genuine interaction for theoretical manipulation. The idea of existential clarication, I believe, may point to a more appropriate beginning point for extending Bourdieus theoretical insights in the form of a genuine social-political project. Social Science Department, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York, USA
PSC
Notes
1 Pierre Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2 See Mditations pascaliennes, p. 9, where Bourdieu explicitly identies his theoretical project as a form of Kantian critique. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 4. 4 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 39. 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 199.

6 Jacques Bouveresse, Rules, Dispositions and the Habitus, in R. Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 110. See also 204. 8 Philosophical Investigations, 219. 9 Axel Honneth, for example, argues that Bourdieus social-theoretic concepts provide for the assertion of a prot motive that penetrates the entire social world. See his The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms, in Die zerissene Welt des Sozialen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 160. 10 Bourdieu himself has recently protested that this charge of utilitarianism is the exact contrary of his express theoretical intentions. See his Practical Reason, p. 79. 11 I borrow this term from David Bloor, in his Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions (London: Routledge, 1997), chapter 1. 12 See Philosophical Investigations, 68, 71, 99. 13 Practical Reason, p. 132. 14 Strategies, furthermore, are not to be conceived in terms of utilitarian calculation. In his analysis of Kabyle society, for example, Bourdieu argues that strategies are largely governed by a sense of honour. The sense of honour guides a series of complex practical manoeuvres (riposte, delay, aggression, retaliation), which are to be understood as practical interpretations and reinterpretations of its meaning, yet whose success can never be guaranteed. 15 See, for example, the essays in Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. 16 See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 93, 94. 17 ibid., 89, 97. 18 Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 172. 19 An exemplary account of the importance of the body in Merleau-Pontys critique of intellectualism can be found in M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Pontys Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), chapter 8. 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La phnomnologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 678. 21 ibid., p. 103. 22 ibid., p. 166. 23 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 164. 24 ibid., p. 175. 25 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 69. 26 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 180. 27 ibid., p. 205. 28 A common misunderstanding of how this adjustment is supposed to work is the basis of a familiar critique of Bourdieu. I will return to this in the nal section. 29 Revolutionary slogans, Merleau-Ponty suggests, crystallize what is latent in workers lives at large: Phnomenologie de la perception, p. 508. 30 ibid., p. 510. 31 Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 67.

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 50. Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, p. 68. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 129. See Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, pp. 80ff. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 137. James Bohman, Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint: Agency in Bourdieus Theory of Practice, in Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, p. 135. ibid., p. 136. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 54. In particular, Paul Willis, in his Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977), and Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bourdieu himself has perceptively noted that the difculty of thinking beyond the dilemma of mechanistic determination versus pure, conscious freedom is itself reected in the alternative characterizations of ethnographers working within this vein as either resistance theorists or reproduction theorists, as though the strategies of subordinate groups have to be tted into the grand either/or of presupposition-less freedom and blind determination of social forces. See Mditations pascaliennes, p. 274. Bourgois, In Search of Respect, p. 9. Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 174. Honneth commits this error in his The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms, pp. 1767. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 281. Hans Herbert Kgler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault, trans. P. Hendrickson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 225. Bohman, Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint, p. 145. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 36. Bohman, Practical Reason and Cultural Constraints, p. 140. Bohman does, however, recognize the necessity of creating an institutional basis for the exercise of discursive reexivity, and this pushes him towards Bourdieus call for a realpolitik of reason, in which the extension of scholarly reason becomes a social-political project rather than a theoretical presupposition. See Bourdieu, Practical Reason, pp. 13940. Bourgois, In Search of Respect, p. 155. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, pp. 13940. See Alex Callinicos, Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, New Left Review 236 (1999): 77102 (90). See also the essays by Pierre Bourdieu in Contre-feux (Paris: Editions Raisons dAgir, 1998). Bourdieu, Mditations pascaliennes, pp. 276ff.
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