European Journal of Social Theory 2(3): 334340

Copyright 1999 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

E J S T

SYMPOSIUM

Scattered Remarks
Pierre Bourdieu
COLLGE DE FRANCE

On Double Truth and the Right Distance How to avoid seeming to be complicitous with the object analyzed (notably in the eyes of those who are foreign to it) or, conversely, reductive and hostile (especially to those who are caught up in the object and who are inclined to refuse the very principle of objectivation)? How to reconcile the objectivation of belief (religious, literary, artistic, scientic, etc.) and of its social conditions of production, and the sensible and faithful evocation of the experience of belief that is inherent to being inserted and involved in a social game? Only at the cost of a very long and very difcult work and one that is the more invisible the more successful it is to put oneself at a distance from the object and then to surmount this very distance, a work that bears inseparably on the object and on the relationship to the object, thus on the subject of the scientic work. On Objectivation Those who rebel against the very intention of objectivizing a subject (who is herself capable of objectivation) could nd support in the existence of a cognitive struggle over the objective representation of the social world in order to contest the pretension to escape the game of mutual objectivation that is entailed in scientic ambition. In fact, scientic objectivation arms itself with collective instruments that ordinary practices of objectivation do not have at their disposal and, above all, it is accomplished within a eld capable of submitting the objectivations, which are necessarily provisional and revisable, to a collective and public testing aimed at controlling the work of desubjectivation (as Bachelard says) that they presuppose, and which is perhaps never denitive. Against Philosophical Heroism The conduct of genuine scientic research requires that one knows how to break oneself of all the habits of thought to which are attached the attributes of theoretical grandeur and depth: to abandon radical doubt in favor of a doubt proportionate to the degree of doubt in the thing, such as Leibniz recommended, to renounce the narcissistic satisfactions provided by all prestigious and sterile meta-discourses, whether methodological or epistemological, in favor of the methodically and epistemologically controlled production of new knowledge, to sacrice the anxiety over the ultimate foundation to the historical critique of unconscious presuppositions, to repudiate the mystical

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ambition to reach the essence in a single leap in favor of the patient reconstruction of genesis, etc. The Epistemology of Ressentiment Those who, like todays postmoderns, colourless continuators of the age-old battle of philosophy against sociology, are wont to contest social sciences claims to scienticity are almost always recruited from among the philosophers who feel threatened in their anthropological monopoly; for this reason, they are not limited to the spiritualists attached to the irreducibility of the human person. They nd their natural allies among the failed or dclass representatives of these sciences (often defrocked philosophers who have not succeeded in their conversion to history or sociology): for lack of having proven themselves on properly scientic terrain, these latter are prone to seeking the appearance of a revenge in meta-scientic, epistemological-looking considerations made for allowing them to convert their personal limitations into universal limits by decreeing a priori the impossibility of doing that which they were unable to do. Bernouilli and the Varignons The sense of theoretical hauteur, which constitutes the main if not the sole support of so many philosophical ambitions, encourages and authorizes large-predator behaviors, notably with regard to the social sciences, those auxiliary and ancillary disciplines barely good enough for providing matter for reection. Thus it is that the linguists, sociologists, ethnologists and historians who, burdened with ambiguous, sticky, fuzzy realities, and bogged down in interminable empirical verications, know that they are destined to arrive after the battle and thus to appear, more often than not, as slavish imitators (suiveurs) of the very thinkers whom they inspired, might nd a measure of comfort and perhaps even some weapons against all the Varignons and their unconfessed borrowings or their hasty generalizations whose paradigm is no doubt the notion of ideological state apparatus in the story told by Cournot about Jean Bernouilli:
Scientists, philosophers, very inclined to generalization, to classication, very fecund in creating new words or new labels for the genera and the classes that they imagine, are not those who cause the most genuine advances made in the sciences and in philosophy. The truly active principle, the principle of fecundity and life, for everything that relates to the development of reason and of the philosophical mind, must therefore be found not in the faculty of abstracting, classifying, and generalizing. It is reported that the great geometrician Bernouilli, despondent at seeing that his contemporary Varignon seemed to want to arrogate his discoveries for himself, under the pretext of adding to them some generality that the author had neglected, and which did not demand a great expense of invention, said with cunning, when nishing a new memoir: Varignon will generalize that for us. (Cournot, 1973: 20)

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Power/Knowledge 1 The philosophers, and in particular Michel Foucault, could

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have posed in earnest the question of symbolic power, a power that is exercised through an action of knowledge, and could have produced, in particular, a theory of the power of theory, of the conditions of possibility, and thus the limits, of its exercise, and of its distribution among the different categories of agents, only at the price of genuinely abdicating the status of philosopher (encouraged by a critical awareness of the logic of the academic eld and of the hierarchy between disciplines). Entering into a practice humbler and closer to the facts, such as that of the historian or the sociologist, is indeed the condition of a real overcoming of the traditional antinomy, on which the philosophical ambition rests, between the political and practical concerns of the man of the agora, on the one hand, and the theoretical, pure, disinterested preoccupations of the philosopher, bound to the distinctive privileges of skhol, on the other. Symbolic Capital To account for recognized domination and for obedience, that is, for the conditions that must be met for a command to be obeyed, one must integrate traditionally separate, nay opposing, theoretical traditions: the constructivist tradition that considers symbolic schemata as the instruments of construction of the world of objects; the structuralist or hermeneutic tradition that, notably in Habermas, treats them as instruments of communication, reducing issues of power and politics to issues of meaning; nally the traditions that see in them instruments of power (or of the legitimation of power), by priority of the economic, as in Marx, or the political, as in Nietzsche. As the synthesis of the three traditions, the notion of symbolic power (or capital) enables one to account for the relations of force that are actualized in and by relations of cognition (or recognition) and of communication. Symbolic capital exists by and for perception or, more precisely, by and for those who perceive it and who can perceive it and make it exist as such only because they are endowed with adequate categories of perception. This means that it depends, for its very existence, on those who bear its effects. These categories (or schemata) of perception are historical principles of vision and division rooted in the objective divisions of the social order (this is the case with the three orders of ancien rgime societies which, as Georges Duby has shown, are at the same time objective structures and cognitive structures) or, more precisely, in the structure of the distribution of capital. Symbolic capital is made, in the last analysis, by those who are submitted to it but if, and only if, the objective structure of its distribution is at the basis of the cognitive structures that they bring into play in order to produce it as, for example, with such structuring oppositions as masculine/feminine, young/old, noble/common, rich/poor, white/black, etc. Nobility exists only for and by those who have at their disposal the principle of division between the noble and the common, that is to say by and for the other nobles or the commoners who have acquired the disposition to recognize it (in both senses) on account of their embeddedness in a universe objectively organized according to this principle of division. If the claim to symbolic power that permits one to act upon the social world in its entirety or upon a particular eld is universal, this capacity is very unequally

Pierre Bourdieu Scattered Remarks

accorded to the different agents according to the position they occupy in the structure of the distribution of symbolic capital within the given social space (that of noble versus commoner, of the notable versus the ordinary person, of the Nobel prizewinner versus the rank-and-le researcher, of the publisher consecrated and capable of consecrating by publication versus the newcomer in the eld of publishing, etc.) (see Bourdieu, 1999). Symbolic capital is the capital of recognition accumulated in the course of the whole history of prior struggles (thus very strongly correlated to seniority), that enables one to intervene effectively in current struggles for the conservation or augmentation of symbolic capital, that is, for the power of nomination and of imposition of the legitimate principle of vision and division, universally recognized in a determinate social space. These cognitive and communicative struggles which, as Goffman (1959) has shown so well, are continually unfolding in daily existence, nd their canonical form in the political struggles that use the symbolic power to cause one to see and to believe (faire voir et faire croire) in order to impose visions of the world and, in particular, visions of the divisions of the world (principles of classication), and thereby to produce groups, families, clans, tribes, classes or nations, and to give them existence by making them visible, notably by the demonstration,2 or, in other universes, the procession (e.g. bridal or funeral procession), the cortge, etc. exhibitions of the force and form of the group, of its divisions and hierarchies. As the logic of the symbolic is fundamentally diacritical, distinction is the specic form of prot that symbolic capital procures. Lifestyle, as the exemplary manifestation of symbolic capital, exists only by and for the gaze of the other and as diacritical deviation from the modal, ordinary, common, banal, average style, a deviation that can be unwitting or obtained by a stylization of life. The symbolic prot of distinction (which can be reconverted into material prots) results, apart from every intentional pursuit, from the monopolistic possession (exclusivity) of some species of capital and from the exhibition, intentional or not, of this capital and of the difference attached to its possession. This is as much as to say that the effect of distinction inherent in the unequal distribution of a good, service, or practice, contributes of itself to legitimating the structure of this distribution. The institutionalization of this effect, by customs and rules of dress, sumptuary laws, etc. tends to constitute status groups (orders, nobility, etc.) by constituting as permanent and founded in nature certain de facto differences, and by establishing mechanisms destined to assure their perpetuation (inheritance laws, matrimonial norms aimed at excluding msalliance, etc.). Symbolic capital can thus be possessed by singular agents or by collectives, especially corps, families, status groups, constituted bodies, the state. Possessor of the monopoly over legitimate symbolic violence, capable of acting as central bank of the symbolic capital accumulated by a nation, the state can exercise the power of naming, an act of consecration that confers upon a singular agent or a group its ofcial identity, universally recognized (within the limits of its jurisdiction), its social titles of recognition (academic or occupational in particular). As the
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strict opposite to insult as idios logos (singular discourse) without consequence, and of all individual or collective strategies of defamation or degradation, aimed at eliciting discredit, the verdict (positive or negative), the solemn enunciation of the social truth of an individual or group, it places a limit, if not a term, on the struggle of all against all about the social world and about the social truth and value of those engaged in it. One can thus understand the paradox of symbolic efcacy, revived by the reection of philosophers (notably Austin, 1962) and linguists (Benveniste, 1969 among others) on the performative. The command that makes itself obeyed, if it is an exception to the laws of physics in that it obtains an effect out of proportion to the energy expended, and thus liable to appear as a form of magic, is in perfect conformity with the law of the conservation of social energy, that is, of capital: it turns out that, to be in a position to act at a distance and without expense of energy, by virtue of an act of social magic, as with the order or the watchword (ordre et mot dordre), one must be endowed with authority, that is, authorized, in ones personal capacity or by proxy, as delegate, representative, or functionary, to set off, as by a trigger mechanism, the social energy that has been accumulated in a group or an institution by the work, often protracted and difcult, that is the condition of the acquisition and conservation of symbolic capital. The Historical Raison dtre of Reason Rationalism too easily grants itself its raison dtre. It is perhaps on condition of radicalizing the historical critique of the supposed foundations of reason, and of the social order, and of refusing all manners of transcendental deus ex machina which the philosophers, from Kant to Husserl to Habermas, have proposed to escape the mute confrontation with the brute fact of historical contingency, that one can discover, in history itself, how and on what conditions what we call reason was able, in certain situations and under certain conditions, to constitute itself by tearing itself away from history. Science and Politics One can, for heuristic purposes, oppose as two ideal types, arrived at by pushing to the limit, on the one hand, the most purely political form of the political eld where the force of ideas would depend essentially on the force of the groups that recognize them because they recognize themselves in them, who accept them as true because they believe them to be such or, in more accurate terms, because they believe that their existence and their economic and social interests depend on them; and on the other hand, the most purely scientic form of the scientic elds where the force of ideas would depend essentially on their intrinsic force, as Spinoza said, that is, on the conformity of propositions or procedures to the rules of logical coherence or on compatibility with the facts. In historical reality, there is no scientic eld, however pure, that does not entail a political dimension, no political eld that makes no room for some disputes over truth. That said, while in scientic elds one does not settle a debate by means of a physical confrontation or by a vote, in political elds, and in particular in those that are subjected to democratic rules, the victors are those propositions that Aristotle calls endoxic, that is those with which one is obliged

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to reckon because the people who matter would like them to be true and also because, partaking of the doxa, of the ordinary vision, which is also the most widespread and the most widely shared, they are liable to receive the approbation and applause of the greatest number. It follows that the political eld is in an ambiguous position: site of a competition for truth (especially about the social world), it is also the site of a competition for power (notably over the state, and the resources whose accumulation and redistribution it controls), power granted by the art of producing or mobilizing ides-forces that contain a force of mobilization, notably as predictions or forecasts, true or capable of making themselves come true, on account of their intrinsic force of truth or the social force that their bearers have the means of mobilizing, be it by virtue of their own symbolic capital (their charisma) or through the agency of an organized group, a party. In short, things are not simple, and political struggles always make room for the logic of quasi-scientic verication by argumentation and for the logic of properly political ratication by plebiscite. The social sciences are in a particularly difcult position owing to the fact that they have the social world for object and claim to produce a scientic representation of it. Each and every specialist is in this regard in competition not only with other researchers but also with the other professionals in symbolic production, and in particular journalists and politicians, and, more broadly still, with all those who work to impose their vision of the social world, with very unequal symbolic force and equally unequal success. This is the case, whether the social researcher knows it or not, wishes it or not, and even when she chooses to enclose herself in the ivory tower of a scientic practice that would be an end in and for itself, in a fantasy of purity (and equanimity) that is necessarily doomed to failure because politics is present within the eld itself through the effects of temporal powers that continue to weigh on the City of science. Propositions that are inconsistent or incompatible with the facts have innitely greater chances to perpetuate themselves there and even to prosper there than in the most autonomous scientic elds, provided that they are endowed, inside the eld and also outside it, with a social authority liable to compensate for their insignicance and insufciency by assuring them material and institutional supports (credits, grants, posts, etc.) and conversely. In fact, social scientists can, without contradiction, struggle, within their own sphere, to reinforce the autonomy of the scientic eld and to rid it of everything political that may remain in it, and outside it in the political eld itself, they can struggle to try to impose scientic truth on the social world, without being able to resort to weapons other than those of truth. And they can even, to give more force to their weak weapons, make the scientic eld play the role of a realized utopia of the political eld or, better, the role of a regulative idea permitting one at once to orient political practices and to submit them to a methodical questioning. The major virtue of the confrontation between the scientic eld, in its different states, and the political eld lies in making a very large number of questions arise regarding both elds, questions that must be converted into scientic problems liable to receiving empirical answers. And it above all prevents one from

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forgetting, against the typically scholastic illusion of the omnipotence of ideas, everything that separates the world of science from the world of politics, the awareness and knowledge of which must in any case orient properly scientic work and the effort to try to communicate its results in the political world. Habitus and Freedom If only to make things more difcult for those who would like to see in the theory of habitus a form of determinism, it will sufce to point out that the habitus offers the only durable form of freedom, that given by the mastery of an art, whatever the art. And that this freedom made nature, which is acquired, paradoxically, by the obligated or elective submission to the conditionings of training and exercise (themselves made possible by a minimal distance from necessity), is indeed, as is the freedom in regard to language and body that is called ease, a property (this is one of the senses that the Scholastics gave to the word habitus) or, if you wish, an acquisition and inheritance predisposed by their unequal distribution to function as capital. This then raises the question of whether there can be any liberty other than that to master ones inheritance and acquisitions. Pedagogical action can thus, because of and despite the symbolic violence it entails, open the possibility of an emancipation founded on awareness and knowledge of the conditionings undergone and on the imposition of new conditionings designed durably to counter their effects. References
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press. Benveniste, Emile (1969) Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre (1999) Une rvolution conservatrice dans ldition, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 126/127 (March): 328. Cournot, A.A. (1973) uvres compltes, Vol. II, ed. J.-C. Pariente. Paris: Vrin. Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.

s Pierre Bourdieu

holds the Chair in Sociology at the Collge de France and is Director of Studies at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales. Address: EHESS, 54, bd Raspail, F-75006 Paris.

Translated by Tarik Wareh and Loc Wacquant