#12623 - Bourdieu The Logic Of Practice - Sociological Theory

Pierre Bourdieu - The Logic of Practice

Introduction

• The opposition between subjectivism and objectivism is artificial, and divides the social sciences

  • we must identify the presuppositions they share as theoretical modes of knowledge

    • theoretical as opposed to the practical mode of knowledge of ordinary experience

    • hence we must objectify the epistemological and social conditions of both subjective and objective experience

  • phenomenological knowledge can teach us with perfect certainty the truth of the primary relationship of familiarity with the familiar environment

    • but it cannot go beyond description - it takes the world as self-evident, without asking why experience is as it is (doesn’t ask what the conditions of possibility of such experience are)

      • phenomenology doesn’t take into account the coincidence of objective structures and internalized structures that give the illusion of immediate understanding

  • objectivism sets out to establish objective regularities - structures, laws, systems of relationships - introduces a radical discontinuity between practical and theoretical knowledge

    • explicit representations of practical knowledge are seen as ideologies

    • it challenges the project of reducing social science to constructs of the constructs made by actors (as phenomenologists do)

      • or accounts of the accounts of agents, which are seen to produce the meaning of the social world

    • Saussurian semiology claims that immediate understanding presupposes that agents are ‘objectively attuned so as to associate the same meaning with the same sign’ (i.e. share precisely the same language)

    • BUT objectivism forgets that primary experience is the condition and product of its objectification

      • hence it fails to objectify its own objectifying relationship

        • it doesn’t explore the conditions that allow it to ‘take for granted the meaning objectified in institutions’

• So to move beyond this antagonism we must explore the conditions of all theoretical knowledge

  • we must not only break with native experience, but also break with the position of the objective observer, who brings into the object the principles of his relation to the object

    • knowledge is not only relative to viewpoint - the very taking up of a viewpoint on a practice constitutes it as an object

• Philosophy has tended to reject practice as uncomtemplative, and reify contemplation as providing true, objective knowledge, without questioning its presuppositions

  • a big factor in this has been the tendency of scientists to see the knowledge of their science as superior to all else, rather than exploring its limits

• The subjective relation of theorist to the social world, and the objective relation presupposed by this, is the unanalysed element of every theoretical analysis

  • where the relation of the observer to the social world is made the basis of the practice analysed, scientific error occurs

Chapter One: Objectification Objectified

• We need to understand the epistemological/sociological presuppositions of objectivism

  • Saussure claims that the true medium of communication is not speech - rather it is language, a system of objective relations

    • this subordinates the material of communication to the pure construct of theory

    • he recognises that speech has chronological priority, but claims that language has priority in the logical conditions of decoding i.e. is the condition of the intelligibility of speech

      • hence to make speech the product of the language, one has to situate oneself in the logical order of intelligibility

• We could critique this as being synchronic, and ignoring the origin/history of language

  • instead let’s concentrate on the viewpoint itself and its relation to the object of observation

• To locate oneself in the order of intelligibility, one must take the position of an impartial spectator, who seeks understanding for its own sake

  • you must take language as an object of study, not as a tool

  • without a theory of the difference between his position and that of the language user, the grammarian treats language as an autonomous object - purposefulness without purpose

    • hence he adopts a scholastic, formal relation to all language, popular or formal

    • the problem of the scholastic approach is that language is seen as a dead intellectual instrument, stripped of its functions and appropriate usage

• The problems in structuralism derive from this: its division between language and its realization in speech (its practice, and history), and its understanding the relation between the two as that between model and execution (essence and existence)

  • this means the reduction of all individual practice to the actualization of ‘a kind of ahistorical essence, in short, nothing’

• Anthropology exhibits these problems in a magnified form

  • there is a tendency towards intellectualism in seeing language from the standpoint of listener rather than speaker - to decode rather than to act/express

    • hence we can understand the observer as representing both an epistemological and a social break with practical, everyday action/knowledge/meaning

    • participation shows the influence of the subject in the object, because he plays the game (object) before reporting it

      • the inadequacy of scholarly discourse derives from its inability to see how its theory of the object derives from its theoretical relation to the object

      • intellectualism simply substitutes one observer’s relation to practice for the practical relation to practice

• In the case of kinship, the anthropologist, who is only interested in cognitive uses, sees kinship as a coherent system of logically necessary relations, and considers symbolic effects that create belief and so on

  • this focus on cognitive uses brackets all other uses that may be made in practice of kinship relations

  • in showing the whole system of logical relations, the structural anthropologist conceals the fact that those relationships that function do so because they fulfil practical functions - the economy and so on

    • an objectification of the objective relation would show us the gap between the theoretical knowledge of the observer and the other uses of the object of study

• Sometimes the anthropologist presents what he has constructed through his work of objectification as acting on the world, sometimes he presents an action that acts on the world as being designed to interpret it

  • thus the objective relation comes into contradiction with the practical relation

• Objectivism presents a distinction between the ignorance, unconscious etc of the agent, but cannot go beyond this duality of theoretical and practical knowledge - it cannot ‘with for science the truth of what science is constructed against’

• The objectivist thinks that action is only fully performed when it is understood/interpreted/expressed

  • thus every action/gesture/ritual must express something - we cannot simply say that it makes sense (Wittgenstein)

    • on this model, the only way to drag primitive societies out of barbarism is to turn them into logicians

• The indeterminacy of the relationship between observer/agent viewpoint is shown in the indeterminacy of the relation between observer’s constructs that account for practices, and the practices themselves

  • this is further confused by native expressions/interpretations of the practices

  • observers tend to reify their constructs and claim them to be reality

    • or else gives concepts power as agent in history e.g. collectivities like the bourgeoisie are made into subjects responsible for historical activity

  • hence the rule of the objectivist can refer to:

    • the regularity of practice

    • the model constructed by science to account for it

    • the norm consciously posited and respected by the agents

      • often structural anthropologists use more than one of these simultaneously - contradictory

• Two common ways of sliding from the model of reality to the reality of the model, which proceed as if the principle of the action is the theoretical model that has been constructed:

  • slipping from regularity to rule

    • this presupposes that the rule is known and recognized, and hence that practices have as their principle conscious obedience to consciously devised and sanctioned rules - dumb

  • slipping from regularity to an unconscious regulating by a cerebral or social mechanism

    • here legalism/formalism are avoided by positing rules unknown to the agent

      • e.g. unconscious mind, (functionalism?)

• Clearly when structuralism swept away the conditions of production (i.e. origin etc) and hence causal explanation, people became interested in ‘mysterious teleological mechanisms’

  • Levi-Strauss got rid of conscious orientation towards rational ends, and replaced it with mechanistic orientation - God in the machine

  • but the naturalism of structuralism, which presented itself as materialism, was in fact idealistic

    • asserting the universality and eternity of logical categories governing the unconscious mind, it ignored the dialectic of social structures, economic relations and so on, which in fact ultimately structure all experience

• The activity of making transcendent entities out of the constructs created by science to account for the structure of actions is to reduce history to a process without a subject - no agency whatsoever

Chapter Three: Structures, Habitus, Practices

• The theory of practice as practice sees knowledge as constructed, rather than passively recorded...