#12620 - Bourdieu Wacquant An Invitation To Reflexive Sociology - Sociological Theory

Pierre Bourdieu & Loic Wacquant - An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology

Chapter One - Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology (Wacquant)

• Bourdieu sought to jettison a bunch of dichotomies that are recognised in social science

  • objective/subjective

  • structure/agency

  • micro/macro-analysis

  • but in order to understand his work it must be examined as a whole, and not compartmentalized

1. Beyond the Antimony of Social Physics and Social Phenomenology

• For B, sociology must uncover buried structures that constitute the social universe, and the mechanisms that ensure their reproduction or transformation

  • structures exist in two forms:

    • the objectivity of the first order - the distribution of material resources, means of appropriation of goods/values etc (social physics e.g. structuralism)

      • analysis on this axis reveals the determinate relations within which people produce their existence, explains regularities and conformity

      • BUT without a principle of the generation of regularities, it slips from the model to reality; its structures are seen as autonomous, acting agents

        • a scholastic vision of practice is imposed upon agents

        • individuals/groups are seen as props of a mechanically determined system

    • objectivity of the second order - systems of classification; mental and bodily schemata that function as templates for the practical activities of social agents (subjectivism/constructivism/ethnomethodology/rational choice)

      • consciousness/interpretations of agents also constitute the reality of the social world - individuals have practical knowledge of the world

        • mundane knowledge, subjective meaning and practical competency play a role in the production of society

      • BUT this approach cannot account for the resilience or rejection of certain objective configurations

        • nor can it explain according to what principles social reality is produced - i.e. the categories that agents use in its construction

    • a science of society must account for both

      • objective structures can be constructed independent of representation, with distributions of socially efficient resources defining the external constraints of interaction/representation

        • this is prior - an agent’s viewpoint will vary systematically with their position in objective structures

      • the immediate, lived experience of agents explicates the categories of perception and appreciation that structure their action from the inside

2. Classification Struggles and the Dialectic of Social and Mental Structures

• Durkheim saw a correspondence between social structures and mental structures in primitive societies, which Bourdieu developed in four ways:

  • extended it to ‘advanced’ societies

  • social structures cause corresponding mental structures

    • exposure means that dispositions are instilled and inscribed in individuals

    • where this occurs, the distinction between sociology and social psychology collapses

  • the correspondence between social and mental structures is political - it is an instrument of domination

    • the symbolic system naturalizes an arbitrary order; presents it as objective necessity

      • conversely, transformation can occur through the generation of a new symbolic system

  • systems of classification constitute a stake in the struggles between individuals/groups

    • classes struggle to impose the classification that is most congruent with their interests

3. Methodological Relationism

• Bourdieu rejects disjunctive dualisms - structure or agent, system or actor, collective or individual

  • these are rooted in ordinary language, and favour substance over relations

  • they are reinforced by political and social oppositions (e.g. individual/society in politics)

  • Bourdieu’s relationalism follows that of Marx, Levi-Strauss etc

    • habitus and field designate bundles of relations

      • a field is a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in forms of power/capital

      • habitus is a set of historical relations deposited within individual bodies as mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation and action

• Society is an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of play that cannot be subsumed under a single overarching logic

  • each field has its own logic, values and regulative principles, which delimit a socially structured space in which agent struggle to change or preserve its boundaries and form

    • a field is a patterned system of objective forces which act upon any agent that falls within its boundaries

    • it is a space of conflict and competition, where participants compete for its capital - e.g. cultural authority, scientific authority, religious authority - and for the power to decree the hierarchy and conversion rates between all forms of authority in the field of power

    • thus there is historical dynamism, unlike in structuralism - the shape and form of the fields is contested

• But without mechanically constrained action, why is social life so regular and predictable?

  • habitus is a structuring mechanism within agents

    • it integrates past experiences and generates strategies that enable agents to cope with unforeseen circumstances through a schema of perception, appreciation and action

    • it is an operator of rationality, but of a practical rationality immanent in a historical system of social relations

• A field is not simply a dead structure of empty places (Althusser) but a space of play that requires agents to act within it, pursue its prizes etc

4. The Fuzzy Logic of Practical Sense

• Bourdieu is monist in that he refuses to establish sharp demarcations between external/internal, conscious/unconscious, bodily/discursive

  • he seeks to capture intentionality without intention, knowledge without cognitive intent - the prereflective mastery that agents acquire in virtue of durable immersion within the social world

  • he rejects Cartesian social ontology, and returns to ‘the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry almost inseparable with us before any objectification’

• The relation between social...