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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Pierre Bourdieu is arguably the most influential sociologist of the twentieth century, especially since the once common criticisms of his determinism and reproductionism have receded. Now, however, his intellectual enterprise faces a new set of challenges unearthed by decades of sympathetic research: how to conceive the relationship between society and place, particularly in an increasingly global world; how to recognize the individual as a product of multiple forces and pressures; how to make sense of family relations and gender domination; and, ultimately, how to grasp how we each come to be the unique beings we are. This book tackles these challenges head on, starting from the philosophical core of Bourdieu's sociology and taking in hints and suggestions across his corpus, to propose a range of novel concepts and arguments. In the process it outlines a new way of looking at the world to complement Bourdieu's own - one in which the focus is on the multiple social structures shaping individuals' everyday lives, not the multiple individuals comprising a single social structure.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgement
Epigraph
1: Introduction
Notes
2: The Lifeworld
Three missing elements of the everyday
From habitat to lifeworld
The social structures of the lifeworld
From mobility capital to motility
Notes
3: The Field of Family Relations
‘Family’ as contested category
The category realized
The family-specific doxa
Family as field of struggle
Boundaries, universes and constellations
The two faces of family
Notes
4: Social Becoming
The Baseline(s)
The early structuring of the habitus
The struggle begins
Mastery, pedagogy and love
Integration into social space
Notes
5: Gender
A scheme of perception
The question of biology
Symbolic struggle and gendered dispositions
From gender capital to gendered capitals
His/Herstory
A continuing dialectic
Gender and the everyday world
Recapitulation
Notes
Epilogue: Sketch of a Research Programme
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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For Phoebe and Vikki
Copyright page
Copyright © Will Atkinson 2016
The right of Will Atkinson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0748-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0749-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Atkinson, Will, 1983- author.
Title: Beyond Bourdieu / Will Atkinson.
Description: Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003544| ISBN 9781509507481 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509507498 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930–2002. | Sociology.
Classification: LCC HM479.B68 A834 2016 | DDC 301–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003544
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Acknowledgement
Chapter 3 is a revised and lengthened version of an article originally published as ‘A Sketch of “Family” as a Field: From Realised Category to Space of Struggle’. Acta Sociologica, 57 (3): 221–33. I am grateful to Sage Publications for permission to reproduce this material.
After having of necessity divided things up too much, and abstracted from them, the sociologists must strive to reconstitute the whole. By doing so they will discover rewarding facts. They will also find a way to satisfy the psychologists. The latter are strongly aware of their privileged position; the psychopathologists, in particular, are certain they can study the concrete. All these study, or should observe, the behaviour of total beings, not divided according to their faculties. We must imitate them. The study of the concrete, which is the study of completeness, is possible, more captivating, and more explanatory still in sociology.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift
(1954/2002: 103)
Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Books UK
1Introduction
There is no doubt about it: Pierre Bourdieu is the single most influential sociologist of the later twentieth century. The concepts which made his name – habitus, capital and field, the latter also encompassing his notion of ‘the social space’ as a national balance sheet of symbolic capital and symbolic power – now, well over a decade after his death, pervade not just his own discipline but the full gamut of social sciences and humanities. Rarely does a month go by, it seems, without a book or article exploring their relevance for this or that subject, or this or that social or intellectual problem. Nor are they any longer confined to their European, let alone French, crucible, finding themselves innovatively applied in research from Shanghai to Chicago and given novel spins as new times and different national contexts demand. Some, especially in the US, have built on Bourdieu's general orientation in his later work to champion an all-purpose ‘field theory’ (see e.g. Fligstein and McAdam, 2011; Green, 2014; Hilgers and Mangez, 2014), while others, fascinated by the ground-breaking statistical techniques he advocated, have sought to map out the social spaces of their respective nations and their homologies in the manner of Distinction, Bourdieu's (1984) magnum opus (e.g. Prieur et al., 2008; Rosenlund, 2009). Still more continue to document and elaborate the process through which cultural capital is reproduced over the generations (e.g. Reay, 1998; Lareau, 2003). Numerous scholars, meanwhile, have dedicated almost their entire careers to clarifying, introducing and extending Bourdieu's theoretical tools – no mean feat given their richness, apparent flexibility and dispersion throughout Bourdieu's hefty corpus. In his own terms, then, it seems evident that the spirit and the language of Bourdieu's brand of sociology have come to occupy a somewhat dominant position within the global sociological field, framing research projects and driving debates all across the face of the Earth.
This is not to say the Frenchman is without his critics or doubters, or that all of his concepts have been well understood by even those sympathetic to him. Many, for example, resist his influence on social science on abstract theoretical grounds, if not – since, like Marxism before him, his perspective has been perceived as a threat to the cherished ideals of liberal capitalism – on raw political principle. His theory has been decried as determinist: the habitus, being nothing but an internalization of social structures, was simply another way of painting people as idiotic ‘judgemental dopes’, to use Harold Garfinkel's famous phrase (Alexander, 1995; Ranciere, 2004). It was depicted as obsessed with social reproduction at the expense of social resistance and change: fields shape habitus, habitus shapes fields, and so the cycle continues forever (Jenkins, 2002). And it was labelled as utilitarian in its view of human beings – we are all seemingly plotting and scheming to maximize our capitals in any field in a purely instrumental manner (Honneth, 1986) – and, at the same time, somewhat overemphatic about the non-conscious, unreflexive, automatic, corporeal nature of practice (Sayer, 2005). Meanwhile even Bourdieu's defenders and appliers have all too often superficially understood and watered down his concepts, combined them with all kinds of antagonistic notions drawn from disparate intellectual sources and subjected them to rounds of critical modification on questionable grounds.
As Bourdieu (1993a, 1997a, 1999a), Wacquant (1993) and others (e.g. Swartz, 1997) frequently lamented, both the enemies and the well-meaning enthusiasts have tended to fall prey to the troublesome allodoxia effect – the mistaken reading of one thing as another premised on distance, whether spatial or social, in this instance generated by viewing a body of thought forged in one intellectual field through the lenses and problematics provided by altogether different ones (Bourdieu, 1997a: 451). Hence Bourdieu's theory has often been equated with neo-Marxism, or functionalism, or utilitarianism, and his concepts robbed of their analytical power by being used as little more than fancy synonyms for existing and somewhat vague notions: habitus becomes simply another way of saying ‘character’ or ‘self’, the label field gets applied to any and every social context, group or situation, and capital becomes an ornamental alternative to the plain term ‘resources’. Worse, as we will see in due course, these supposedly innovative applications can sometimes obscure the pertinent set of generative relations and lead researchers and their readers astray. Ultimately, there has been constant oversight of the fundamental tripartite philosophical core of Bourdieu's vision of the social world from which all his concepts derive their specific meaning and function (in Cassirer's sense): the ‘three Rs’ of recognition, relationalism and applied or historicized rationalism.
On the first count, linking up with – but giving a much richer sociological architecture for – the latest developments in critical theory pushed by Axel Honneth (1996), the major spring of human action, and thus so many specific quests for capital, is not a cold, calculating, instrumental imperative to maximize profit or reproduce domination, as so many critics, sympathizers and revisers have read into Bourdieu's writings over the years (including Honneth at times), but the highly emotive search for a reason for being, generally available in the form of worth and value in the eyes of others. Second, since the desire to attain such recognition from others seems inexorably to entail struggle to be seen as worthier than others through the imposition of certain arbitrary symbols and properties as legitimate (rendering them misrecognized), human beings and their schemes of perception organize around so many systems of difference, dominance and contention vis-à-vis certain definitions of worthiness – i.e. fields – such that any person, practice or property is defined not by some intrinsic essence or substance, as Aristotelian metaphysics had it for centuries, but by their position relative to other people, practices or properties in any one such system. Individual projects and strategies thus flow not from an autonomous cogitator, or homo clausus to use Norbert Elias' (1978) phrase, but from a sense of one's place and the possibilities inscribed in it, and resistance, far from being marginalized or absent in Bourdieu's account as some friendly and not-so-friendly critics complain, is endemic. Third, the Frenchman's concepts are rooted in a specifically Gallic tradition of historical epistemology in which systematic reason and the quest for objectivity are only made possible by the development of certain social conditions and in which reality can never be grasped ‘as is’ but can only ever serve as an ideal to be approximated to better and worse degrees (as judged by logic and evidence) through constructed models of the object under investigation. To add two further ‘Rs’ to the mix, this brand of rationalism thus accommodates a form of realism, insofar as the existence of objective social structures shaping and constraining perception is admitted, even if we will never render them other than through approximating models (see further Wacquant, 1989; Vandenberghe, 1999), but also necessitates reflexivity on behalf of the researcher, that is, the studied bringing-to-light of one's position in the space of sociological production and the interests and limitations it might impose on intellectual practice.
Bourdieu also spoke of the habitus encompassing a ‘dispositional’ philosophy of action – which somewhat spoils the Rs theme – but I have made the case elsewhere that, to avoid slipping into determinism and epiphenomenalism, this should be more wholeheartedly rendered using the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz (Atkinson, 2010a, 2010b, forthcoming a). On this reading, to put it concisely, the habitus comprises the ‘horizons’ of perception. This is premised on the phenomenological foundation that conscious experience is bifurcated into a ‘theme’ and a ‘horizon’. The theme refers to whatever conscious attention is focused on, whether they be inner thoughts or objects in the world, though this can be split further into the core (the preponderant focus of attention) and the periphery (that which is within conscious awareness but more marginally so, such as certain background sounds, bodily postures and sensations, etc). The horizon, on the other hand, is all that is automatically co-given in perception without actually being directly presented in the sensual input. This includes an intuition of aspects of a percept not seen (e.g. an object's posterior), or qualities not experienced (e.g. its weight), but also, more importantly, its simultaneous exemplification of multiple classes or ‘types’ of object, of varying generality, with typical properties, patterns of activity and relations with other objects. Other people are experienced in the same way: when we perceive a person, we automatically attribute subjectivity to them, assume they see us as we see them, and perceive them as exemplars of so many types of person who talk, act and think in typical ways. Anticipation of likely or possible futures, what Husserl dubbed protention, is thus written into the present, co-given with perception of (including inner thought about) an object, subject or event. Often this is experienced as an awareness of ‘I can’ at the level of motor capacity – something is graspable, climbable, doable, etc., on the basis of protention of one's own corporeal facility and the environment into which it is geared (Merleau-Ponty's ‘corporeal schema’). Sometimes, of course, it is experienced as an ‘I must’, calling out a certain response quasi-automatically – with ‘intention-in-action’, as Anscombe puts it – but protention also underpins consideration and projection of longer-term goals insofar as certain futures enter thematic consciousness as possible before being stamped with the decisive ‘voluntative fiat’, to use Schutz's phrase, while others are discounted or, more importantly, never even enter consciousness because they are unthinkable. Tying this back up to relationalism and recognition, however, and going beyond phenomenology by itself, it has to be acknowledged that the typifications and sense of the possible constituting the horizons of perception are rooted in the oppositional stances and labels defining particular fields as well as the conditions of existence provided by possession of capitals within them.
This cluster of philosophical postulates, I believe, offers a fertile basis for investigating the full panoply of human endeavour, and many of the problematic interpretations and uses of the specific conceptual ‘tools’ they animate stem from their neglect or violation. That argument has sometimes led others to label me an ‘orthodox’ Bourdieusian, stubbornly unwilling to flout logical foundations for the sake of participating in the race to bestow the label ‘capital’, ‘habitus’ or ‘field’ onto all sorts of social phenomena (e.g. Burke et al., 2013). Yet, in the course of a decade of research on the experience of social class, I have, in fact, come across two troublesome limitations in Bourdieu's oeuvre: its inadequacy for making sense of the fullness of mundane, everyday, lived experience (Erlebnis) and its insufficiency for making sense of how we each come to be who we are as a whole (Erfahrung). For instance, when trying to analyse all the factors playing into people's decisions – to leave school or stay on in education, to undertake vocational courses or academic study, which university to attend and subject to study, which jobs to pursue and so on – as a means of assessing the salience and specific place of class, it quickly became clear to me that there was more going on than seemed to fit neatly into Bourdieu's model of the social space and fields (Atkinson, 2010a, 2010b). Other experiences given by the time-space location and movement in the world of not only individuals themselves but the things and people they find about them, for example, clearly contribute to making them who they are and informing their practice, even if locations and movements are, to be sure, shaped in complex ways by struggles within the social space and various fields. When trying to follow this up with a study into the full lived experience and reproduction of class in domestic practice, moreover, it became apparent that many of the routines, struggles, joys and suffering of everyday life and social becoming are, at least in contemporary Western societies, the products of not just one field – not even one as encompassing as the social space – but of relations, balances, tensions and harmonies between a multitude of fields vying for attention and desire (Atkinson, forthcoming b).1 The specific bundles of relations usually put under the labels of family and gender emerged as two of the most important in this regard.
When I scoured Bourdieu's writings for ways to conceive these phenomena, I found suggestive hints and tips – signposts to pathways not travelled by Bourdieu himself. Yet I also came up against an unsatisfactory insistence that the unit of analysis in any sociological research act should always be a singular field, whether art, law, science or whatever, rather than the contradictory or complementary meshing of a multiplicity of fields in an individual's experience (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 107). One field should be in the researcher's sights at a time, Bourdieu dictated, or perhaps the articulation of two or more fields – especially when it comes to mapping the place of a particular field of cultural, ideological or economic production within the overarching field of power – and then the relevant habitus and strategies underpinning particular events and artworks/policies/goods can be unravelled. This in turn seemed to be premised on a fundamental epistemological division between ‘empirical individuals’ – individuals in their full specificity – and ‘epistemic individuals’ – individuals with only their pertinent properties in relation to a specific field isolated for analysis – and an uncertain assertion, at once a frustrating injunction and an appealing challenge, that the latter are the real subject matter of sociology but that ‘conceptual progress’ will stem from the invention of concepts and categories able to reconcile individuals as seen in relation to one field with their full concrete specificity (Bourdieu, 1988: 22–3). In one place, tucked away in an endnote, empirical individuality, or ‘personality’, was even explicitly equated with existence as an agent in multiple fields, making the individual a multifaceted ‘social surface’, but, once the conclusions for statistical analysis had been considered, this intriguing idea was more or less forgotten, perhaps because, not yet having noticed the multitude of micro-fields structuring everyday life that would crop up in his later works, he saw it as a limited phenomenon (Bourdieu, 2000a: 303n8).
Matters were only made worse when I turned to the writings of others for possible solutions. Many essentially confirm Bourdieu's orientation, including those aiming to rebaptize it as ‘field theory’ (e.g. Fligstein and McAdam, 2011; Hilgers and Mangez, 2014) and those who believe they are in a position to decree the ‘correct’ way to do Bourdieusian sociology (e.g. Grenfell, 2010; Swartz, 2013). On the other hand, when I started to pull at the various threads of everyday existence – multiplicity, time-space, gender, family – it soon transpired that many others have expressed considerable dissatisfaction with Bourdieu's treatment of each and either quickly rejected his ideas outright or hastily put forward deeply confused concepts – often a capital of some sort – to fill the supposed blanks. The question of multiplicity, for example, has been raised most persistently and forcefully by Bernard Lahire (1998, 2011) in his programme for a ‘sociology of individuals’ in France, while Bourdieu's approach to time-space is often said to be undeveloped and, perhaps, in need of a new capital to make sense of differential movement potentials. Allied to this latter argument is a growing discontent among those (Lahire among them) sympathetic to one form or another of network theory – including Norbert Elias' figurational sociology and actor-network theory – who chide Bourdieu for neglecting, or outright dismissing, the intricate chains and webs of interaction, communication and association between people and things situated in concrete time-space. These unquestionably feed into habitus in some way, and field forces surely cannot work without them, yet they are not necessarily neatly bounded or shaped by single fields and, indeed, lack any meaningful conceptual articulation in Bourdieu's work. In recent years, in fact, this has burgeoned into a battle over the very meaning of ‘relational sociology’ – when we talk about social reality being comprised of bundles of relations, do we mean structural relations as defined by capital distribution, or substantive relations of association and dependence (see e.g. Crossley, 2010; Dépelteau and Powell, 2013; Powell and Dépelteau, 2013)?
As for gender relations and family, feminists and other scholars of intimate life have long been unimpressed by Bourdieu's level of attention to their subject matter and the content of his arguments when he has addressed it. Ambivalence, intersectionality and resistance to masculine domination are said to be absent from, or poorly conceived in, his writings, and many have questioned why gender struggles would not constitute a field of their own, or at least a distinct capital. His vision of the family and socialization, despite their centrality to his entire edifice and some fleeting remarks later in his career, is, claim others, too crude to be useful for making sense of how people come to desire what they do and be who they are, requires critical confrontation with psychoanalysis – or the ‘psychosocial’ – to bring it up to scratch and perhaps, once again, needs to be bolstered by an extra capital capturing familial affect. The ‘classic’ criticisms that Bourdieu's model of the social world is too determinist, reductionist and reproductionist, and his view of human beings too unreflexive, thus find fertile soil in substantive areas of sociology in which to flower.
In order to answer the research questions I had set myself, and to adequately explain what I uncovered, it was necessary to come to terms with the reservations, modifications and additions launched by others – to work out their logical validity or inconsistency in relation to the philosophical core outlined above. But it was also necessary to devise new concepts and orientations – to ignore Bourdieu's epistemological injunction, in other words, but rise to his challenge and plug the gaps unearthed. In the process, I found, a whole range of fresh research questions and vistas previously neglected by many Bourdieusian sociologists came into view – not by all, to be fair, as there are those out there who have broached similar themes before without following through on their theoretical consequences and for whom, therefore, I might hope (without wanting to coming across as insufferably arrogant) to act as a sort of Lockean conceptual underlabourer. All this is so much as to say that the interventions and elaborations this volume contains are the product of reflections on concrete research problems and findings, and possible starting points for further inquiry, rather than purely theoretical considerations, though I have never been keen on the knee-jerk rejection of careful logical analysis that sometimes gets dressed up as a Bourdieu-style refusal of ‘scholasticism’ or ‘theoreticism’. Rigorous logic, hard won through the development of the scientific field, is and has to be one of the pillars of a historicized rationalism alongside empirical confirmation and confutation.
Phenomenology has been the primary current of inspiration along the way for the simple reason that no other body of thought offers such potential insight into the detail of how we each individually experience the world and come to be who we are. Since other scholars have nudged in this direction too, albeit less surely, it seemed fitting to identify the view of the social world proposed here not as ‘genetic structuralism’, Bourdieu's own label for his perspective (which has never really taken off despite his influence), but as what Lois McNay (2008) has called ‘relational phenomenology’. Within this perspective, the individual's lifeworld as the centre point of multiple, interacting social forces bearing down on experience can become the focal point of analysis, not as a replacement for field analysis – which remains essential – but as a complement to it. Moreover, the phenomenological constitution of the habitus is, to fit this switch of perspective, pushed a little further than Bourdieu himself went. His depiction of habitus may have been fine for his purposes, but my own research questions have necessitated sharper and more specific conceptual distinctions.
It is in this sense, then, that we can talk of going ‘beyond Bourdieu’. It is definitely not a plea to reject Bourdieu's thought outright, nor a claim that his ideas might have been right for their time but have since become outdated, as Archer (2007) would have us believe. Nor am I trying to use his thought as a foil for launching an opposed perspective apparently conquering major problems and partialities of Bourdieu's model – its supposed determinism or objectivism – as is the case with Bruno Latour, whose actor-network theory disavows causal explication in favour of a shallow descriptivism, or Luc Boltanski, whose ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ represents a lurch back to voluntarism and subjectivism.2 Whatever useful points they might flag by-the-by – the underemphasis on materiality within social theory, or the need for greater attention to situational dynamics – such endeavours nearly always rest on gross caricatures for their rhetorical force. Boltanski's (2011) claims that Bourdieu paints people as passive, indoctrinated dupes, for example, somewhat overlooks the resistance and struggle built into the concept of field; his assertion that Bourdieu fails to appreciate the circulation and re-appropriation of sociological knowledge among the populace ignores his long-established idea of the ‘theory effect’; and the argument that Bourdieu lacks a philosophical anthropology on which to base his critique of society bizarrely misses the attention Bourdieu paid to recognition, symbolic worth and justification in his later work – all perhaps because Boltanski tries to claim these foci for himself. Yet there is, nevertheless, a need to go past what Bourdieu himself wrote, to take the logic of his thought and apply it in novel ways and to refine it and add in new distinctions and concepts to meet the demands of empirical evidence. This is what I venture to do in what follows.
In the next chapter I tackle the questions of multiplicity, time-space and networks by sketching two conceptual tools complementing the existing Bourdieusian kit: the lifeworld and circuits of symbolic power. In fact both of these notions exist in embryo in Bourdieu's own writings, but for one reason or another, despite their fruitfulness, he did virtually nothing with them. Chapter 3 then focuses on one of the most important of all fields structuring individual lifeworlds: the family. Another idea present in Bourdieu's work, but left woefully undeveloped, the intention is to lay out the genesis and general features of families as fields, push beyond Bourdieu's own suggestions, demonstrate the concept's capacity to integrate and supersede existing scholarship and open up new avenues for research. Perhaps the major divergence from the letter of Bourdieu's argument is the suggestion that love and care constitute forms of (mis)recognition and thus symbolic power – or, in short, a capital. Building on this argument I then go on, in chapter 4, to delve into the detail of social becoming – how we develop our dispositions and perceptual schemes, how our desires are directed towards different fields and how these are shaped by the interplay of class, family and schooling. This will involve some engagement with the leading lights of developmental psychology – Piaget, Vygotsky, Freud, Mead – as well as educational research, and the core substantive argument, working up all-too-brief comments by Bourdieu in Pascalian Meditations (2000b), will be that struggles for love within the familial field are fundamental to the channelling of the child's libido, and attendant development of competencies and perceptual schemas, towards accumulation of specific ‘external’ capitals such as economic and cultural capital. Chapter 5 then grapples with the weighty issue of gender, the discussions of family and social becoming having inevitably raised it. While clearing up misunderstandings and defending many of Bourdieu's points against critics, it emerges that only through the lens of relational phenomenology – acknowledging the play of multiple fields and circuits of symbolic power in lifeworlds – do the history, dynamic and lived experience of masculine domination, and feminine resistance, come into sharp relief. The closing epilogue then attempts to distil from the preceding chapters some reflections on the practical possibilities for future research.
Notes
1.
This study can be thought of as the empirical or ‘applied’ counterpart to the current volume, much as Bourdieu's
The Logic of Practice
(1990b) served as a distillation of the theoretical lessons of
Distinction
(1984).
2.
Boltanski's (2011) programme focuses on how ‘actors’ negotiate disputes
in situ
, identifying and criticizing an injustice by virtue of one regime of justification or worth, or ‘polity’, invading a practice supposedly revolving around another (e.g. matters of class culture invading considerations of university entry). Yet one is constantly left wondering why one polity invades another and why (certain) others consider it unjust – whose
interests
does the injustice serve, whose interests does its overthrow serve, and why do they have those divergent interests in the first place?
2The Lifeworld
Three missing elements of the everyday
To take a field as the unit of analysis is to start with the social structure and work back to individual experience. The battles, manoeuvres and revolutions within the worlds of politics, law, art, science or whatever, or the broad-scale topology underpinning symbolic domination in any one society, are front stage. Mundane perception and representations of the world, in which being a politician, lawyer, artist, scientist or whatever is only a part of someone's life, must be pushed to one side, therefore, and only a certain ‘slice’ of each implicated individual – their capital and their dispositions (perceptions, inclinations, desires) in relation to that field alone – isolated for analysis. In the words of Loïc Wacquant, decreeing the appropriate steps of Bourdieu's ‘social praxeology’ in the text widely regarded as the ‘go-to’ book on genetic structuralism, the task is to extract only the ‘socially efficient resources’ for the specific domain of social life under the spotlight, bringing in ‘lived experience’ solely as it relates to the intuition and articulation of that field's forces – the ‘feel for the game’, in other words (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 11). Grenfell (2010: 20) is even more prescriptive. Anyone wishing to do ‘proper’ Bourdieu-style research must, he asserts, always follow the same three steps: determine the position of the field in question vis-à-vis the overarching field of power, chart the space of positions in relation to the form of recognition at stake in the field, and then map out the habitus individuals have developed by virtue of their position in the field and the strategies which flow from it. Both commentators are, without a doubt, building on statements from the man himself. It was, after all, Bourdieu who firmly declared that ‘the true object of social science is not the individual’, that ‘it is the field which is primary and must be the focus of the research operations’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 107), and that people exist for sociology only as ‘epistemic individuals’ or ‘agents’, that is, with only a ‘finite list of effective properties’ distinguished for analysis and all else bracketed out as ‘irrelevant’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 22–3).
Yet this is not the only way in which sociology inspired by Bourdieu's philosophy can proceed – the ‘this way or bust’ methodological prescriptions do not follow from the core underlying premises of recognition, relationalism and rationalism. We can start with the individual, or a cluster of individuals in a particular sample gathered to illuminate a specific research problem, and attempt to unravel the total social structuring of the phenomenology of everyday life and their dispositions as an ensemble. If we do, however, it soon emerges that Bourdieu overlooked, or marginalized, three factors vital to the lived experience of the social world, to the formation of habitus and to the formulation of strategies, each of which has been flagged individually or in combination by others. The first is multiplicity
