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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Has the revolution that led from the economy of the gift, characteristic of most precapitalist societies, to the economy of modern societies been accomplished in all spheres of life, as tacitly assumed by those who claim to apply the model of the profit-optimizing agent to every practice – to art, to education and even to marriage, seen as an exchange of economic services of production and reproduction? And is it totally accomplished even at the heart of the sphere most directly concerned with economic activity – the world of business?
These and many other questions are absent from the dominant economic theories, which fail to take account of the economic and social conditions under which economic agents and their universe arise. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1987-89, Pierre Bourdieu laid bare the assumptions of the imaginary anthropology that underlies economics in its dominant form and put forward an alternative view. He replaced the notion of a pure and perfect market with the notion of an economic field structured by the unequal distribution of different forms of capital and by relations of force and symbolic struggle. He replaced homo economicus – that sovereign individual with no qualities or qualifications other than a capacity for rational calculation – with an agent endowed with enduring dispositions, fashioned by social background and experience, both individual and collective. And thus, without having to appeal to a perfectly lucid calculating mind or to the logic of bounded rationality, he was able to account for the alignment of subjective expectations and objective opportunities that confers on the great majority of economic behaviour its 'reasonable' character.
Bourdieu's trenchant critique of dominant economic thought and his development of an alternative way of understanding economic activity, rooted in his notion of field and his theory of practice, will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, economics and throughout the social sciences and humanities.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Editorial Note
Notes
Lecture of 1 April 1993
Preamble: rethinking the problems of economics
The theory of rational action
The dehistoricization of economic universes and behaviour
The case of the gift
The phenomenological approach to the gift (Derrida)
The anthropological analysis of the gift
Reintegrating lived experience, creating a theory of practice
The destruction of time in science
The scholastic point of view
Notes
Lecture of 8 April 1993
Questions from the audience: the audacity of the philosophers
The error of projecting the return-gift into the gift
Overcoming the subjectivist and objectivist visions of the gift
Three differences
Discouraging the spirit of calculation in pre-capitalist economies
Economic dispositions and collective repression
Enchanted economic relations
The foundations of collective misrecognition
The nostalgia for lost paradises
Notes
Lecture of 29 April 1993
Obeying the rules and self-deception
The economics of symbolic goods
Forgetting the historical and economic conditions of economic behaviour
The rise of calculability
Notes
Lecture of 6 May 1993
Symbolic revolutions and the overthrow of categories
The co-genesis of the economic world and economic discourse
The universal falsehood of the calculating mind
The model of exchange
Challenge and gesture of contempt
Collective expectations (1)
The gift and power
Collective expectations (2)
Notes
Lecture of 13 May 1993
The symbolic economy and the limitations of economic economics
The construction of lasting relations through symbolic exchange
Permanently recreating belief
The myth of the imperialism of the market and resistance to commercialization
The symbolic dimension of economic relations, the example of the labour contract
Symbolic logic in consumption
The economic conditions of rational behaviour
Notes
Lecture of 27 May 1993
Sociologists and economists
An ahistorical deductivism
A double dehistoricization
For a historicist rationalism
The definition of the market
The historical conditions of pure theory
Notes
Lecture of 3 June 1993
The impossible definition of the market
Economic theory against itself
The economic field as a field of forces
The immanent tendencies of the economic field
The distinction effect and competition
Notes
Lecture of 10 June 1993
The notion of the market in Max Weber
The indirect conflict
Harrison White’s model
Homology and second-degree choice for consumers
A three-fold break with Weber
The State creates the market: the example of the private housing market
Notes
Lecture of 17 June 1993
Questions from the audience
Classification struggles in the economic field
The three postulates of homo economicus
First alternative: the individual and the collective
(Socially) limited rationality
Second alternative: purposiveness and mechanism
The purposive illusion
Third alternative: the micro and the macro
Notes
Situating the Lectures on ‘The Social Foundations of Economic Action’ in the Works of Pierre Bourdieu
From the Kabyle house to the housing market
Homo economicus returns
Political repercussions
A moment in the theory of fields
Notes
Postface: Economics and the Social Sciences
Interest and relevance of a lecture course over a quarter of a century old
Field and habitus: reinserting economics at the heart of the social sciences
The need for a historical perspective
Comparison: as many rationalities as fields
Beyond reproduction, a theory of change
A homology with the theory of regulation
Reflexivity as a condition of the formation of a scientific community
Notes
Appendix: Summary of the Lectures as Published in the Annals of the Collège de France
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figure
Postface: Economics and the Social Sciences
Figure 1
The interactions behind change
List of Tables
Postface: Economics and the Social Sciences
Table 1
Neoclassical economics and sociological economics
Table 2
Genesis of fields and markets: some examples
Table 3
As many forms of individual rationality as contexts
Table 4
Theory of fields, theory of regulation
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Editorial Note
Begin Reading
Situating the Lectures on ‘The Social Foundations of Economic Action’ in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
Postface: Economics and the Social Sciences
Appendix: Summary of the Lectures as Published in the Annals of the Collège de France
Index
End User License Agreement
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Economic Anthropology
Lectures at the Collège de France (1992–1993)
Pierre Bourdieu
Edited by Patrick Champagne and Julien Duval, with the collaboration of Franck Poupeau and Marie-Christine RivièrePostface by Robert Boyer
Translated by Peter Collier
polity
Originally published in French as Anthropologie économique. Cours au Collège de France (1992–1993) © Éditions Raisons d’Agir / Éditions du Seuil, 2017
This English translation © Polity Press, 2026
The editors extend their thanks to Bruno Auerbach, Johan Heilbron and Thibaut Izard for their help.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, 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: 978-1-5095-3478-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025936424
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Editorial Note
This book continues and concludes the publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s lectures at the Collège de France. A few months after his final lecture at this institute in March 2001, Bourdieu published a concise version of the last year of his course (2000–1), under the title Science de la science et réflexivité (Science of Science and Reflexivity, 2004).1 After his death, Sur l’État appeared in 2012 (On the State, 2014),2 followed by Manet. Une révolution symbolique in 2013 (Manet: A Symbolic Revolution, 2017).3 The publication of the ‘Cours de sociologie générale’ that Bourdieu gave during the first five years of his teaching at the Collège de France, between April 1982 and June 1986, was then launched, with a first volume combining the lectures of the academic years 1981–82 and 1982–83 issued in 2015, and then a second volume in 2016, containing those of the following three years.4 The lectures published here [in 2017 in France], originally entitled ‘Les fondements sociaux de l’action économique’, were delivered in 1992–93.5 The present volume comprises nine sessions, each lasting about 1 hour, 20 minutes, which were held weekly on Thursdays in the late morning, from April to June 1993.6
The present edition respects the editorial approach chosen for the publication of the lectures on the State, aiming to reconcile faithfulness to the text with readability.7 The text reproduces the transcription of the lectures as spoken. In one case (the lecture of 29 April 1993), where the recording of the start of the lecture is missing, Bourdieu’s argument has been reconstructed using notes taken by a member of the audience.
As in the previous volumes, the transposition from the spoken to the written word has involved some superficial rewriting, which is careful to respect the criteria applied by Bourdieu himself when he revised his own lectures and seminars: stylistic corrections, smoothing over rough patches in the oral discourse (eliminating repetitions and other linguistic tics, etc.). On the rare occasions that passages were more or less inaudible, these have been indicated by ellipses between brackets: […]. Here and there a word or a part of a sentence have been added by the editors in order to facilitate comprehension of the text or clarify elliptical formulae; since they were not spoken by Bourdieu, they have been placed between brackets.
The divisions into sections and paragraphs have been provided by the editors, as have the subtitles and punctuation. The ‘parentheses’, where Bourdieu strays from his main argument, have been treated in different ways depending on their length and their relation to the surrounding text. The shortest have been placed between dashes. Where they are more self-sufficient and entail a break in the ongoing argument, they are placed between brackets, and where they are too long they have been assigned to a section of their own.
The endnotes are mainly of three kinds. Some indicate the texts explicitly (or sometimes implicitly) referred to by Bourdieu, whenever it has been possible to identify them; in cases where it has seemed useful, we have added short quotations from these texts. Other notes aim to alert the reader to texts by Bourdieu – whether published before or after these lectures – that include developments of the topics discussed. Finally, some of the notes provide contextual information, for instance to explain allusions that might seem obscure to contemporary readers or those not fully aware of the French context.
An appendix reproduces the summary of the lectures that was published at the time in the Annuaire du Collège de France – cours et travaux. In addition to an article situating the 1992–93 lectures within the work of Bourdieu as a whole, the volume also includes a text by Robert Boyer that places them in perspective, in particular in relation to the theory of regulation, of which he was one of the founding fathers, and in relation to present-day economic science.
Notes
1.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Science de la science et réflexivité
(Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2001);
Science of Science and Reflexivity
, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
2.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France 1989–1992
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, 2012), reprinted in ‘Points Essais’, 2015;
On the State
, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).
3.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Manet. Une révolution symbolique, Cours au Collège de France 1998–2000, suivis d’un manuscript inachevé de Pierre et Marie-Claire Bourdieu
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, 2013);
Manet: A Symbolic Revolution
, trans. Peter Collier and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
4.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Sociologie générale
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, vol. 1, 2015; vol. 2, 2016), reprinted in ‘Points Essais’, 2 vols., 2019. In English,
General Sociology
(Cambridge: Polity), trans. Peter Collier, in the following five volumes:
Classification Struggles
(2018),
Habitus and Field
(2020),
Forms of Capital
(2021),
Principles of Vision
(2022) and
Politics and Sociology
(2023).
5.
Pierre Bourdieu,
Anthropologie économique
(Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’agir, 2017); reprinted in ‘Points Essais’, 2021.
6.
The two interruptions (between the sessions of 8 and 29 April, and then between 13 and 27 May) correspond to the Easter vacation and Ascension Day.
7.
See the editors’ note in
On the State
, pp. 7–9.
Lecture of 1 April 1993
Preamble: rethinking the problems of economics – The theory of rational action – The dehistoricization of economic universes and behaviour – The case of the gift – The phenomenological approach to the gift (Derrida) – The anthropological analysis of the gift – Reintegrating lived experience, creating a theory of practice – The destruction of time in science – The scholastic point of view
Preamble: rethinking the problems of economics
This year I am proposing to deal with a rather daunting topic, and I feel some trepidation as I come to offer it up to you. I shall immediately define some limits to my ambition. I am obviously not going to launch into a criticism of economics, which would be the aggressive and pretentious sort of attack that is based on nothing more than ignorance. It would be senseless – although such attacks are very commonly mounted by sociologists. What I would like to do, is to refer to the discussions that are current among economists themselves in order to establish some clear foundations for economic behaviour, since economics is in fact an extremely advanced, complex and diversified science, and the aggressivity that sociologists show towards it is explained partly by this real or apparent advance: most of the accusations that we could aim at economics in general – like the majority of those we could aim at sociology in general – have no sense, insofar as some economist has already addressed them to other economists or to himself. If you are familiar with the discourse of economics, then, you will find that it contains all the most fundamental reflections that can be made about economics. (I am referring to sociology at the same time by proxy, and it is common enough for sociologists to be irritated to hear what non-sociologists have to say about sociology. Philosophers in particular willingly conflate issues and make sweeping accusations that have no sense – it is admittedly less false if they say ‘sociology’ when they are thinking of some particular sociologist, but even in such a case, they frequently target a scapegoat rather than the reality of a scientific practice.) So I have to warn you not to expect this from me: that is not at all what I intend to do. I am going to attempt to tackle economics on its own terms, and take the problems that it poses as it poses them, while attempting to pose them in a more rigorous and perhaps more systematic way. If I have a contribution to make to a reflection that is inherent in the discipline of economics, it is perhaps a reintegration of economic behaviour within the universe of all human behaviour; I would like to try to show that this economic behaviour, which we treat as a datum, a given object, is in fact a historical construction.
Another difficulty in the discussion with a discipline as complex and diversified as economics is that, like all contemporary disciplines, it is composed as a field: it forms a space of objective relations between producers who hold different positions in the social space that comprises the discipline, and who adopt stances differentiated according to their different situations in the space of positions. In other words, when you have even a smattering of the culture of a discipline, you measure the fact that confronting a discipline in isolation has no sense; a discipline, rather like the Hydra of Lerna, is a kind of monster with a hundred heads: when you think you have cut off one head, ninety-nine others sprout up and tell you that your attack is both vain and rather stupid. Often, if you can handle the culture – and I shall do my best within the limits of my knowledge – you can place economics in dialogue with itself and – as I shall try to do – use economics and its various discoveries, born of conflict and won through conflict, to try to elucidate, perhaps more systematically than before, the problems of the foundations and the temporal structure of economic action. There you have what is more or less the intention [of my course of lectures]; I wanted to immediately dispel any ambiguities that the title I have announced might arouse or encourage.
The theory of rational action
If this reflection on the foundations of economic behaviour seems important to me, it is because it has today returned to the centre of debates in the social sciences as a whole. Strangely, the notorious homo economicus, who had become an object of derision, as much for the economists themselves as for non-economists, has returned, for reasons that need to be analysed in sociological terms, to the centre of the intellectual stage, under the aegis of what is now called ‘rational action theory’. This has been developing for some years now around the University of Chicago, where it brings together at once economists, philosophers of economics (Jon Elster, for instance1), and cognitive psychology theorists, among others. A whole complex of disciplines has been refashioned around an anthropological concept or a philosophy of man which aims to base human actions on rational intentions. This rational action theory, however diversified (it does also take on very specific forms, insofar as some rational action theorists, such as Elster, see themselves as Marxists and claim to reinterpret Marxism according to the logic of this philosophy of action), accepts a certain number of fundamental postulates on human activity that seem to me to warrant discussion. In fact these people are responding to the question of the anthropological foundations of economic action that I have offered as the theme for these lectures, with a theory that we might characterize as intellectualist in the sense that it places conscious intentions and rational calculations at the source of action. It aims to account for all human behaviour, and notably economic behaviour in the narrow sense of the term (such as acts of investment, saving and credit). For example, Gary Becker, a recent and rather surprising Nobel Prize winner,2 has spent quite some time on his ambition to use this model to explain behaviour such as marriage:3 he charges boldly ahead in blissful ignorance of any anthropological studies or theories of kinship, etc., and has come up with a theory of marriage in terms of expenses, profit and loss. He was the first to forge the ambition to apply a mode of economic thinking based on the anthropological theory that I have just spelt out to all branches of human behaviour. Through these types of model, economics is presented as the general science of human practice, and it threatens all the other sciences because it invades among others the terrains of sociology, anthropology and history in the wider sense, etc. This challenge is not the real reason for me to choose this topic, because my first studies in the domain of ethnology, anthropology and sociology had already dealt with sociological problems of economics, such as credit and savings.4 But while it is not the reason why I decided to approach this subject, the existence of such a powerful, indeed dominant current does I believe underline the relevance and importance of reflecting on these problems. I shall not explicitly comment on this rational action theory, which I have already discussed on several occasions.5 To put it simply, let us say that I would defend a very different anthropology, based on the idea that, to explain behaviour perceived as rational there is no need to formulate the hypothesis that it is motivated by reason or by a consciously rational intention. This is in general terms the basis of the analysis that I shall deliver.
The dehistoricization of economic universes and behaviour
This rational action theory draws substantially on the practice of economists – here I think we can lump them all together – who are characterized without exception by a kind of in-depth dehistoricization of economic agents and universes. This will be the burden of what I wish to argue: it seems to me that, in order to account for human behaviour in real terms, including the behaviour closest to a rationalist model, that is, the economic behaviour of the most advanced societies, we need to rehistoricize anthropological theory and take on board two dimensions ignored by economic theory. We need on the one hand to reintroduce the genesis of economic dispositions which have nothing natural about them: a simple glance at comparative anthropology will reveal that the economic behaviour which we find most obvious, such as savings or credit, is a historical invention that is almost impenetrable for a society that has not taken shape within this universe. And on the other hand we need to rediscover the genesis of the economic universes themselves, whether of credit or the market: economic institutions are all historical inventions; there is nothing universal about them and they are not the products of pure reason. We must therefore reintroduce a history of the process according to which the universes that we call ‘economic’ have become established and more precisely the history of the process of autonomization of the economic universe which is never completely separate from other universes, for instance that of the family, but which is particularly separate in our societies where the process of separation has nonetheless taken place very slowly over a long period of time.
The source of the error – at least what I see as such – committed by the proponents of theories of rational action is that by dehistoricizing economic practices they are universalizing the particular historical context which we ourselves inhabit. Taking the special case of the economic activities of societies of a specific type such as ours, and more precisely specific regions of these particular societies, they commit, I believe, one of the errors most sinister for the social sciences: unwittingly universalizing a particular case, that is, giving as universal the specific features of a special case that is unaware of its singularity. Thus they universalize the properties of social universes like ours where the economic field is established as autonomous and where the principles that guide its real or supposed operations are taken as given. One of the reasons why it is important to find another foundation for economic theory is because the fantastical anthropology that the rational action theorists invent does in fact prevent economics from considering any pre-capitalist society – or only allows it to be discussed, as Marx said, in the terms that the Fathers of the Church used when they spoke of illiterate societies dating back to before the Gospels6 – or, in societies with an economic universe established as such, any region still free from the grasp of the economic model, such as the family and domestic relations, for instance. This then is the overall model that I wish to expound. To give you a more accessible and user-friendly idea of what I shall propose, I have decided to use the analysis of the gift as a sort of introductory parable.
The case of the gift
So I would like in the first instance to approach the fundamental problems that I intend to discuss through the specific case that is the phenomenon of the gift. This phenomenon as you know is at the heart of anthropological theory, along with Mauss, Lévi-Strauss7 and all those who have reflected on the problem of exchange. This reflection on the gift is important and central because if we take it to its logical conclusion it obliges us to make explicit the fundamental assumptions that economic theory draws on while repressing them and avoiding any explicit formulation of them. Through this example, then, we can form an intuitive, synoptic and systematic idea of what I am aiming to say: we shall encounter on the one hand the problems posed by the diverse theories of agents, action, time and economic dispositions, and on the other hand the theory of the whole economic universe and its particular form of illusio, the belief which it implies and which renders economic activity possible.
I shall be repeating things that are very classic but from a viewpoint which I think is not. They are things which are part of the scientific tradition and things that I myself have written about, but from a different viewpoint, whose general principles I now intend to draw out. In the analysis that I put forward in The Logic of Practice,8 I showed that we might adopt three different viewpoints on the gift. They appear to be mutually exclusive but they are in fact compatible. Mauss’s fundamental text, which is one of the very great texts of anthropological science, one of the founding texts,9 shows how the gift cannot be thought of in the terms used in native experience. Mauss affirms (not clearly enough according to Lévi-Strauss: I shall try to expose the difference between the two authors) that the gift cannot be reduced to the lived experience felt by the agents. This lived experience, insofar as we can gather from self-analysis or from observation and analysis of discourse, whether spontaneous or constructed (as in sayings and proverbs, for instance), is ambiguous or ambivalent. The gift, disinterestedness and generosity are celebrated and praised as supreme accomplishments of humanity. They are universally celebrated, and if we are looking for empirically grounded universals I think that gratitude for generosity is one. We could say that there is no society that does not favour the universal at the expense of the particular: it is universally acknowledged that the universal is better than the particular. This is an empirical, testable proposition, and one opportunity to observe it is precisely in attitudes towards the gift.
Of course there are those who profess ironic misgivings, as do the Kabyle, for instance: ‘presents bring misfortune’, or ‘they give you an egg and it costs you an arm and a leg’.10 But despite this popular folklore on the costs and ambiguities of the gift, there is no society that does not pay its respects to generosity, that is, to the gratuitous gift, as some kind of victory over egoism. In other words, there is universal praise for generosity, the generous gift, the gift expecting nothing in return – and the term ‘nothing in return’ is very important because this is the point that anthropologists will labour in their critique of the lived experience of the gift. Everyone celebrates generosity, the generous gift, the gift with nothing in return, that is both gratuitous and gracious, they exalt the gratuitous gift, that is, the gift freely given, with no payment, no counterbalancing exchange, no valid reason. At the extreme it is arbitrary and unjustified, and thus defined it is in a way a fundamental challenge for social science. This science, like any other, sees its mission as a search for reasons, but here it finds itself confronted with an act that eschews reason, that is unjustified and arbitrary, with no justification other than the pure desire for generosity. Without reason and also without determination: it is determined neither by any cause nor by economic or social constraint. As well as being gratuitous the gift is also gracious: because it is offered without being due and without anything being demanded in return, it appears to be one of the supreme accomplishments of humanity. When the social agents of different societies speak of the gift, they speak of the gift in all its truth, the truly given gift: a gift intended to be truly generous must be the gift as I have just defined it. What is given as the essence of the gift – and most analyses of essence, as the philosopher Austin has shown,11 strive to discover the truth of some behaviour or practice, of some entity defined in terms of its truth – is then the gift which is truly a gift and is tacitly opposed to the gift which is not really one. There is then a normative element imported into this apparently purely constative definition (I think that it is an important technique of reflection when faced with a definition always to ask ourselves if it refers to something that just is [in this case, the gift] or to something that is truly what it is [the gift that is truly a gift]: might the constative declaration not imply a normative declaration through its reference to an ideal realization of the thing being considered?).
The phenomenological approach to the gift (Derrida)
Jacques Derrida has recently reviewed the question of the gift, in particular in a book entitled Given Time: Counterfeit Money.12 He reviews the lived, indigenous definition in a very systematic and radical manner and he acknowledges its full coherence. He makes an extremely cogent case for the lived definition, and I find that he performs what you might call the Austin operation, which consists, under the appearance of speaking of the gift, in speaking of the truly giftful gift. I quote:
For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, return-gift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or differance.13 This is all too obvious if the other, the donee, gives me back immediately the same thing.14
He continues: ‘For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt.’15 Derrida knows that he is being normative … […] Note in passing that what is interesting is his suggestion that the truth of the gift depends on the representation made of it not only by the giver but also by the receiver, because – and this is the paradox of the gift according to Derrida – as soon as the receiver knows that it is a gift, it is no longer a gift, it is no longer a free gift because the other knows he has received it and is grateful: there is acknowledgement of a debt, which destroys the gift qua gift. Whence Derrida’s demonstration: the gift is impossible since in the simple fulfilment of the act, even if it is founded on the will to forget that it is a gift, it is vulnerable to the other not forgetting this, and even if the other does not forget, and so on.
It is a very fine and important analysis which radicalizes the problematics involved. Although I consider it to be wrong, it is radical and therefore very interesting: it poses in a most rigorous manner the problem that an economics of the gift must resolve. I repeat the text:
For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt. […] If he recognizes it as gift […]
Here Derrida plays on the double meaning of ‘recognizing’: recognizing the debt is the fact of recognizing in the sense that I recognize someone in the street: I recognize the debt as a debt (I know that it is a debt) and (Derrida does not say this, but it is very important and it is what a sociologist may add) someone who is not aware of the issue, someone who has not been brought up in the society where the exchange of gifts is practised in this particular way, may not recognize a gift as a gift (in the same way that he might mistake a friendly tap on the cheek for a slap). Recognizing, then, is knowing how to identify a gift as a gift, but it is also being grateful to the person whom one recognizes as making the gift. The two meanings of the word ‘recognition’ are very important for understanding the whole analysis:
If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift. Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent. […] It suffices therefore for the other to perceive the gift – not only to perceive it in the sense in which, […] one receives, for example, merchandise, payment, or compensation – but to perceive its nature of gift, the […] intentional meaning of the gift, in order for this simple recognition of the gift as gift, as such, to annul the gift as gift even before recognition becomes gratitude.16
I think this is clear. For there to be a true gift, then, the donor must not realize that he is making a gift and the receiver must not realize that he is receiving one. I am not making this up. I quote:
If the other perceives or receives it, if he or she keeps it as gift, the gift is annulled. [Bourdieu: it is annulled as gratuitous, generous, gracious gift, expecting nothing in return] But the one who gives it must not see it or know it either; otherwise he begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition […].17
For indeed the giver, if they perceive the gift as gift, saying ‘yes, I have made a gift, I am generous, I am admirable’, at least earns some reward, a symbolic compensation: the reward of being recognized as generous. This is important because there exists in the religious tradition a reflection on the problem of sainthood closely linked to this problem – I shall return to this. The most holy of saints may question themselves on the gratuity of their disinterestedness: is this gratuity not undermined by the fact of being recognized (in both senses of the word) as a saint and having all the symbolic profits that sanctity gives, that is offerings, gifts or quite simply respect? Some very radical saints did put this question to themselves and even went so far as to deliberately commit sins. There are historical examples: history is formidable because it gives us everything that any imaginary variation a supple philosophical mind like Derrida’s could try to conjure up.
If the gift is perceived as such by the person making it and/or by the person receiving it, it ceases to be a gift. Derrida repeats this a little later:
As the condition for a gift to be given [Bourdieu: here we think of Heidegger’s ‘es gibt’,18but no matter], this forgetting must be radical not only on the part of the donee but first of all, if one can say here first of all, on the part of the donor. It is also on the part of the donor ‘subject’ that the gift not only must not be repaid but must not be kept in memory, retained as symbol of a sacrifice, as symbolic in general. For the symbol immediately engages one in restitution. To tell the truth, the gift must not even appear or signify, consciously or unconsciously, as gift for the donors, whether individual or collective subjects. From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt. The simple intention to give, insofar as it carries the intentional meaning of the gift, suffices to make a return payment to oneself. The simple consciousness of the gift [Bourdieu: this is the example of the saint that I have just quoted indifferent terms] right away sends itself back the gratifying image of goodness or generosity, of the giving-being who, knowing itself to be such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion, in a sort of auto-recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude.19
That means: ‘Aren’t I generous!’ The interest of Derrida’s analysis comes from the fact that he radicalizes in a way our ordinary vision; he offers an extreme but highly cogent expression of the ordinary experience of the gift as purely gratuitous, and at the same time as something that has a hold on you: if ‘presents bring misfortune’, as the Kabyle say, it is because we know full well that we have to repay them, and repay them a hundred-fold; this is one of the fundamental rules of the exchange of gifts in all societies. The person who makes a gift, then, launches a process which makes the person receiving the gift its object: the act of making a gift is a kind of intrusion. This intrusion, as you will see later, is present in all the initiatory actions of an exchange, for instance in the act of addressing someone. I think Bally20 is the linguist who notes that you don’t address a question to someone without accompanying the questioning with a series of euphemisms: ‘May I take the liberty of asking you the time?’ Although people are not always so polite, there is always some effort (for instance in substituting the interrogative for the imperative mood), given the fact that any launch of an exchange is an interruption, an intrusion, insofar as it launches a process which involves the other whether they like it or not. Let me explain: they can reply yes or no, or show disdain for the question, but in any case, they will respond. The initial acts of exchange are deeply ambiguous and they are commonly felt to be such. In particular, the experience of the gift is profoundly ambiguous. Derrida, who proposes a sort of phenomenology of this experience which he opposes to the whole anthropological theory that I shall go on to discuss, takes advantage of this ambiguity to conclude that the gift, in its ideal definition as genuinely gifted gift, is impossible, since it is a sort of self-destructive practice. I think we could say that the gift, like Breton’s soluble fish,21 is self-destructive because it is enough for it to think of itself, and be thought of, as a gift, for it to cease to exist as a gift. It is enough for it to think of itself as gratuitous, generous and gracious for it to be immediately marked down as perverse, self-interested and calculating, and even as very wickedly calculating because it is negated and very subtly disguised as its opposite. We might say that it is the ultimate in social hypocrisy, because it is typically a homage that vice pays to virtue:22 it is calculation disguised as generosity. [I have attempted here] to bring out the full force of the ordinary analysis, but I could also quote, as I did in The Logic of Practice,23 a series of sayings and proverbs taken from Kabyle tradition which show that the gift is perceived in all its ambiguity as having a contradictory character.
The anthropological analysis of the gift
The anthropological tradition inaugurated by Mauss and developed by Lévi-Strauss rejects both this indigenous experience and the phenomenology of the gift as proposed by Derrida. I want to set out very briefly what Mauss says in his ‘Essay on the Gift’, and Lévi-Strauss’s rereading and revision. The first act of the analysis consists obviously in breaking with the indigenous theory of lived experience of the gift as gift with nothing given in return. The fundamental thesis of the ‘Essay on the Gift’ is that there is no gift without a return-gift and that the true object, the genuine, constructed object of an anthropological analysis of the gift is not the act of giving as a generous, unreciprocated act, but the structure of the exchange; in a way, the exchange precedes and founds the initial act of donation. This analysis by Mauss is familiar to most of you, it was republished in the collection entitled Sociologie et anthropologie, where Lévi-Strauss offers a very famous ‘Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss’, which for people in the 1960s served as a sort of manifesto of structuralism.24 I believe that we should pay some attention to the detail of Mauss’s demonstration since today structuralism is much discussed – there are some lamentable books on the history of structuralism that mix everything up, putting in the same bag things that have nothing to do with each other25 – and it seems to me important to recall a few elementary principles. Lévi-Strauss assumes and argues that Mauss is the founder of a truly scientific anthropological theory but at the same time he takes his distance because he reproaches him with not having completed the break with indigenous experience and with substituting for the indigenous experience an objective description accompanied by an indigenous theory taken from the Melanesians.
To return to the detail of the demonstration. Lévi-Strauss insists on the fact that the analysis of the gift must operate a change of object: it must pass from the gift to the exchange, that is, to a relation transcending the acts of exchange which as soon as it is made explicit contradicts the lived truth (there is no gift without a return-gift), which Lévi-Strauss in his Introduction calls the ‘phenomenological given’.26 This is the only place where he mentions phenomenology. The word ‘phenomenological’ is important because he applies it to Derrida’s interpretation, which, as I shall explain later, accomplishes this astonishing paradox: Derrida founds a phenomenological description on arguments taken from the anthropological descriptions constructed in opposition to this phenomenological description. The description of exchange contradicts the phenomenological description and Lévi-Strauss writes quite clearly: ‘So the whole theory calls for the existence of a structure, only fragments of which are delivered by experience – just its scattered members, or rather its elements.’27 In other words, the naive pre-Maussian anthropologist is left with only these membra disjecta, these separate limbs: he does not make the connection between the gift and the return-gift to construct this structure of exchange that is the truth of the gift and the return-gift.
Thus Lévi-Strauss substitutes a structure of reciprocity for a series of discontinuous and unrelated acts. Mauss glimpsed this, but Lévi-Strauss reproaches him with not taking it to its logical conclusion, that is, not finding the point where this theory of exchange would be self-sufficient, and not seeing that this primacy of the structure of exchange was sufficient to completely explain the existence of acts of exchange. In a way, Mauss is looking for the motor of the act of exchange in an indigenous theory close to indigenous experience. Failing to see in the structure the principle and the motor of exchange, he has to invent a force that makes the gifts circulate – ‘when gifts circulate in Melanesia and Polynesia the return is assured by the virtue of the things passed on, which are their own guarantees’28 – because the giving is not self-evident. Why should someone give (or repay a gift they have received) rather than not give (or not repay?). Mauss therefore invokes this force, the hau, that the Melanesians invoke to explain the existence of the gift and the return-gift. In Lévi-Strauss’s words, he invokes ‘the conscious form whereby men of a given society, in which the problem had particular importance, apprehended an unconscious necessity whose explanation lies elsewhere’.29 Lévi-Strauss reproaches Mauss with remaining on the conscious level of this exchange whose truth lies in an unconscious structure transcending consciousness and irreducible to the experience that the conscious mind can make of it. This is where he introduces the analogy between the exchange of gifts and linguistic exchange. He turns the exchange of gifts into a phase of a general theory of communication which is structural anthropology: exchange of gifts, exchange of women, of words, of presents, etc. All these exchanges are subsumed under the same category of exchange, whose structure becomes a proper object of anthropological science. Lévi-Strauss makes the connection with linguistics: he says that if Mauss had constituted the gift as structure, he would have distinguished, as Trubetskoy and Jakobson did, ‘a purely phenomenological given, on which scientific analysis has no hold [Bourdieu: this is his postulate], from an infrastructure simpler than that given, to which the given owes its whole reality’.30 In other words, behind the phenomenological gift and the lived experience of this phenomenological gift lies a hidden, unconscious structure which is the truth of the act of exchange and of the mystified experience that the agents make of it. This is one of the most powerful, and I find most vulnerable, theses of Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology: the scholar can in a way sweep aside the native, lived experience, insofar as he has access to this anthropological unconscious that the acts or the speech [of the agents] can deliver (insofar as they are linguistically structured) but which is never completely present in spoken form. Making the structure thus irreducible to its manifestations in behaviour or speech leads in a way to disqualifying indigenous experience and expelling it from the realm of science. By the same token, all the science founded on a phenomenology of this experience becomes worthless. Lévi-Strauss has a radical, Wittgensteinian vision: generally speaking, lived experience is impossible to grasp, and in any case of no interest.
Reintegrating lived experience, creating a theory of practice
It seems to me that it is Lévi-Strauss’s presuppositions that we need to call into question. I don’t know if the people who can be classed under the structuralist label have much in common, but I think that the Althusserians, like Foucault, would have accepted this anthropological thesis, this repudiation of lived experience and phenomenology as a mode of access to lived experience, and of the ambition for science to integrate lived experience, whether grasped phenomenologically or by other means, into a complete science. This is the conflation that I have always rejected and this is why I am annoyed when I am classified as a structuralist. The case of the gift is particularly interesting from this point of view: it seems to me that to really account for the gift you need to account both for the lived experience of the gift as irreversible and unreturnable (‘I give and I don’t want to know whether I will be repaid’) and for the objective truth as the science of the gift might apprehend it as a moment of structured exchange that implies a return-gift.31 How do we reconcile these two truths? More precisely, how do we question the questioning that anthropological theory – Mauss, Lévi-Strauss – puts to this indigenous theory or experience? Questioning the questioning is what I call the principle of reflexivity: you have to have both a theory of what the theory is and a theory of what the practice is as it largely escapes the theory.
This is tautological, but tautologies are often foundational: the error of the anthropologists – Mauss and above all Lévi-Strauss – consists in taking for the truth of a practice the theory or rather the model that has to be constructed to explain this practice. This error – I think we may call it an ‘error’ – is very common in anthropology. In my opinion it is the fundamental error of anthropology and we find it in Chomsky, [as the theory of] homo economicus – which is why I am insisting on this point. This error consists in placing in the agents’ minds the thoughts of the scholars. To denounce this paralogism with a sort of slogan, I always use a famous phrase of Marx saying that Hegel ‘takes the things of logic to be the logic of things’.32 In the present case, what Lévi-Strauss does is place in the minds of the agents making the gift the model constructed to explain the fact that they make gifts, that is, to proceed as if the structure (of course people will say – and I shall say it myself – that ‘the structure is transcendental’, that the words are hidden, etc.), the exchange, and the relations transcending the acts of exchange, preceded and founded the experience of the exchange. The structure is a sort of deus ex machina, it is explicative, it explains what it appears merely to be describing. To allow it to explain, it has to be situated somewhere, and the place to locate it has to be in the unconscious, and therefore in the minds of the agents and thus at the source of their actions. This anthropological error leads to the obfuscation of the fundamental question of the relation between the model constructed and the experience that the agents have of it.
To my mind this is a key question: there is no phase of scientific practice where it is not encountered. The sociological analysis of any human behaviour whatever supposes the construction of models designed to understand and explain. Thus we must question the principle of the difference between the model, that is, the theoretical posture that makes the construction of this model possible, and the practice which the model is supposed to explain and which operates in conformity with the model but in the absence of the model. The theory of rational action that I mentioned (rather clumsily) just now illustrates this paralogism quite clearly: it takes the things of logic to be the logic of things, arguing that the economic practices of the social agents who perform acts of credit and saving at the bank are rational because they derive from the rational reasoning of the rational economic agent accomplishing these acts, inspired by the conscious intention to maximize profit, for example. In the case of the gift we are in an analogous situation: the social agents, in a sense, do not know what they are doing because, when they are asked to express their reasons for doing what they are doing, they invent indigenous theories which are a simple codification of the lived experience, as revealed, for instance, by phenomenology. They therefore leave a yawning gap between the logical theory and the practice which this theory claims to be the expression of. It takes quite some scientistic audacity to say that the scholar rather than the indigenous experience is right, but that is not the question: the question is whether, in order to construct the models of indigenous experience, the scholar might proceed not by forbidding himself from investigating the indigenous experience, but rather by introducing a model that would straddle both the model and the gap between this model and reality. Explicit investigation of the gap between the model and the lived experience would call for a model which, quite simply, would integrate a structural vision with a phenomenological vision.
The destruction of time in science
To explain this scientific effect better, we would have to launch a long reflection on the logic of scientific practice. Since it would take too long [to do it here], I refer you to my analyses of this topic in The Logic of Practice.33 There I focused on a text by Husserl which has not attracted much attention but is, I believe, capital from the point of view of the social sciences: Husserl insists on the fact that science tends to substitute what he calls the ‘monothetic’ for the ‘polythetic’, which means, to put it simply, that it tends to render complex things instantaneous or synchronized.34 He says that science in a way destroys the temporality, the temporal structure, of its objects, if only because to arrive at a model it has to overcome time. This raises the question of the time that is needed to overcome time, and thereby the status of the scholar as someone not involved in the action. These are time-honoured reflections that we find in Descartes, saying repeatedly ‘we suffer no delay’,35 etc., but without drawing any conclusions. For instance, to understand that there is a gift and a return-gift, you have in a way to telescope the moment of the gift with the moment of the return-gift. You must then make the interval between them disappear, without noticing it. What I am going to reintroduce is the decisive interval which in my opinion enables lived experience to be reconciled with scholarly experience. For instance, drawing up a family tree36 is a piece of work that takes the ethnologist time but which then allows him to master in the instant, uno intuitu, with a single, instantaneous synchronic glance, things that the agents can only live through in time – it takes three generations to live out three generations – and can only recount in a discontinuous manner, and not total simul in Descartes’ terms, that is, ‘all at the same time’. The secret of objectification, which the objectivist fails to see, is that in order to objectify you often need to synchronize: for instance, the diagram, the schema or the synopsis – the synopsis is uno intuitu, synoptic – give you at a glance, in a moment, in a single view, things that are liveable only through time, that is – and this is my thesis – in a form that conceals their structure.
I take another example that has motivated much of my reflection. We do not question the notion of the calendar, although it is fundamental. The first clerks were the authors of the calendar because they had to synchronize the different timetables of men and women, city dwellers, townsfolk and peasants, etc.37 In my youth I had to draw up agricultural calendars,38 gathering from informers everything there was to know on the changing of the seasons, on the activities and rites (masculine or feminine, for the start of ploughing, say), exactly as you do for a family tree; I wrote it all down, took notes, composed schemas and diagrams, etc. The Logic of Practice is full of diagrams which can give an instantaneous, intuitive vision of the complete cycle of the year with the whole set of activities that are accomplished in it, proverbs, sayings, everything you can imagine. Indigenous experience excludes precisely this vision: you don’t think of making a schema of your own life-cycle: you can mobilize episodically, piece by piece, only fragments of this totality which science can capture thanks to a study that takes time, that supposes time, that is, leisure, skholè.
The scholastic point of view
Basically, the error that I have identified is what Austin has called the ‘scholastic view’, or ‘doctrine’,39 the scholastic point of view, with its paralogism. To give Austin’s formula its full meaning we need to understand ‘scholastic’ in its etymological sense:40 the scholastic point of view is the viewpoint common to those who frequent schools, that is, people of leisure. Austin uses this expression when discussing the grammarians’ use of language: the grammarian’s usage is practised by people who have nothing to do with language except to analyse it, as opposed to those who use language to do something with it, like lawyers – see the famous example in Plato: the water-clock introduces time again, with all its urgency.41 [Those who make use of language] have to speak at an opportune moment (kairos), they must respond to pressure, they need to focus on the topic, they have not as much time as they would like, they are subject to the constraints of circumstance, etc. The scholastic point of view is the viewpoint of someone who can take his time to overcome time, although he does not realize it. He introduces a bias because he leaves out of his model the conditions of construction of the model that would explain the gap between the experience and its model. Thus he cannot produce a complete theory of the experience that would integrate what people experience with the model that he constructs to give an account of this experience and make it understandable, and yet this experience is [not] complete [without this].
To tell you very briefly the crux of what I shall be talking about next week: for reasons that I hope will become apparent (the scholar does not think of himself as thinking like a scholar …), the Lévi-Straussian model obscures reflective analysis. Reflexive analysis is much practised, but people confuse reflexivity with narcissism. Reflexive analysis as I practise it is as un-narcissistic as possible since it makes us discover things that we do not wish to know: it does not even discover the individual libido, but the fact that a part of our thinking is linked to the positions that we hold in the social space. More generally, in this particular instance it reveals things depending on the simple fact that we are thinkers, that we are located outside the action, that we have the leisure to think what other people are living. There are then errors we make as thinkers, and the scholastic bias is I think the most difficult error to detect. This is why it is so universal and why it is present in even the greatest thinkers. It consists in forgetting what thinking is, what it is to be a thinker. It neglects the social conditions regulating possible ways of thinking, and in general it places in the thoughts of those being thought the unconscious thoughts of the person thinking them. You shall see, through what I shall explain, that all this is very concrete.
What has been forgotten [in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the gift] is the gap, the distance between the gift and the return-gift, because his thinking synchronizes them. In all societies it is imperative to repay a gift, but you have to repay with something different because to render the identical thing would be a kind of rejection, as would returning the object itself, or repaying immediately. The return-gift should be deferred, and different. It should be made much later, as much later as possible. I shall show you that we need to generalize the model of exchange (there is the gift and the return-gift, but also the challenge or offence and the riposte, the summons and the reply, etc.), but the management of the interval varies a lot depending on the original action or intervention. When it is a challenge to someone’s honour, leaving the riposte too long exposes you to the accusation of cowardice. But what is important is the obligation to repay with something different, and to defer it. This difference – and here we might think of Derrida, with different connotations – this fact of differing and deferring, of taking time, is a lifeline.
