Return to Reflexivity E-Book

Pierre Bourdieu

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 143

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This slim volume contains four little-known texts by Pierre Bourdieu on the question of reflexivity, which was a key theme in his work. 

For Bourdieu, reflexivity was not an exercise in introspection but rather a way of applying the tools of sociology to itself.  The aim is to make explicit and control the effects of the presuppositions, standpoints and dispositions that the researcher brings to the conduct of social science research.  Bourdieu advocates an attitude of epistemological vigilance that helps to uncover the invisible effects of the social determinants that weigh on the researcher, effects that are difficult to perceive by the mere desire to be lucid.  Questioning the social position and presuppositions of the researcher at every opportunity loosens the hold of scholastic and other biases on the outcome of research.

By clarifying and illustrating the principles of reflexivity, the four texts in this volume lay the groundwork for the kind of reflexive social science that Bourdieu practised and advocated throughout his career.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Epigraph

Introduction: From Epistemological Vigilance to Reflexivity

by Jérôme Bourdieu and Johan Heilbron

Notes

Editorial Note

Epistemology and the Sociology of Sociology (1967)

Notes

Narcissistic Reflexivity and Scientific Reflexivity (1993)

Notes

Proposal for a Social History of the Social Sciences (1997)

Notes

The Cause of Science: How the Social History of the Social Sciences Can Serve the Progress of These Sciences (1995)

The ambiguous situation of social science

The two principles of hierarchization

Political consensus and scientific conflict

The ambiguous effects of internationalization

For a scientific

Realpolitik

Notes

Bio-bibliographical Markers: Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Return to Reflexivity

Pierre Bourdieu

Edited and introduced by Jérôme Bourdieu and Johan Heilbron

Translated by Peter Collier

polity

Copyright Page

Originally published in French as Retour sur la réflexivité © Éditions de l’EHESS, Paris, 2023

This English edition © Polity Press, 2025

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, 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: 978-1-5095-6291-6 – hardback

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6292-3 – paperback

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024936759

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

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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.

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Epigraph

An enterprise of objectification can only be scientifically validated insofar as the subject of the objectification has been subjected to objectification in the first place.

Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, trans. Richard Nice [translation adjusted] (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 92.

IntroductionFrom epistemological vigilance to reflexivity

The demand for reflexivity, which has come to be accepted as a key principle for the human and social sciences, is one of the major contributions made by Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Although all of his work bears the hallmark of a reflexive practice of research, he came to use the word itself rather late in the day. His systematic reflection on the research he was engaged in, designed to scientifically objectify his own scientific practice, was a disposition that preceded, and probably facilitated, his various intellectual innovations, including his concept of reflexivity.

Spurning the bureaucratic model of research as a mechanical application of standardized methods, Bourdieu started his career with fieldwork in wartime Algeria. These exceptional conditions were incompatible with ordinary research work, unless the researcher were to cast a reflexive gaze back onto precisely this extraordinary context, in order to register its impact on the object of research and the researcher himself. So that when Bourdieu took his native Béarn as his object of study, it paradoxically obeyed the same logic: he set out this familiar but fast-changing terrain as a mirror of Algeria, following a reflexive practice that made it possible to verify the impact of the social world on the observer. This concern to objectify and control the relationship between the observer and his object also informed the various investigations he undertook and (co)directed at the Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE), where he was recruited by his director of studies, Raymond Aron, in 1961.1

To understand Bourdieu’s sense of reflexivity, we should go back to his early research. His first investigations were characterized by the fact that nothing came easily: none of the criteria for normal research work were satisfied. In the circumstances, the usual procedures of ethnographic or statistical research were almost impossible to apply, nor were the techniques he had acquired as a trainee philosopher much help. The context of Algeria’s War of Independence, involving extreme danger and emergencies, provoked a ‘permanent practical reflexivity’ as a condition of survival as much as a method of research.2 This led Bourdieu to mount a collective enterprise, with a team of investigators and researchers who drew on their diverse forms of involvement with Algerian reality. This very diversity was rich in assets, but these needed to be co-ordinated and organized, exploiting a variety of survey methods (observations, interviews, and statistical analysis) and academic resources (blurring the boundaries between anthropology, sociology, and labour economics, for example). These various scientific and managerial procedures were guided by a reflexive approach that came to typify all of his subsequent projects. This approach, which is explained explicitly in Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963),3 was explored and elaborated on as his work progressed.

The research in Béarn, begun in 1959, appears to be an essential complement to the Algerian work then in progress. It deals with social upheavals of a completely different nature and is situated in a radically different universe, one close to Bourdieu’s heart, the childhood village that he had left when he was still young to attend boarding school at the lycée in Pau. These studies, later collected in The Bachelors’ Ball (2002), focus on peasant celibacy and the crisis facing peasant families.4 They represent an acid test for these early experiments in research and provide a conclusive justification of the Algerian studies. In his self-analysis, Bourdieu describes his study of Béarn as the ‘occasion and the operator of a veritable conversion’:5

The word is, no doubt, not too strong to describe the transformation, at once intellectual and affective, that led me from the phenomenology of emotional life [the initial theme of his thesis project] [. . .] to a scientific practice implying a vision of the social world that was both more distanced and more realistic.6

In launching this twofold enterprise, Bourdieu confronted the many problems arising, not so much as technical or theoretical questions, nor even as ethical or political issues, but first and foremost in a reflexive mode. In The Craft of Sociology (1968), co-authored with Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron, this attitude is still referred to as ‘epistemological vigilance’.7 Instead of relying on logical techniques, as advocated by some philosophers of science, or on the ‘methodology’ of sociologists, such as Paul Lazarsfeld, it encourages the objectification of the (social) conditions of possibility of research, which depend on the generic positions of the researchers and the characteristics of their personal social trajectories. This approach requires the use of social science techniques in order to better understand and master the research in progress, its obstacles and perspectives, as well as the dispositions that researchers unwittingly deploy in their work.

This understanding of reflexivity does not imply an exercise in introspection designed to overcome some kind of lack of personal self-knowledge. Perhaps this is why Bourdieu initially preferred to speak of ‘epistemological vigilance’ instead of ‘reflexivity’, a term that he started to use more frequently only from the 1980s.8

The attitude of epistemological vigilance is grounded in the need to dispel the denial or ignorance of the effects of researchers’ characteristics on their activity: a blindness based on the illusion of a personal talent for lucidity, which is the first obstacle to a relationship with the world conducive to sociological objectification. But even when subjecting themselves to an analysis of their unique personality and experience, researchers cannot escape the perceptual biases that are social. It is only by trying to take account of all the social mechanisms that construct the human person, including their belief in their uniqueness as an individual, that researchers can hope to gain some control over the effect that these can have on any attempt to represent the social world.

This perspective consists in ‘objectifying the subject of objectification’, that is, deploying ‘all the available instruments of objectification (statistical surveys, ethnographic observation, historical research, etc.) in order to bring to light the presuppositions it owes to its inclusion in the object of knowledge’.9 The assumptions are of three kinds. First, the most accessible are those associated with the subject’s position in the public arena, the particular trajectory that led to it, and their social origin and gender. Next come those that constitute the doxa specific to each of the different fields of intellectual production (religious, artistic, philosophical, etc.) and, more precisely, those that each individual scholar owes to their position in their own particular field. Finally, and even more profoundly, there are assumptions related to skholè, namely leisure, distance from the demands and crises of the world. As a condition underlying the existence of all scholarly fields, skholè, along with the ‘scholastic vision’ that it engenders, is the most complicated to apprehend and manage for those who are immersed in universes where it is taken for granted.10

In order to perform reflexivity as Bourdieu conceives it, it is not sufficient to confront these three orders of assumption by making them explicit. For Bourdieu, reflexivity is less an act of attaining conscious awareness, however painstakingly, than an effort to achieve a practical mastery of the social unconscious that inhabits every one of us, along with the effects of the social determinants that weigh on us, invisible effects that the mere will to be lucid is insufficient to detect. Since it is not enough to be aware of the existence of these determinants in the abstract to limit their impact, one way of succeeding is to vary their scope. Awareness can be liberating, as long as we engage with the actual conditions needed for this liberation. A characteristic example of the concrete application of reflexivity for Bourdieu was when he undertook in Béarn the type of investigation that he had carried out in Algeria, enabling him to take into account empirically the effects of distance or proximity generated by the study of a foreign or a familiar society. This procedure determines the way he uses an ‘informant’ and analyses their nature. In an investigation, informants are always involved in staging themselves and their universe, especially in the presence of a stranger. Far from accepting their point of view as gospel, we must question the social position of the speaker at every turn, and the particular social relationship they entertain with the person questioning them, in order to identify the grains of truth contained in their discourse. This also implies paying attention to the use of technical equipment, such as the tape recorder or the camera, as well as the social composition of the research team11 – in short, the whole range of the mental or technical faculties that the researcher mobilizes in the survey without realizing that they can help to determine results.

Among the obstacles to scientific knowledge, there is, rather paradoxically, the very fact of holding a scientific viewpoint, characterized by its external position enabling observation over time and at a distance, and defined by its conscious departure from the logic of practice. Thus,

breaking with the unthinking assumptions of conscious thought, that is, with scholastic bias, [leads] the sociologist and economist unable to appropriate their pre-reflexive experience of the world [to insert] scholarly thoughts, driven by the myths of homo oeconomicus and the ‘theory of rational action’, into the behaviour of ordinary economic agents.12

Hence the counter-intuitive injunction that Bourdieu enunciates:

In my opinion, nothing is more false than the universally accepted maxim in the social sciences that the researcher must not put anything personal into their research. On the contrary, we must constantly refer to our own experience, but not, as is all too often the case, even among the best researchers, in a shamefaced, unconscious, or uncritical manner.13

In a late interview, Bourdieu reminds us that reflexivity must be embodied in practical procedures and in their rational use:

I have two important things to teach: (1) strategies for the collective organization of work necessary to gain the autonomy that is the condition of scientific practice; (2) the rational management of intellectual work. Many researchers believe that they must lead their lives as artists, in accordance with a whole mythology. However, the researcher is much more comparable to a top-flight sportsman who must rationalize. Intellectual work has its training regime, which includes managing the team, working as a team, organizing the team, and kitting out the team.14

Beyond sociological analysis and practical procedures, reflexivity must still be converted into a disposition incorporated into the scientific habitus, that is, exist as ‘a reflexivity reflex, capable of acting not ex post, on the opus operatum, but a priori, on the modus operandi’.15

* * *

Four relatively short and little-known texts by Bourdieu on reflexivity are collected in this volume. They bring to the fore certain largely unnoticed aspects of his practice, which are treated more systematically in The Logic of Practice (1980), Pascalian Meditations (1997), and Science of Science and Reflexivity (2001). The present collection, which forms as it were a review of the question, includes two unpublished texts, an article that was published only in German, and one contributed to the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, but which has never been republished since.

The collection opens with an unpublished work from 1967, ‘Epistemology and the Sociology of Sociology’. It was a contribution to a debate held at the Sorbonne on the theme ‘What Are the Human Sciences For? (Formalization and Models)’. This debate was organized by the Centre national des jeunes scientifiques (CNJS) and a short-lived journal, Porisme (1966–7), which published the work of the CNJS.16 Other participants were the mathematicians Marc Barbut and André Régnier, the philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, the psychologist Pierre Gréco, and the linguist Nicolas Ruwet. The lecture that Bourdieu gave on this occasion was part of an enquiry into the sociology of science that was taking shape in the CSE and developed initially in two directions: the sociology of scientific vulgarization and the sociology of medicine.17 The study of the vulgarization of science was conducted in collaboration with the CNJS.18

This lecture outlines the programme of a sociology of science characterized by its rejection of an abstract epistemological discourse, in this case discussing the notion of the ‘model’ which was the official theme of the debate. Bourdieu rejects theoretical and philosophical epistemology and elaborates the argument for making epistemological questions sociological. He adopts a stance that develops reflections made in his studies of Algeria and Béarn, as well as those in progress at the CSE, which amount to a critique of the major epistemological discourses dominant at the time, of which the philosophers of the École normale supérieure, Althusserians, Lacanians, and others, and their Cahiers pour l’analyse (1966–9) are a typical example.19 Like the neopositivist philosophy of science, which was still marginal in France, their work questioned the epistemology, methodology, or logic of science, but in a theoretical mode that ignored scientific practice and its social circumstances, which were at the heart of the programme outlined by Bourdieu. The text that Bourdieu and Passeron wrote around the same time on the relationship between sociology and philosophy in France is a good illustration of the ‘sociology of sociology’ that Bourdieu calls for in his lecture, seeing it above all as an instrument of epistemological vigilance.20

This reflection continues with The Craft of Sociology (1968) and Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972). According to Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron, scientific practice must be subjected to an interrogation which, unlike the classic philosophy of knowledge, applies not to ‘science made, [. . .] but to science being made’, that is, not so much to the logic of proof, ars probandi