The Sociologist and the Historian E-Book

Pierre Bourdieu

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

Seitenzahl: 135

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In 1988, the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the leading historian Roger Chartier met for a series of lively discussions that were broadcast on French public radio. Published here for the first time, these conversations are an accessible and engaging introduction to the work of these two great thinkers, who discuss their work and explore the similarities and differences between their disciplines with the clarity and frankness of the spoken word.

Bourdieu and Chartier discuss some of the core themes of Bourdieu’s work, such as his theory of fields, his notions of habitus and symbolic power and his account of the relation between structures and individuals, and they examine the relevance of these ideas to the study of historical events and processes. They also discuss at length Bourdieu’s work on culture and aesthetics, including his work on Flaubert and Manet and his analyses of the formation of the literary and artistic fields. Reflecting on the differences between sociology and history, Bourdieu and Chartier observe that while history deals with the past, sociology is dealing with living subjects who are often confronted with discourses that speak about them, and therefore it disrupts, disconcerts and encounters resistance in ways that few other disciplines do.

This unique dialogue between two great figures is a testimony to the richness of Bourdieu’s thought and its enduring relevance for the humanities and social sciences today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Notes

1: The Sociologist's Craft

Notes

2: Illusions and Knowledge

Notes

3: Structures and the Individual

Notes

4: Habitus and Field

Notes

5: Manet, Flaubert and Michelet

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Preface

CHAPTER 1

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First published in French as Le Sociologue et l’historien © Éditions Agone, Marseille, & Raisons d’Agir, Paris, France, 2010

This English edition © Polity Press, 2015

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: 978-0-7456-7958-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7959-4 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8898-5 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8897-8 (mobi)

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002

    [Le sociologue et l'historien. English]

    The sociologist and the historian / Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier.

        pages cm

    Translation of the author's Le sociologue et l'historien.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-7958-7 (hardback) – ISBN 0-7456-7958-7 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-0-7456-7959-4 (paperback) – ISBN 0-7456-7959-5 (paperback)    1.  Bourdieu, Pierre, 1903-2002–Interviews.    2.  Chartier, Roger, 1945—Interviews.    3.  Sociologists–France–Interviews.    4.  Historians–France–Interviews.    I.  Chartier, Roger, 1945-    II.  Title.

    HM479.B68A513 2015

    301.0944–dc23

                                                                        2014039887

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Preface

My first impression on reading these interviews conducted with Pierre Bourdieu in 1988 was to find him just as he had remained in my memory from these five broadcasts: energetic, humorous, impassioned. The merit of this little book, I believe, is that his way of thinking can be followed particularly closely in this lively exchange, freed from the shrouds that sometimes cover it, whether the magisterial authority conferred by his chair at the Collège de France1 or the polemical debates of the sociologist deeply engaged in his era. Without obscuring the continuity and coherence of a work based from its beginnings on the same categories of analysis and the same demand for critical clarity, these five interviews introduce us to a rather different Bourdieu, less imprisoned by the roles that he subsequently chose, or that were imposed on him. A Bourdieu joyful, vivacious, ironic with others but also with himself; a Bourdieu confident about the scientific breaks that his work effected, but also ever ready for dialogue with other disciplines and other approaches.

These conversations should not be read without recalling the difference in time; rather, their specific date should be borne in mind. In 1987, France Culture, of which Jean-Marie Borzeix2 was then director, wanted to include Bourdieu in its series À voix nue (‘With Bare Voice’). If the choice of his interlocutor fell on a historian who was neither a beginner nor one of the most visible, this was certainly because the admiration and intellectual friendship that I felt for Bourdieu had already been expressed by his presence on several of the programmes I produced – and still produce – one Monday a month for Les lundis de l'histoire.3 One programme, devoted to his two books that appeared within a short timespan – La Distinction and Le Sens pratique4 – had him in dialogue with Patrick Fridenson and Georges Duby, with whom he enjoyed a bond of mutual esteem.5 This remains for me one of the strongest memories of these broadcasts. At a time when Distinction had been the target of fierce attacks from certain historians, who either could not understand it or did so all too well, this exchange showed, conversely, that both historian and sociologist had to understand struggles over classification as being just as real as class struggles (if indeed they could be separated from one another), and that conflicting representations of the social world produced it at the same time as they expressed it.

The Bourdieu of 1987 was for many people the author of Distinction. Polemic and media attention to this book had brought the sociologist to the front of the intellectual and public stage.6 But before the publication of Distinction, Bourdieu already had a long past as a researcher and a strong and substantial body of work,7 marked by his ethnological publications on Kabylia,8 his analyses of the French educational system,9 his collective investigations of the social uses of photography10 and of museum visiting,11 and his theoretical reflections on the logics of practice. These main lines in no way exhaust the astounding vitality of a research that was always open to new topics, and that also focused on such varied objects as opinion polls,12 matrimonial strategies,13 haute couture,14 the practices of sports,15 and the sociology of employers16 and of French bishops.17 A number of these analyses, often presented in the form of interviews or lectures, were brought together in a short volume, Questions de sociologie.18 In the 1980s, three books were milestones in Bourdieu's intellectual development as a sociologist after he had been appointed professor at the Collège de France: in 1982, Ce que parler veut dire;19 in 1984, what was undoubtedly the most difficult book for him, Homo Academicus;20 and, a few months before our exchanges, a collection of pieces delivered orally, Choses dites.21

The Bourdieu of À voix nue was preparing Les Règles de l'art,22 as shown by the passionate way in which he mentions his work in progress on Manet and Flaubert. A number of essays published in English had accompanied his reflections on the specific characteristics of the intellectual and artistic fields,23 as had also the lectures he gave at Princeton in 1986 in the series ‘Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism’, and again, in some respects, his study of Heidegger, published in book form the same year as these interviews.24 This is the Bourdieu we should try to listen to here, as if we were still unaware that he would later publish La Noblesse d'État, Méditations pascaliennes, La Domination masculine and Les Structures sociales de l'économie,25 not to mention the more directly political texts published by Raisons d'agir.26

On the historians' side, three facts must be recalled to understand certain themes in our conversations of 1988. First of all, history was still the most public and most visible discipline out of all the social sciences, not only thanks to the books of its masters, which sometimes became bestsellers, but also with the success of great multi-volume undertakings that French publishers did not shy away from and that found both buyers and translators. For example, the five-volume Histoire de la vie privée edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, which was published by Éditions du Seuil between 1985 and 1987, and, on a more modest scale, the Histoire de l'édition française that I was pleased to edit together with Henri-Jean Martin, the four volumes of which were published by Promodis between 1982 and 1986.

On the other hand, French historians had by then begun to distance themselves from the principles of analysis that had founded the domination – or at least the intellectual domination – of Annales, visible in a preference for massive sources, a quantitative treatment of those sources, and the creation of series. Challenged from outside, for example, by the propositions of Italian micro-history, but also from within the Annales tradition itself, this model of intelligibility had broken up in favour of other approaches, which privileged collective representations more than objective classifications, singular appropriations more than statistical distributions, conscious strategies more than unconscious determinations. Hence the debates, no doubt rather futile for Bourdieu, between the former primacy given to series and structures, and the more recent attention given to actors, or regarding the distances or affinities between the categories deployed by the historian and the language of historical actors themselves.

Finally, though still only timidly, history had begun to question itself. Far removed from Bourdieu's ways of thinking, some major texts by Paul Veyne, Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur27 had indicated the tension that existed between the discipline's intention of seeking knowledge and the necessarily narrative form of its writing. For some historians, if not for the profession as a whole, this presented a further reason for the collapse of inherited certainties and a strong incitement to reflect not only on the scientific nature of their discipline, but also, and conversely, on the cognitive capacity of fiction, as Bourdieu was doing in his study of Flaubert.28

These interviews accordingly make it possible to locate a moment in Bourdieu's relationship with history and historians. His criticism was sharp, reproaching them for unduly universalizing their categories of analysis and insufficiently questioning the social and historical construction of partitions and classifications that they too often took as natural objects. At the same time, however, Bourdieu respected the work of certain historians, French and foreign, who found a generous welcome in the pages of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,29 or were published in the collection Le sens commun that he edited for Éditions de Minuit.30 Shortly before our interviews, I had myself published an article in Actes,31 and had two conversations with Bourdieu on the subject of reading and cultural history.32

The violence of polemics that were ever more bitter, the return to a primacy of politics and the individual that some people proclaimed at the time of the controversies aroused by the bicentennial of the French Revolution, as well as the vogue for national history, led Bourdieu to a more forceful critique of history and historians, as shown in his 1995 interview with the German historian Lutz Raphael.33 His tone is no longer that of 1988, and his indictment, in which only a few names are spared, is remorseless: history (at least French history) is denounced here en bloc, for its rejection of any critical reflexivity, its taste for false oppositions, its attraction to bad philosophy, its ignorance of the classic works of the social sciences, and the preference it gives to futile epistemological discussions at the expense of research practices that are in fact the genuine site of theoretical reflection. This pitiless judgement, whether it is seen as well founded or unjust, well targeted or too indistinct, had shifted quite a bit from the critical but friendly tone of the 1988 exchanges. This is why I am happy to be able to rediscover this precious moment of a dialogue damaged for a while by injuries and misunderstandings, but subsequently renewed. Several conversations with Bourdieu in Les lundis de l'histoire remain shining memories for me, inspired, as ten years previously, by the warmth of a discussion that was demanding but peaceable: for example, an interview about Méditations pascaliennes inspired by the memory of Louis Marin, who had been Bourdieu's friend since their years at the École normale supérieure,34 or, on La Domination masculine, a dialogue with Arlette Farge on the marvellous mystery that sometimes breaks the iron laws of the social world and makes possible the enchantment of unexpected encounters.35

The lightness of tone that marks these five conversations should not, however, lead us to forget that they are also marked by Bourdieu's evident anxiety in his efforts to understand the violent resistance to his analyses – not only on the part of his opponents – and the tensions characteristic of a work on social spaces, whether the world of the university or society as a whole, in which the sociologist himself participates – ‘as a native’, as Bourdieu puts it. Hence, for him, the difficult but indispensable task of a discipline that, by dissolving reassuring misunderstandings, makes possible a more lucid comprehension of the mechanisms that govern dominations and subjections, but at the price of disillusion. ‘The sociologist is insufferable’, he maintains, and not only to others, but also to himself, as he finds himself situated within the social field that he is analysing. We discover in Bourdieu's words the painful ‘schizophrenia’ (a word he uses) that results from this position, no doubt unique in the social sciences, in which the subject who produces knowledge is at the same time part of the object to be known.

Difficult to live and to assume, this division of oneself that sociological work implies also lies at the bottom of the ‘rational utopianism’ that founds it. In fact, it is only by displaying the determinisms that constrain the actors of the social world (including the sociologist) that a way is opened for the critique of illusory appearances and deceptively self-evident phenomena, the loosening of constraints and the possibility given to each person, even if not all are able to seize it, to ‘become the subject of their own thoughts’. On condition of not getting bogged down in false oppositions (for example, between individual and society, between consensus and conflict, between the objectivity of structures and the subjectivity of actors), the work of the sociologist offers mechanisms of self-defence against what the natural order of things – and of dominations – seems inexorably to impose.

Pierre Bourdieu was haunted by his responsibility. This sentiment explains his commitments, but also his torments, and – as may be read in these interviews, which restore his passionate speech as closely as possible – his trust in knowledge as alone capable of making the world, as it is, less ineluctable and less of a source of despair.

Roger Chartier

Paris, 24 November 2009

Notes

1

Bourdieu delivered his inaugural lecture as professor of sociology at the Collège de France on 23 April 1982. It was published by Éditions de Minuit under the title

Leçon sur la leçon

[‘Lecture on the Lecture’, in

In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology

(Cambridge: Polity, 1990)].

2

Jean-Marie Borzeix ran the radio channel France Culture from 1984 to 1997.

3

On 24 October 1983, for example, in a programme devoted to the history and sociology of art, with Carlo Ginzburg and Louis Marin, and on 8 July 1985 on the subject of Alain Viala's book

Naissance de l'écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l'âge classique

, with Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala.

4

Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1979 and 1980 respectively. [

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984);

The Logic of Practice

(Cambridge: Polity, 1990).]

5

This programme in the

Lundis de l'histoire

series was broadcast on 25 February 1980.

6

Bourdieu had presented his book on television in the course of a programme in the

Apostrophes