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Meditations on Pascalian
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Lois McNay
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 Economy and Society Volume 30 Number 1 February 2001: 139–154

Review article by Lois McNay

Meditations on Pascalian
Meditations

Texts reviewed
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Pierre Bourdieu (2000) Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge:

Polity Press, 256 pp., ISBN 0 7456 2055 8, £14.99 pbk.

Richard Schusterman (ed.) (1999) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Black-

well, 277 pp., ISBN 0 631 18818 5, £15.99 pbk.

The critique of scholastic reason

The pretensions of academic, intellectual, and other privileged élites have long
been a target of Pierre Bourdieu’s critical gaze. In his latest work, Pascalian
Meditations, Bourdieu turns his deconstructive tools upon scholastic reason
(‘skhole’) understood as pure reason or the ‘pedantic comedy’ of thought that
believes itself to be unencumbered by the practical mundanities and urgencies
of the world. The inspiration behind this unpacking of the illusion of ‘socially
weightless’ thought is not traced back to Marx – as one might expect – but to
Pascal and, in particular, to his idea that ‘true philosophy makes light of philos-
ophy’. Bourdieu Ž nds in Pascal a concern, devoid of populist naivety, for ordi-
nary people and for their practical activities, which are unencumbered by the
delusions of those who misrecognize their own positions of social privilege as
evidence of their superior capacity for enlightened thought.
Bourdieu’s method is by now familiar: deploying the concepts of ‘habitus’ and
the ‘Ž eld’, he exposes the underlying social and economic inequalities, the strat-
egies of restriction and exclusion and the internalization of norms that permit
academic élites – in particular, those working in the domains of science, ethics
(law and politics), and aesthetics – to establish a ‘magical boundary’ between
themselves and the mundane world. This apartness from the everyday world is

Lois McNay, Somerville College, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HD. Tel: 01865 270600.
Fax: 01865 270620.

Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140020019124
 140 Economy and Society

both a liberatory break and a potentially crippling separation. It is naturalized,

however, through a collective act of repression and misrecognition whereby the
material conditions of privilege are represented as an ‘enchanted adherence’ to
the idea of election through natural gift.
Like peeling the layers of an onion, Bourdieu unfolds the relations of power
underlying this ‘theodicy of privilege’. His method of historical objectiŽ cation
involves a form of ascending analysis which moves from the macro-level of
relations between Ž elds or ‘structuring structures’ through to the micro-level of
incorporated dispositions that permit the cultivation of the individual scholas-
tic demeanour. In a Durkheimian style, Bourdieu claims that the illusion of pure
thought is correlative to the emergence of an autonomous academic Ž eld, which
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is internally differentiated into the sub-Ž elds of science, social science, aes-
thetics, philosophy, and so forth. Each sub-Ž eld is deŽ ned by an objective set of
relations, which is distinguished from other sub-Ž elds by its own fundamental
law or ‘nomos’. Like Foucault’s concepts of the archive and episteme, this nomos
must necessarily remain unspoken in so far as it deŽ nes the thinkable and
unthinkable within any given Ž eld of action: ‘Being the matrix of all the perti-
nent questions, it cannot produce the questions that could call it into question’
(Bourdieu 2000: 97). For example, the latent constitutive principle informing
the emergence of an autonomous sphere of art during the nineteenth century
was the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. The unspoken founding principle of the
scholastic Ž eld is that of an ontological break with the world of everyday activi-
ties. Nomos is generative of speciŽ c cognitive or evaluative presuppositions
(‘doxa’) whose acceptance is implied in adherence to the Ž eld. All agents,
whether champions of the orthodox or the heterodox, have a fundamental invest-
ment in the rules and stakes of the game (‘illusio’).
The nomos of the scholastic Ž eld is generative of a series of structuring
fallacies. A principal fallacy is that of ‘scholastic epistemocentrism’ which, by
maintaining a boundary between the scholastic and practical world, cancels out
the speciŽ city of practical action by assimilating it to scholastic knowledge.
Bourdieu cites, as an example of this, Clifford Geertz’s description in The
Interpretation of Cultures of a Balinese cockŽ ght where Geertz ‘ “generously”
credits the Balinese with a hermeneutic and aesthetic gaze which is none other
than his own’ (Bourdieu 2000: 52). Either that or the speciŽ city of practical
action is dis-regarded by being consigned to the category of radical otherness,
non-existence or, in Kant’s phrase, ‘barbarous taste’. In short, the active agent
of practical knowledge is substituted with the re ecting subject of theoretical
knowledge. This projection of self into the other results in a second fallacy,
namely the privileging of the atemporal perspective of the ‘lector’ over the
dynamic perspective of the ‘auctor’. The fuzzy and creative logic of practical
understanding is replaced with an abstract process of self-decipherment charac-
teristic of scholastic interpretation. The subordination of the open and
diachronic nature of praxis to synchronic analysis hypostatizes action. In Bour-
dieu’s view, even the most ritualized and repetitive of actions are necessarily
linked to time by their movement and duration. It is the particular temporality
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 141

of the process of gift exchange, for example, that makes it possible to understand
how it operates as a form of symbolic domination. The ‘euphemised violence’
of the process resides in the contradiction between the experienced truth of the
gift as a gratuitous act and its objective truth as a stage in a relation of exchange.
It is the interval between the giving of the gift and its reciprocation which estab-
lishes hierarchical relations. Over-eagerness in responding can be a sign of
dependence; a delayed or non-response a sign of subordination and indebted-
ness or, conversely, it can be seen as a snub to the giver. The atemporal categories
of the scholastic perspective obscure the polysemous temporality of the gift by
considering ‘monothetically’, that is in simultaneity, a process which unfolds
‘polythetically, that is in succession and discontinuities (Bourdieu 2000: 56).
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The annexation of the social actor’s perspective to that of the scholar leads to
a third fallacy of linguistic or aesthetic universalism. The economic and social
conditions that underlie the scholastic world-view are naturalized and univer-
salized as impartial objectivity. It is in discussing this fallacy that Bourdieu takes
aim at some of his contemporaries. For example, Bourdieu criticizes Habermas’s
idea of communicative ethics for its excessive abstraction and proceduralism,
which effects a twofold de-politicization. Political power relations are reduced
to those of communication, which are, in turn, neutralized by being understood
as reciprocal. The idea of the ideal speech situation does not acknowledge suf-
Ž ciently the extent to which cognitive interests are ineluctably rooted in strategic
or instrumental considerations. The ‘force of arguments’ counts for little against
the ‘arguments of force’, domination can never be entirely absent from relations
of communication. Bourdieu sees a similar form of epistemocentrism at work in
John Rawls’ idea of the original position and the concept of justice as neutrality
which it yields. The seeming impartiality of these principles of justice is in fact
based on a tendentious universalization of an economically orthodox and cul-
turally speciŽ c view of the rational actor. Finally, it is in the thought of Judith
Butler that Bourdieu identiŽ es another version of linguistic fetishism, where the
cluster of material inequalities and economic exclusions constitutive of gender
hierarchies are reduced to the narrow issue of the symbolic construction of
sexual identity: ‘it is naïve, even dangerous to suppose and suggest that one only
has to “deconstruct” these social artefacts in a purely performative celebration
of “resistance” in order to destroy them’ (Bourdieu 2000: 108). The imperialism
of the universal that is implied in the over-extension of a linguistic model of iden-
tity formation is, in the Ž nal analysis, a form par excellence of symbolic violence
perpetuated by seemingly enlightened élites upon the practical activities of social
actors. The totalizing dynamic of the analytical perspective sanctions the arbi-
trary and ahistorical distinction between intellectual reason and common sense,
between scholar and actor, the latter of whom, ‘being the dominated products
of an order dominated by forces armed with reason . . . cannot but give their
acquiescence to the arbitrariness of rationalised force’ (Bourdieu 2000: 83).
The only way in which this symbolic violence can be contested is by break-
ing down the consecrated boundary between scholastic logic and practical
action. If thought is to be both epistemologically and politically effective, then
 142 Economy and Society

it must be exercised ‘in the same direction as the immanent tendencies of the
social world’ rather than at one remove from them (Bourdieu 2000: 5). This, of
course, raises the potentially uncomfortable question of the position from which
Bourdieu speaks and which, to a degree, draws upon the authority imputed to
the impartial perspective of the scholar in order to legitimate itself. As Michel
de Certeau observed of Foucault’s idea of the unconscious structuring force of
the episteme: ‘Who is he to know what no one else knows, what so many thinkers
have “forgotten” or have yet to realize about their own thought?’ (De Certeau
1986: 183). Bourdieu recognizes the possibility of such a performative contra-
diction: ‘the sociologist might seem to be threatened with a kind of schizo-
phrenia, in as much as he is condemned to speak of historicity and relativity in
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a discourse that aspires to universality and objectivity’ (Bourdieu 2000: 93). This
scholastic double-bind can be circumvented only through a thoroughgoing
re exivity understood as a process of historical objectivization which, by uncov-
ering underlying material conditions, relativizes scholastic claims to universal
impartiality. The aim of the critique of scholastic reason is not, therefore, one of
simple denunciation but rather invokes a form of epistemological questioning
which seeks to reveal the social conditions of possibility of abstract thought. It
is only through the attempt to comprehend the material conditions from which
it emerges that thought can begin to move beyond its limitations: ‘there can be
thought about the social conditions of thought which offers thought the possi-
bility of a genuine freedom with respect to these conditions’ (Bourdieu 2000:
118).
The idea of re exivity has become one of those exegetical terms that, by being
used to denote any form of self-consciousness, is in danger of losing analytical
precision. In order to elaborate a more precise notion, Bourdieu sets up a dichot-
omous model of erroneous concepts of re exivity in order to justify his own
mediatory formulation. On the one side, re exive critique is not a form of criti-
cal self-examination which tacitly reinstalls an absolute point of view, the ‘view
from nowhere’, exempliŽ ed in Habermas’s idea of the ideal speech situation or
Rawls’ original position. Nor, on the other side, can it be a narcissistic turning
in of subjectivity upon itself, exempliŽ ed in the anti-foundationalism of
Nietzsche and Foucault. This postmodern ‘view from everywhere’ leads to a
fallacious relativism where all positions remain deconstructed except the decon-
structors’ (Bourdieu 2000: 107). Against these options, Bourdieu deŽ nes re ex-
ive critique as a form of self-examination that takes as its object the impersonal
rather than the singular self. Using a phrase of Bachelard’s, Bourdieu describes
this mode of re exivity as ‘a constant effort of desubjectivism’. This sounds
similar to Foucault’s (1984) notion of an ethics of the self which seeks to acquire
a critical form of self-knowledge through a ceaseless contestation of the self. The
difference, however, is that, while, for Foucault, the self that is invoked is singu-
lar and fashioned like a unique work of art, for Bourdieu, the focus is on the
impersonal or collective self who is the result of somatized power relations. It
follows that the examination of selfhood is understood not as a personal memoir,
but in terms of its construction within a given Ž eld and its ‘space of possibles’.
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 143

Bourdieu illustrates this idea with an ‘impersonal confession’ where he provides

an account of the rites of institution and effects of scholastic enclosure which
brought about his transformation from working-class scholar (oblat miraculé) to
a member of the ‘academic nobility’ of philosophers so dominated by Sartre’s
idea of the ‘total intellectual’ during the 1950s. This form of detached medi-
tation upon the self sidesteps, to a degree, the problems of selective memory and
defensive modes of self-recollection. Furthermore, the process of re exivity
does not stop with this mode of distantiated sociological analysis of the subject
upon itself, it also involves a collective enterprise which is immanent within the
intersubjective dynamics of the academic Ž eld. It is the con ictual but regulated
co-operation inherent in the competitive relations within academia that leads to
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the subordination of the selŽ sh interests of individual actors to a dialogic con-

frontation with others which may induce a movement to greater re exivity. The
imposed effects of a mutual objectiŽ cation can result in a generalized process of
intellectual self-scrutiny, thus yielding the possibility of a ‘real freedom with
respect to the determinations it reveals’ (Bourdieu 2000: 121).
So far, so familiar. Pascalian Meditations is undoubtedly a bravura perform-
ance, but many of its themes and arguments are already well known from Bour-
dieu’s previous works, Homo Academicus, The State Nobility, and The Rules of
Art. Familiar also are certain problematic stylistic tics and intellectual tenden-
cies, which, if anything, weaken Bourdieu’s arguments. For example, there is his
repeated habit of schematizing opposing intellectual positions into a series of
false antitheses, thus stylistically justifying his middle course. There is also
Bourdieu’s tendency to construct complex sentences around a favourite rhetor-
ical device of the chiasmus. Both these well-rehearsed strategies create the
occasional sense that cases are being won through rhetorical virtuosity rather
than argumentative rigour. The work of other thinkers – for example, the
critique of Rawls and Habermas – is dealt with in a broad-brush manner that is
frustratingly elliptical and a little high-handed. There is also an impression of
the pronounced national speciŽ city of some of his claims against scholastic
reason. To put it crudely, some of the more rareŽ ed rituals of scholastic enclos-
ure and intellectual autarky that Bourdieu describes do not really seem to apply
to what goes on in many other European and American universities, even the
most élite. This is not necessarily a fault in itself, but there is a tendency to
present the intense élitism and hot-house atmosphere of the Parisian grandes
écoles as if they are representative of all academic systems.
Despite these limitations, Pascalian Meditations contains some of the most
important reŽ nements and developments in Bourdieu’s thought in the past few
years. There are two themes that are worth considering in detail: the relation-
ship between symbolic and material power relations, and the concepts of agency
and change. Bourdieu develops these themes as an indirect but sustained
response to perhaps one of the most repeated criticisms of his work, namely that
it is merely a sophisticated formulation of an orthodox materialist determinism
which denies autonomous agency. Judith Butler has offered a particularly
powerful critique of Bourdieu along these lines and it is through this that I shall
 144 Economy and Society

now examine his most recent elaborations on the themes of material determin-
ism and agency. By showing the way in which Butler misreads some of his central
arguments – in particular she misses the signiŽ cance of his temporalization of
the categories of Ž eld and habitus – I shall also sketch out some of the impli-
cations of Bourdieu’s latest thought for the growing area of work on identity and
agency in de-traditionalized societies.

Symbolic and material determinism

The essence of Butler’s claim is that Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and the Ž eld
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are determinist in so far as they deny the possibility of radical change and, in the
Ž nal analysis, reassert a reductionist base–superstructure model. In Excitable
Speech, Butler examines the problem of determinism, which, in her view, is inher-
ent in Bourdieu’s understanding of the symbolic violence of performative speech
acts. She argues that the concept of symbolic violence is problematic in that it
ties the speech act too closely to its institutional context and misses the processes
of temporal deferral and dissemination that are constitutive of the indeterminacy
of the performative. It is this indeterminacy that is essential to understanding
how it is that dominant norms may be appropriated and subverted by marginal
groups. A similar lack of indeterminacy hampers Bourdieu’s notion of habitus
which, by stressing the extent to which there is an accommodation between domi-
nant power relations and bodily dispositions, misses the ways in which the
process of corporeal inculcation is never straightforward or complete. In Butler’s
view, there is a residue, or bodily volatility, that renders strategies of domination
vulnerable to displacement: ‘This excess is what Bourdieu’s account appears to
miss or, perhaps, to suppress: the abiding incongruity of the speaking body, the
way in which it exceeds its interpellation, and remains uncontained by any of its
acts of speech’ (Butler 1997a: 155). By producing an account of power that is
structurally committed to the status quo, Bourdieu forecloses the possibility of
agency emerging from the margins. In the Ž nal analysis, his insistence on the
determining priority of material over symbolic forces amounts to a reassertion of
the orthodox Marxist base–superstructure distinction.
In her article ‘Performativity’s social magic’ in the recent Schusterman col-
lection of philosophical engagements with Bourdieu’s thought, Butler reŽ nes
her critique through a consideration of the claim that habitus is a generative
rather than determining structure. Butler argues that Bourdieu’s assertion of
the generative nature of habitus is undercut by his rather tenuous formulation
of its relation with the Ž eld. Despite the claim of a relation of double con-
ditioning between the two entities, it is, in fact, the Ž eld that is attributed a pre-
given objectivity and enshrined, therefore, as an ‘unalterable positivity’ (Butler
1999: 117). Whereas habitus may adapt to the objective demands of the Ž eld,
there is no sense of a countervailing alteration of the Ž eld by habitus. The uni-
directional causality ascribed to the Ž eld undermines any idea of the instabili-
ties and resistances inherent in the process of the somatization of social norms.
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 145

This is compounded by Bourdieu’s deployment of a rather functionalist notion

of adaptation in which habitus adjusts to the exigencies of the Ž eld and which
reinscribes a dualism between the objective and the subjective where the former
remains determining in the last instance. This dualism is also tacitly perpetu-
ated in the separation of the social from the linguistic that Bourdieu institutes
in his idea of the performative. Against the alleged semiological reduction of
the performative to text, Bourdieu maintains that the force or ‘magical efficac-
ity’ of a performative act derives not from the linguistic utterance itself but
from the surrounding social and institutional context (Butler 1999: 109–10).
The consequent claim that heterogeneity is not a property of language itself
but, rather, ‘social heterogeneity is inherent in language’ raises the issue of the
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precise status of the heterogeneous. The stringent separation made between the
realms of the linguistic and the social leads to the paradox of whether the social
heterogeneity that is internal to language is ‘self-identically social’ or whether
it is a speciŽ c dimension of the linguistic itself. The distinction between the
social and the linguistic leads to Bourdieu’s reliance upon a simpliŽ ed mimetic
relation between language and society where the former re ects the latter. It
also suggests an exterior and instrumental relation between the utterance and
its subject who pre-exists in the social. For Bourdieu, the subject who utters
the performative is ‘positioned on a map of social power in a fairly Ž xed way.
The performative will or will not be effective depending on whether the subject
who performs the utterance is already authorized to make it work by the pos-
ition of social power it occupies’ (Butler 1999: 122).
For Butler, the domains of the social and the linguistic cannot be separated
in such a distinct way because ‘the discursive constitution of the subject {is} in-
extricable from the social constitution of the subject’ (Butler 1999: 120). The
repeated effects of racial slurs, for example, live and thrive in the  esh of the
addressee. The performative interpellation of the subject in terms of race or
gender is not dependent on a speciŽ c ‘authorized’ subject but is the effect of a
generalized process of subjectiŽ cation. The diffuse nature of the process of
interpellation renders the effects of the performative potentially indeterminate
and open to subversion. The performative utterance cannot exclude the possi-
bility of going awry, of being appropriated by marginal groups in, for example,
the resigniŽ cation of terms of degradation such as queer or nigger: ‘it is
precisely the expropriability of the dominant, “authorized” discourse that con-
stitutes one potential site of its subversive resigniŽ cation’ (Butler 1999: 123). It
is this re-appropriation of the authorized position within language which serves
to expose prevailing forms of authority. Bourdieu cannot explain the troubling
effects of such indeterminacy because of the causal priority accorded to the
social over the linguistic and the Ž xity of the subject over the utterance, and, in
the Ž nal analysis, this undercuts claims about the generative nature of the
habitus.
Butler is undoubtedly right to underscore the tendency in some of Bourdieu’s
work to overestimate the accommodation between dominant symbolic codes and
corporeal hexis. This is most evident in his earlier work, for example, in his essay
 146 Economy and Society

on masculine domination (1998), which offers a rather monolithic and dualist

account of the way in which men and women are accommodated to the norms
of masculinity and femininity (McNay 2000). In theory, Bourdieu has always
conceded the possibility that it is the disjunction between habitus and the Ž eld
that may lead to a critical consciousness and the attendant possibility of social
change. Despite admitting this possibility, however, the thrust of his work has
been towards the examination of processes of social reproduction rather than
transformation. Yet, against Butler, this tendency need not be regarded as inher-
ent in the concepts of habitus and symbolic violence per se, but rather arises from
a failure on Bourdieu’s part to integrate these concepts sufficiently with his idea
of the Ž eld. Furthermore, there has been an increasing emphasis in Bourdieu’s
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more recent work on moments of disalignment and tension between habitus and
Ž eld, which may give rise to social change. It is the refractory and destabilizing
implications that the concept of the Ž eld has for the notion of habitus which
Butler disregards and which Bourdieu elaborates in Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu explores the possibilities for destabilization and misappropriation
in relation to a twofold principle of differentiation understood both as move-
ment across Ž elds and as the internal complexity of material and symbolic
relations within any given Ž eld. First, the idea of the Ž eld expresses a Weberian
principle of differentiation which means, contra Butler, that Bourdieu does not
understand social position as Ž xed but as entailing movement across Ž elds which
may involve contradictory and dissonant power relations: ‘the diversity of con-
ditions, the corresponding diversity of habitus and the multiplicity of intra- and
intergenerational movements of ascent or decline mean that habitus may, in
many cases, be confronted with conditions of actualization different from those
in which they were produced’ (Bourdieu 2000: 160–1). Second, the Ž eld is not
understood as an inert materiality, but as a complex imbrication of material and
symbolic relations of power. It is this intertwinement of the structure of ‘pos-
itions’ within the ‘space of possibles’ which disrupts the uni-directional deter-
minism that  ows from what Butler claims is the inert positivity of the Ž eld. The
tendencies of the Ž eld may be absorbed within the body in the form of disposi-
tions but, in a countervailing logic, they can react back and modify behaviour
within the Ž eld: ‘through the cognitive and motivating structures that it brings
into play . . . habitus plays its part in determining the things to be done, or not
to be done, the urgencies, etc., which trigger action’ (Bourdieu 2000: 148). In
other words, there is an ‘affective transaction’ between habitus and Ž eld which
may reinforce or dislodge objective tendencies.
The complexity of relations within and across Ž elds ensures that the con-
cordance of position and disposition is far from assured. As Bourdieu puts it,
paraphrasing Pascal: ‘from this paradoxical relation of double inclusion  ow all
the paradoxes . . . of wretchedness and greatness’ (2000: 130). Escaping simple
dichotomies between freedom and determinism or the symbolic and the
material, these paradoxical relations may result in the ‘tormented habitus’ riven
by the tension and contradictions of social marginalization which may ulti-
mately form the source of social transformation. Against the criticism of the
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 147

exaggerated congruence between habitus and the Ž eld, Bourdieu states that
habitus is not necessarily adapted to its situation nor is it internally coherent.
It has integration – which corresponds in particular to degrees of ‘crystalliza-
tion’ of the status occupied. However, it can be observed that to contradictory
positions, which tend to exert structural ‘double-binds’ on their occupants,
there often correspond ‘destabilized habitus, torn by contradiction and inter-
nal division, generating suffering’ (Bourdieu 2000: 160).
To turn attention back to Butler’s work, it can be argued that it is such a
principle of differentiation that her theory of the performative lacks. Despite
claims to the contrary, Butler deploys a concept of symbolic power which lacks
speciŽ city and which ultimately results in a type of symbolic determinism.
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Difference is understood almost exclusively as the instability of systems of

meaning rather than as social complexity. For example, her claim that there are
zones of social uninhabitability or spaces of ‘abjection’ is simply too undiffer-
entiated to have much explanatory force (e.g. Butler 1993: xi). The ability to
participate in a performative politics presupposes variable dynamics between
material and symbolic relations which cannot be captured in such a general and
ahistorical term as abjection. Visible forms of gay identity, for example, often
involve complex relations of symbolic marginalization and economic centrality.
As historians such as John D’Emilio (1984) have shown, the emergence of a
metropolitan gay identity is predicated on a convergence of social and symbolic
relations which tend towards the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of
homosexual groups. The economic power of the gay consumer – ‘the pink
pound’ – has facilitated the greater visibility of a marginalized sexuality in a
way that the ideas of abjection and resigniŽ cation do not satisfactorily capture.
This is not to dismiss identity politics as a form of life-style consumerism, as
some critics have claimed (e.g. Field 1997). Nor is it to reassert a problematic
dualism where material struggles are seen as separable and prior to symbolic
ones. In her article ‘Marxism and the merely cultural’ (1998), Butler rightly
criticizes the resurgence of an orthodox Leftism which dismisses queer politics
as an epiphenomenal Ž xation on identity and forestalls an analysis of a more
fundamental politics of redistribution. Against this, Butler argues that, not only
is the distinction between the material and symbolic unstable, but also redis-
tributive issues lie at the heart of a politics of cultural recognition. While Butler
is right to question the opposition of the material and cultural, it is still import-
ant to attempt to distinguish analytically between the different logics of social
Ž elds if the discontinuous and uneven effects of political change are to be
understood. The idea of the performative clearly alludes to the complex inter-
play of material and symbolic relations but does not really attempt to disag-
gregate them analytically. As a result, Butler’s work often moves too quickly
from outlining the constitutive instability of symbolic systems to claiming a
political status for certain ‘excentric’ sexual practices (Hennessy 1992). For
example, as Osborne and Segal point out, the parodic reinscription of hetero-
sexual norms is most effective in subcultures that are predisposed to the disso-
lution of hegemonic identities (Osborne and Segal 1994: 38). In other contexts,
 148 Economy and Society

the same reinscription can serve to re-idealize rather than denaturalize hetero-
sexual norms, as Moya Lloyd points out: ‘parody might be transgressive from
the perspective of the speciŽ c linear history of practices that constitute a par-
ticular individuated subject. . . . This does not guarantee, however, that it is
parodic when seen in the context of others’ (Lloyd 1999: 208). This is not to
deny the challenge that the assertion of homosexual rights poses to hetero-
sexuality. It does, however, throw into question some of the wider political
claims made about individualized sexual practices which privilege one dimen-
sion of oppression over others (Bourdieu 1998: 134). In short, it is essential to
recognize that the efficacity of certain types of identity politics often presup-
poses access to economic and social capital denied to other social actors. The
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inappropriateness of concepts such as the abject to capture these complex and

variable relations constitutive of different forms of social exclusion and mar-
ginalization points to a certain non-correspondence between sociological and
psychoanalytic discourses and the difficulty of transposing terms from one
domain to the other (Young 1996). Even though Butler attempts to socialize
psychoanalytic terms such as abjection and the psyche (see 1997b), the terms
cannot be used to describe the variability of social practices without some dehis-
toricizing consequences. In short, the ideas of habitus and the Ž eld allow Bour-
dieu to produce a more nuanced understanding of power relations and political
agency than Butler’s primarily symbolic account of subjectiŽ cation. In order to
understand agency in terms other than the dualisms of domination–resistance
or signiŽ cation–resigniŽ cation, it is essential to theorize the various material
relations through which symbolic norms are mediated, and the concept of the
Ž eld provides a non-reductionist way to undertake such an analysis.

Agency and change

Attendant on the charge of material determinism is the second criticism that

Bourdieu’s work precludes the possibility of autonomous agency. In fact, the
ideas of double conditioning and differentiation expressed in the habitus–Ž eld
couplet yield notions of agency and change but these diverge signiŽ cantly from
prevailing Foucauldian formulations such as Butler’s work. In elaborating a
praxeological account of agency, Bourdieu focuses on certain temporal and
hermeneutic dimensions of action which highlight the one-dimensionality of
Butler’s account of performative agency as instability within signiŽ cation. In
fact, it can be argued that Butler’s work does not in fact present an account of
practice but rather a theory of structural indeterminacy, which forms a neces-
sary but not sufficient condition for conceptualizing agency and change.
The theme of temporality has become increasingly predominant in Bour-
dieu’s work over the last few years and Pascalian Meditations offers Bourdieu’s
fullest consideration of the topic so far. A double historicity expressed in terms
of the Husserlian themes of retention and protention is used to develop a
dynamic account of embodied existence and agency (Bourdieu 1992: 139). An
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 149

understanding of embodiment as inseparable from social practice leads Bour-

dieu to speak of social agents rather than subjects (1992: 137). Praxis, or the
living through of the embodied potentialities of the habitus, is a temporal activity
where time is understood in radically historicist terms as engendered through
social being. Practice is the result of a habitus that is itself the incorporation of
temporal structures or the regularities and tendencies of the world into the body.
Embodied practice is necessarily temporal in that it both expresses and antici-
pates these tendencies and regularities. Practice, therefore, generates time: ‘time
is engendered in the actualisation of the act’ (1992: 138).
Bourdieu’s praxeological understanding of temporality is opposed in part to
rational action theory and to existentialism in two major respects. First, both
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rational action theory and existentialism subscribe to an individualist concept of

agency. In an essay in the Schusterman collection, Charles Taylor draws out the
limitations of such monological models of consciousness, which dominate in the
social sciences, for explaining the dialogical dimensions of action. The individ-
uated subject cannot explain types of action which happen insofar ‘as the agent
understands and constitutes him or herself as an integral part of a “we” ’ (Taylor
1999: 36). There are types of agency that cannot be understood as acts of a single
agent but must be understood in a collective sense of individuals as co-agents of
common action. This idea of common action does not mean the co-ordination
of individual actions as, for example, the synchronization of the moves of the
players in a football match. It refers, rather, to forms of action that are irre-
ducibly collective or dialogical, such as a conversation at the level of immediate
social interaction or, more diffusely, political or religious movements where
agents are widely scattered but share a common sense of purpose. As Taylor puts
it, ‘An action is dialogical . . . when it is effected by an integrated, non-individual
agent. This means that for those involved in it, its identity as this kind of action
essentially depends on the agency being shared’ (Taylor 1999: 36). There are, of
course, difficulties with the communitarian in ection that Taylor gives this idea
of common agency, which relate, in the Ž nal analysis, to the disregard of dis-
torting power relations immanent within most communities. Despite this, Taylor
draws attention to the way in which Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, as the somatiza-
tion of social norms resulting in a form of pre-re exive practice, explains types
of collective action in a non-mechanistic fashion. Conformity to norms is not
reducible to the idea of rule following, to a causal sequence of rule and action;
rather, it is a more uncertain and dynamic process where the enactment of norms
results in their reproduction and transformation on a collective level.
The second respect in which Bourdieu’s work on the temporality of the
habitus differs from rational action theory and existentialism is the extent to
which the latter subscribe to an intellectualist view of temporal experience which
excludes any relation to the future other than that of conscious project. Against
the idea of project, whose correlative is often a disembodied and disembedded
subject, Bourdieu counterposes the idea of protension as a form of a practical
sense of the forthcoming which elsewhere he calls allodoxia: ‘the imminent
forth-coming is present, immediately visible, as a present property of things’
 150 Economy and Society

(Bourdieu 2000: 207). It is this idea of the practical anticipation of the imma-
nent tendencies of the Ž eld which generates a concept of agency. This also con-
trasts with Foucault’s notion of the corporeal inscription of the body, which
concentrates exclusively on the retentive aspect of time as sedimentation. While
this explains the stability of corporeal identity, it does not easily yield an account
of agency (McNay 1999).
Although protension is a general feature of agency, Bourdieu considers the
ways in which power relations overdetermine the experience of anticipation
through the shaping of the agent’s expectations and orientation towards the
future: ‘the practical relation to the forth-coming, in which the experience of time
is generated, depends on power and the objective chances it opens’ (2000: 231).
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To put it schematically, class power expresses itself, for example, in the empty
time of the dispossessed, which contrasts to the full time of the busy person.
Developing the idea that practice does not take place in time but, in fact, makes
time, Bourdieu argues that the experience of temporality is engendered from the
relation between habitus and Ž eld: ‘it arises more precisely in the relationship
between the practical expectations or hopes which are constitutive of an illusio as
investment in a social game, and the tendencies immanent to this game’ (2000:
208). In everyday practices, time is not usually consciously experienced because
of the subject’s immersion in the present and in the self-evident. Time is, in fact,
experienced fully only when the correspondence between expectations and
chances is broken. Following Hegel, for example, boredom or discontent is
understood as a dissatisfaction with the present that implies its negation and the
propensity to work towards its supersession. More interestingly, Bourdieu
expands on how the phenomenological experience of time is altered by relations
of power which operate through an alignment of the subjective structure of hopes
and expectations with the objective structure of probabilities. In other words,
there is a tendency for hope to increase proportionally with social power which
enables an agent to manipulate the potentialities of the present in order to realize
some future project. Or, conversely, levels of resignation are inversely pro-
portional to class position (2000: 228). Thus, the most oppressed groups in
society oscillate between fantasy and surrender, which re ects how, below a
certain threshold of objective chances, the strategic and anticipatory disposition
diminishes. Instead, a generalized and lasting disorganization of behaviour and
thought prevails which is linked to the disappearance of any coherent vision of
the future: ‘The real ambition to control the future...varies with the real power
to control that future, which means Ž rst of all having a grasp on the present itself ’
(Bourdieu 2000: 221). In a less extreme fashion, the appeal of national lotteries
lies partly in the extent to which they re-inject expectation into the negated or
non-time of life in which nothing happens. Similarly, vandalism is understood as
the making of something out of nothing. Of course, the sub-proletarian and the
dispossessed offer limit cases of the experience of time and it does not follow
that the adjustment of expectations to objective chances cannot be broken.
Indeed, Bourdieu argues that systemic tendencies towards social complexity and
uncertainty, such as increasing occupational insecurity, social mobility, and the
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 151

expansion of higher education, lead increasingly to mismatches between expec-

tations and objective chances: ‘the lack of a future, previously reserved for the
“wretched of the earth” is an increasingly widespread, even modal experience’
(Bourdieu 2000: 234).
Far from denying agency, the idea of the protensive dimension of habitus
yields an account of action and change in terms of what Bourdieu calls regu-
lated liberties. Regulated liberties are generated through the interaction of the
space of positions with the space of possibles speciŽ c to a given Ž eld and
through the relations of homology and divergence operating across Ž elds. This
dynamic leads to ever more differentiated relations, or a lengthening of circuits
of legitimation which creates a myriad of possibilities for ‘invention/autonomy
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while remaining within the constraints and limits inherent in structure’ (2000:
116). The dialectic of positions and dispositions yields a gradualist and vari-
able, but usually non-radical, model of change, although the possibility of dra-
matic transformation is never ruled out entirely. As Bourdieu puts it, habitus
has its moments or blips when it occasionally misŽ res. In general, however, the
habitus is in a state of permanent revision, but this revision is rarely radical
because the new and unexpected is always incorporated upon the basis of pre-
viously established, embodied dispositions. Bourdieu Ž nishes with a dialectical
idea of change as generated by the interplay of necessity and contingency, or,
as he puts it, ‘the opacity of historical processes derives from the fact that
human actions are the non-random and yet never radically mastered product
of countless self-obscure encounters between habitus . . . and social universes’
(Bourdieu 2000: 116).
Bourdieu’s conceptualization of agency and change in terms of a qualiŽ ed
contingency provides an interesting contrast with post-Foucauldian thought on
these topics. In the work of Butler, for example, an unqualiŽ ed notion of inde-
terminacy comes to stand in for more substantive and delimited ideas of agency
and change. In fact, it is possible to argue that Butler’s theory of the performa-
tive does not provide a theory of agency at all, but rather a general account of
the conditions of possibility of agency. The indeterminacy of signiŽ cation pro-
vides a necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding agency. Theor-
izing agency only in terms of instabilities within meaning results in a form of
symbolic determinism, or what Stuart Hall has called a ‘reduction upwards’,
where all questions of power are reduced to that of positionality within language
(Hall 1997: 33). The idea of the performative becomes an over-generalized
mechanism which stands in for all aspects of the process of subjectiŽ cation and
for all types of agency and change. Performative agency does not distinguish suf-
Ž ciently between different modalities of power and therefore different types of
change. The substitution of an abstract account of the conditions of possibility
of agency for a theory of practice results in an undifferentiated account of change
as a process of symbolic resigniŽ cation. This, in turn, sets up a dualism of sig-
niŽ cation and resigniŽ cation, where the indeterminacy of the latter is invested
with an apodictic radicalism. ResigniŽ cation yields a concept of change as a
freedom from all determinations or as a pure and unqualiŽ ed contingency which
 152 Economy and Society

fetishizes marginality and inchoation. Such an over-extended idea of indeter-

minacy cannot produce a concept of agency because, as Bourdieu points out, if
an idea of the permanent  ux of identity prevails, then ‘habitus dissolves into
the opportunism of a kind of mens momentanea, incapable of encountering the
world and of having an integrated sense of self ’ (Bourdieu 2000: 161).
The idea of symbolic indeterminacy also results in a one-dimensional account
of change which overestimates the emancipatory impact of linguistic and sym-
bolic practices. Bourdieu’s idea of the interplay of constancy and variation does
not deny the possibility of change at this level but it tries to retain a sense of the
inertness of some social structures. There is a sense in which action can do very
little to dislodge certain sedimented inequalities that are systemically reproduced
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and, in a sense, abstracted from daily practices. The inert violence of economic
and social structures is reproduced and exerted over the intentional and practi-
cal logic of action. It is such a notion of systemic determination that symbolic
feminists, Butler included, foreclose in their rather unqualiŽ ed insistence on the
emancipatory effects of strategies of resigniŽ cation. This is not to deny the sub-
versive potential of such practices, it is however, to resist the tendency within
much work on identity to view all types of inequality and power through the
narrow prism of discourse and sexuality. Many inequalities of gender are repro-
duced in an autopoetic fashion through abstract, systemic dynamics which are
relatively resistant to the destabilizing effects of a radical sexual politics. As the
sociologist Janet Saltzman Chafetz puts it, ‘Gender systems are structured so as
to automatically reproduce themselves’ (1990: 94). Such a view of the inert vio-
lence of social structures does not deny the possibility of change. Rather, it leads
to a conceptualization of processes of social transformation as gradual and
unevenly realized throughout the social structure rather than in dualisms of
determinacy and indeterminacy or domination and resistance.
The hermeneutic aspect to Bourdieu’s work on time and power highlights the
extent to which the notion of indeterminacy is too conceptually impoverished
to capture meaningfully an idea of emancipatory change. His analysis of the ways
in which power overdetermines the experience of hope by adjusting expectations
to objective chances demonstrates the extent to which the formulation of change
in the abstract idea of indeterminacy would be meaningless to many social actors.
This is not to fetishize everyday ‘experience’ as some touchstone of validity.
Bourdieu values interpretative analysis in the context of what Paul Ricoeur has
called a hermeneutics of suspicion, which recognizes the mediation of experi-
ence through relations of power. What the hermeneutic perspective highlights,
however, is the extent to which the elliptical idea of indeterminacy sidesteps the
concrete and political realities associated with change. This is evident for
example in the work of Drucilla Cornell (1993) on ethical feminism. Deploying
the Derridean notion of iterability, Cornell argues that the idea that the category
of femininity represents the limit of meaning within symbolic systems should be
understood not as an absolute bar, but rather as a metaphor of the excess inher-
ent to all identiŽ cation. The historicity and, therefore, inherent instability of
identity prevents its full institution and points to the ethical possibilities of
 Lois McNay: Meditations on Pascalian Meditations 153

reworking identity. This dialogical notion of temporality, of a past which cannot

be fully recollected (‘secondness’) and which yields a notion of futurity unde-
termined by the already actualized past (‘thirdness’), is inherent in the Lacan-
ian notion of the ‘future anterior’ and is central to Cornell’s deŽ nition of ethical
feminism. Ethical feminism is based around a re-exploration of the past in terms
of the recollective imagination which revalues and extends our notion of the
meaning of the category of woman. It is also predicated upon an exploration of
the ‘should be’ within representations of the feminine, as a refusal of closure and
as an openness to rethinking and justifying our sittlich commitments. The diffi-
culty with this idea of the future anterior is that it remains an abstract possibility
which does not lend itself to a thorough-going socio-historical understanding of
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change. As in Butler’s work, a more determinate concept of change is substi-

tuted with a structural potentiality.
Cornell’s work on the ethical promise of the future can be contrasted, for
example, with Suzanne Franks’ work in Having None of It which documents an
increased disparity between young women’s heightened expectations of social
equality and the objective reality of continuing gender discrimination. In Bour-
dieusian terms, there is an increasing mismatch, for many women, between
expectations and objective probabilities. A hermeneutic perspective reveals that
the problem for a feminist programme of emancipatory change is not the recog-
nition of the potentiality for change within the increasing instability of gender
norms in an era of de-traditionalization. Rather, it is combating the ways in
which the actuality of systemically maintained inequalities close off the poten-
tiality of change both at the level of material conditions and in terms of the indi-
vidual’s experience of hope. Realization of that disjunction means that hope
becomes distorted into cynicism and resignation. In other words, the general-
ized use of the term indeterminacy to describe all anticipatory relations to the
future disregards and undervalues the speciŽ c ways in which hope is fostered
and negated, recognized and misrecognized, at the level of the individual.
Cornell’s formulation of the instability of the category of femininity is, in Nancy
Fraser’s (1995) words, ‘an abstract promise’ that the symbolic order could be
otherwise, which does little to explain the material and cultural shifts and con-
 icts that underlie change within gender norms.
At the very least, what Bourdieu demonstrates in Pascalian Meditations is that
materialist analysis is not necessarily reductionist. The automatic con ation of
the terms materialism and reductionism seems to be one of the pernicious effects
of the linguistic turn initiated in post-structural thought and perpetuated in
much contemporary work on identity. Pascalian Meditations not only demon-
strates the precision and analytical force of materialist analysis, but it also shows
that determinism is as much a problem for symbolic and discursive modes of
analysis. More than that, however, Pascalian Meditations conŽ rms Bourdieu’s
status as one of today’s most important and innovative thinkers within sociology.
Like Foucault, Bourdieu works away at a series of core concepts, revising and
reŽ ning them in response to criticisms and self-perceived limitations. In par-
ticular, the temporalization of the concepts of habitus and the Ž eld throws down
 154 Economy and Society
important challenges to the burgeoning – and often theoretically naïve – area of
thought on the nature of identity and change in a post-traditional society.
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