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The three forms of theoretical knowledge

Pierre Bourdieu
Social Science Information 1973 12: 53
DOI: 10.1177/053901847301200103

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 Theory and methods
Théorie et méthodes

PIERRE BOURDIEU

The three forms of theoretical knowledge

The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical knowledge,

each of which implies a set of (usually tacit) anthropological theses. The only
thing these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all stand in
opposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge we shall term
phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of currently active schools,
&dquo;interactionist&dquo; or &dquo;ethnomethodological&dquo;) makes explicit primary expe-
rience of the social world: perception of the social world as natural and self-
evident is not self-reflective by definition and excludes all interrogation about
its own conditions of possibility. At a second level, objectivist knowledge
(of which the structuralist hermeneutic constitutes a particular case) constructs
the objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) structuring not only prac-
tices but representations of practices and in particular primary knowledge,
practical and tacit, of the familiar world, by means of a break with this primary
knowledge and, hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer
upon the social world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivist
knowledge can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and the
objective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of
these structures is absent), provided it poses the very problem doxic experience
of the social world excludes by definition, namely the problem of the (specific)
conditions under which this experience is possible. Thirdly, what we might
refer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned not only with the system
of objective relations constructed by the objectivist form of knowledge, but
also with the dialectical relationships between these objective structures and the
structured dispositions which they produce and which tend to reproduce
them, i.e. the dual process of the internalization of externality and the exter-
nalization of internality. This knowledge presupposes a break with the objec-
tivist form of knowledge, that is, it presupposes investigation into the condi-
tions of possibility and, consequently, into the limits of the objectivistic view-
fromat the
GRANDoutside, fait accompli,2, 2014 rather than
point which grasps practices
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VALLEY STATE a LIB
UNIV on September

53
54

construct their generative principle by placing itself inside the process of their
accomplishment.
The praxeological form of knowledge may appear to be a regression to the
phenomenological mode of knowledge, while the implied critique of objecti-
vism is liable to be confused with the critique of scientific objectification for-
mulated by naive humanism in the name of lived experience and the rights
of subjectivity. This is so because it is the product of a double theoretical
movement of translation : in effect, it carries out a second reversal of the pro-
blematic that objective science of the social world, seen as a system of objec-
tive relationships, constituted by posing those problems which practical expe-
rience and the phenomenological analysis of that experience exclude. Just
as objectivist knowledge poses the problem of the conditions of possibility
of practical experience, thereby demonstrating that this experience is defined,
fundamentally, by the fact that it does not pose this problem, so praxeolo-
gical knowledge sets objectivist knowledge on its feet by posing the problem
of the conditions of possibility of this problem (theoretical, but also social con-
ditions) and, at the same time, makes it apparent that objectivist knowledge
is defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it excludes this problem. Being
set up in opposition to practical perception of the social world, objectivist
knowledge is distracted from the task of constructing the theory of practical
knowledge of the social world. Praxeological knowledge does not cancel out
the gains accruing from objectivist knowledge, rather it conserves and trans-
cends them by integrating that which this knowledge had to exclude in order
to obtain them.
We must pause for a moment on what is objectivism’s field par excellence,
that of semiology. Just as Saussure postulates that language is an autono-
mous object, irreducible to its concrete actualizations, that is to the speech-
behaviour it makes possible, so Panofsky establishes that what he calls,
following Alois Riegl, Kunstwollen, in other words, roughly, the objective
meaning of a work 1, is no more reducible to the artist’s &dquo;will&dquo; than it is to the
&dquo;will of the age&dquo; or to the lived experiences which the work arouses in the spec-
tator. In so doing, both Saussure and Panofsky carry out, with regard to
speech, that particular form of behaviour, and to works of art, those particu-
lar products of action, the operation which builds objectivist science by build-
ing a system of objective relations that are as irreducible to the practices
within which they are realized and manifested as they are to the intentions
of the subjects, and to any awareness these may have of its constraints or its
logic. Saussure shows that the true medium of communication between two
is
agents not speech, as an immediate datum grasped in its observable mate-
riality, but language, as the structure of objective relations making both the

1. "That which ’presents itself’, not to us, but objectively, as the ultimate and definitive
meaning of the Downloaded
artistic phenomenon" (E. Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens",
from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14, 1920, pp. 321-339).
 55

production and decoding of speech possible. Similarly, Panofsky shows that

iconological interpretation treats the tangible properties of the work of art,
with the affective experiences it arouses, as mere &dquo;cultural symptoms&dquo;, which
only fully yield up their meaning to a reading armed with the cultural code
the creator himself has &dquo;involved&dquo; in his work.
Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo; presupposes an unconscious decoding ope-
ration which can only be perfectly adequate where the competence which one
of the agents engages in his practice or in his works is identical to that objec-
tively engaged by the other agent in his perception of this practice or work;
in other words, in the particular case in which the coding -
in the sense of the
transformation of a subjective meaning into a practice or a work - coincides
with the symetrical decoding operation. Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo;, a de-
coding act that does not recognize itself as such, is only possible (and only really
accomplished) in the particular case where the historical code which makes the
(unconscious) act of decoding possible, is completely mastered (as a cultivated
disposition) by the perceiving agent and coincides with the code which has (as
a cultivated disposition) made the production of the perceived practice or
work possible. Partial or total misunderstanding is the rule in all other cases,
the illusion of immediate comprehension leading to illusory comprehension,
that of ethnocentrism, in the sense of a code interference: in short, when its
sole cognitive tool is what Husserl termed the &dquo; intentional transfer into the
Other&dquo;, even the most &dquo;comprehensive&dquo; interpretation is liable to amount
to no more than a particularly irreproachable form of ethnocentrism.
As the heirs to an intellectual heritage, that of linguistics, whose conditions
of production they are not always able to reproduce, structuralist anthropo-
logists have all too often contented themselves with literal translations of
linguistic terms dissociated from the structure from which they derived their
original meaning, sparing themselves the trouble of undertaking their own
epistemological reflection on the conditions and the limits of the validity
of the transposition of the Saussurian construction. It is noteworthy, for
example, that, with the exception of Sapir, who was predisposed by his dual
formation as linguist and anthropologist to raise the problem of the rela-
tionship between culture and language, no anthropologist has attempted
to bring out all the implications of the homology (which Leslie White is vir-
tually alone in formulating explicitly) between two oppositions, language
and speech on one side culture, and behaviour or works on the other side.
Objectivism states that immediate communication is possible if, and only if,
the agents are objectively disposed in such a way that they associate the same
meaning with the same sign (speech, practice or work) and the same sign with
the same meaning or, to put it another way, if they are objectively disposed
in such a way that, in their coding and decoding operations, i.e. in their prac-
tices and their interpretations, they both refer to one and the same system
of constant relations, independent of individual consciousness or wills and
irreducible to their execution
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in theat GRAND of practices or
STATE UNIV LIB works 2,(code
on September 2014 or cipher).
56

In so doing, objectivism does not deny the phenomenological analysis of

primary experience of the social world and of the immediate comprehension

of speech or actions: it merely sets the limits of its validity by establishing
the particular conditions within which it is possible and which phenomeno-
logical analysis leaves out of account. The social sciences have, necessarily,
to quote Husserl, &dquo;a thematics with a consistently dual orientation, a the-
matics consistently linking theory of the scientific field with a theory of the
knowledge of that theory&dquo; 2; in other words, epistemological reflection on
the conditions of possibility of the anthropological sciences forms an inte-
gral part of the anthropological sciences. That is so firstly because a science
which has as its very object that which makes the science possible, such as
language or culture, can only constitute itself by the constitution of its own
conditions of possibility; but it is also because complete knowledge of the
conditions of the science, that is, of the operations whereby this science acquires
symbolic mastery of a language, a myth or a rite, implies the knowledge of prac-
tical comprehension: the practical knowledge accomplishes the same oper-
ations, though in absolute ignorance of the general and particular conditions
within which it is possible and which confer its particularity upon it.
We have only to examine the theoretical operations whereby Saussure builds
up linguistics as a science, by treating language as an autonomous object,
distinct from its materializations in speech, in order to reveal the presuppo-
sitions implicit in any form of knowledge which treats practices or works
as symbolic facts to be decoded and, more generally, which treats them as

accomplished facts rather than as practices. Although one could invoke

the existence of dead languages or of mutism in old age as demonstrating that
it is possible for speech to disappear while language remains preserved,
although language faults reveal language as constituting the objective norms
underlying speech (were it otherwise, any language fault would modify the
language and there would be no language faults), speech appears to be the condi-
tion of language, as much from an individual as from a collective point of view,
since language cannot be apprehended outside of speech, because language
is learnt by means of speech, and because speech lies at the origin of inno-
vations in and transformations of language. But the priority of the two pro-
cesses mentioned is merely chronological; when one leaves the field of indivi-
dual or collective history, as does objectivist hermeneutics, in order to inquire
into the logical conditions of decoding, the relationship is turned on its head :
language is the condition of the intelligibility of speech, that is the mediation
which, ensuring the identity of the associations of sounds and concepts ope-
rated by the senders and receivers, guarantees mutual comprehension. So,
from this point of view, that of intelligibility, speech is the product of lan-
guage 3. It follows that, because it is developed from the strictly intellec-
2. E. Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendentale, Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1965, p. 52.
Downloaded
Coursfrom
de ssi.sagepub.com
3. F. de Saussure, linguistiqueatgénérale,
GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2,37-38.
Paris, Payot, 1960, pp. 2014
 57

tualist point of view, that of decoding, Saussurian linguistics gives priority

to the structure of signs, that is, to the relations between them, to the detriment
of their practical functions, which are never reducible, as structuralism tacitly
assumes, to functions of communication or knowledge: those practices apparent-
ly most strictly oriented towards functions of communication for the sake of com-
munication (the phatic function) or communication for the purposes of know-
ledge, such as feasts and ceremonies, ritual exchanges or, in a wholly different
field, the circulation of scientific information, are always more or less openly
oriented towards political or economic functions.
Structuralist linguistics bases the construction of the structural properties
of the message as such, that is to say, as a system, on the assumption of an
impersonal and interchangeable sender and receiver and on the ignorance
of the functional properties that each message owes to its utilization within
a certain social(>, structured interaction. In fact, we know well that the sym-
bolic interactions within any group depend, not only on the structure of the
interaction group within which they occur 4, but also on the social struc-
tures within which the interacting agents are situated (e.g. the class structure):
consequently, it is probable that a measurement of symbolic exchanges which
would enable us to distinguish, with Chapple and Coon 5, those who only
originate, those who only respond and those who respond to the sending of
the first group while originating with regard to the second group, would reveal,
both on the level of a society in its entirety and inside a circumstantial group,
the dependence of the structure of symbolic power relations upon the struc-
ture of political power relations. The perfect competition model is just as
unrealistic here as it is elsewhere, the market in symbolic goods also having
its monopolies and its structures of domination.
In short, the moment one shifts from the structure of language to the func-
tions it fulfills, that is, to the uses agents really make of it, one sees that know-
ledge of the code alone permits only a very imperfect mastery of the linguistic
interactions actually carried out; as Luis Prieto observes, the meaning of a
linguistic element depends at least as much on extra-linguistic as on linguistic
factors, that is, on the context and situation in which it is employed. It is
as if, in the class of significates abstractly corresponding to a speech sound,
the receiver &dquo;selected&dquo; the one that seemed to him to be compatible with the
circumstances, such as he perceives them 6. Which is another way of saying
that the reception (and doubtless the emission too) largely depends on the
objective structure of the relations between the objective positions in the so-
cial structure of the interacting agents (e.g. competitive relations, objectively

4. S. Moscovici and M. Plon, "Les situations-colloques : Observations théoriques et expé-

rimentales", Bulletin de psychologie, jan. 1966, pp. 701-722.
5. E. D. Chapple and C. S. Coon, Principles of anthropology, London, Jonathan Cape,
1947, p. 283.
6. L. J. Prieto, Principes de noologie, Paris, Mouton, 1964, and J. C. Pariente, "Vers un
nouvel esprit linguistique", Critique,
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com
apr.at GRAND pp. 334-358.
1966, VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
58

antagonistic relations or power and authority relationships, etc.), for it is this

structure which determines the form assumed by the interactions observed
within a particular conjuncture.

Nothing demonstrates better the inappropriateness of the theory of prac-

tice haunting linguistic (and also anthropological) structuralism than its
inability to integrate, into this theory, all that pertains to execution, as Saus-
sure puts it. The foundations of this inability reside in the incapacity to
think of speech and, more generally, of practice otherwise than as execution 1.
Objectivism constructs a theory of practice (as execution), but only as a nega-
tive sub-product or, one might say, as a refuse immediately thrown away,
left over from the construction of language or culture as systems of objective
relations. So, with the aim of delimiting, within language facts, the &dquo;field
of language&dquo; and of isolating &dquo;a well defined object&dquo;, &dquo;an object capable of
being studied seperately&dquo;, &dquo;with a homogeneous nature&dquo;, Saussure rejects
the &dquo;physical aspect of communication&dquo;, that is, speech as a pre-constructed
object, liable to obstruct the construction of language; then within the &dquo;speech
circuit&dquo;, he isolates what he terms the &dquo;executive aspect &dquo;, that is, speech as a
constructed object, defined as the actualization of a certain meaning within
a particular combination of sounds, which he finally eliminates by stating that
&dquo;execution is never carried out by the collectivity&dquo;, but is &dquo;always individual&dquo;.
Thus, the same concept, that of speech, is divided by theoretical construction
into a preconstructed datum, which is immediately observable and the very one
against which the operation of theoretical construction is carried out, and a
constructed object, the negative product of the operation whereby language as
such is constituted or, better, which produces the two objects by producing
the conflicting relationship within which and by which they are defined. It
would be easy to show that the construction of the concept of culture in -

the sense of cultural anthropology or of social structure (in Radcliffe-

-

Brown’s sense and that of social anthropology) also implies the construction
of a notion of conduct as execution which coexists with the primary notion
of conduct as simple behaviour taken at face value. The extreme confusion
of debates on the relationship between &dquo;culture&dquo; (or &dquo;social structures&dquo;)
and conduct usually arises out of the fact that the constructed meaning of
conduct and its implied theory of practice lead a kind of clandestine existence
inside the discourse of both the defenders and the opponents of cultural
anthropology. In fact, the most virulent opponents of the notion of &dquo;cul-
7. "Neither is the psychological part of the circuit wholly responsible: the executive side
is missing, for execution is never carried out by the collectivity. Execution is always indivi-
dual, and the individual is always its master: I shall call the executive side speaking (parole)"
(F. de Saussure, Course in general linguistics, New York, Philosophical Library, 1959, p. 13).
The most explicit formulation of the theory of speech as execution is certainly found in the work
of Hjelmslev, who clearly reveals the various dimensions of the Saussurian opposition between
language and speech, the former being institutional, social and "rigid", the other being
executive, individual and "non-rigid" (L. Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques, Copenhagen,
Nordisk Sprog-ogDownloaded
Kulturforlag, 1959, esp.
from ssi.sagepub.com p. 79).
at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
 59

ture&dquo;, such
as Radcliffe-Brown, can only set over a naive realism against
the realism of the ideas which turn &dquo;culture&dquo; into a transcendent and autonomous
reality, which obeys only its own internal laws e. The implicit state of its theory
of practice is what protects objectivism against the only really decisive criti-
cism, that which would be aimed at its theory of practice, the generator of all
those metaphysical aberrations on the &dquo;locus of culture&dquo;, on the mode of
existence of the &dquo;structure&dquo; or on the unconscious finality of the history
of systems, not to mention the too famous &dquo;collective consciousness&dquo; 9.
Short of constructing practice other than negatively, that is, as execution,
objectivism is condemned either only to record regularities, ignoring the whole
8. "Let us consider what are the concrete, observable facts with which the social anthro-
pologist is concerned. If we set out to study, for example, the aboriginal inhabitants of a
part of Australia, we find a certain number of individual human beings in a certain natural
environment. We can observe the acts of behaviour of these individuals, including of course
their acts of speech, and the material products of past actions. We do not observe a "cul-
ture", since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is com-
monly used a vague abstraction. But direct observation does reveal to us that these human
beings are connected by a complex network of social relations. I use the term "social struc-
ture" to denote this network of actually existing relations" (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, "On
social structure", Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
70, 1940, pp. 1-12). The reason for the extreme confusion surrounding debates on the
notion of culture probably lies in the fact that most authors place —
if only in order to oppose
them — concepts of very different epistemological status, such as culture and society or the
individual or conduct, etc., on the same level. The imaginary dialogue on the notion of
culture presented by Clyde Kluckhohn and William H. Kelly . cf C. Kluckhohn and W. H.
(
Kelly, "The concept of culture", pp. 78-105 in: R. Linton (ed.), The science of man in the
world crisis, New York, Columbia University Press, 1945) gives a more summary, though
livelier image of this debate than that to be found in A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn’s
work, Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 1952, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethno-
logy 67 (1). Leach has observed that, despite their apparent opposition, Malinowski and
Radcliffe-Brown at least agree to consider each "society" or each "culture" (in their respec-
tive vocabularies) as a "totality made up of a number of discrete, empirical ’things’, of
rather diverse kinds e. g. groups of people, ’institutions’, customs" or also as "an empi-
—

rical whole made up of a limited number of readily identifiable parts", the comparison
between different societies having the purpose of examining whether the "same kinds of
parts" are to be found in all cases (E. R. Leach, Rethinking anthropology, London, Athlone
Press, 1961, p. 6).
9. If we except those rare authors who confer on the notion of conduct a meaning that
is rigorously defined by the operation constituting it as opposed to "culture" (for example,
H. D. Laswell, who states that "if an act conforms to culture then it is conduct, if not, it is be-
haviour", H. D. Lasswell, "Collective autism as a consequence of culture contact", Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung 4, 1935, pp. 232-247) without drawing any conclusions from it, most of
those who employ the opposition propose epistemologically discordant definitions of culture
or of conduct, opposing a constructed object to a preconstructed datum, leaving the place
of the second constructed object, namely practice, in the sense of execution, empty: thus —

and this is far from the worst example —

Harris opposes "cultural patterns" to "culturally

patterned behaviours", as "what is constructed by the anthropologist" and "what members
of a society observe or impose upon others" (M. Harris, "Review of selected writings of
Edward Sapir, language, culture
Downloaded from and atpersonality",
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Language (3), 2,1951,
September 2014 pp. 288-333).
60

question of the principle of their production, or to reify abstractions, by

treating objects constructed by science -

be they &dquo;culture&dquo;, &dquo;structures&dquo;,

&dquo;social classes&dquo;, &dquo;modes of production&dquo;, etc. as autonomous realities,
-

endowed with social efficacity, capable of acting as subjects responsible for

historical actions or as a power capable of constraining practices. Although
it has the merit of rejecting the coarser forms of the realism of ideas, the
hypothesis of the unconscious nonetheless tends to mask the contradictions
arising out of the uncertainties of the theory of practice which &dquo;structural
anthropology&dquo; accepts, if only by omission, and even worse, it may permit
the restoration -
in the apparently secularized form of a structure that is
structured without the aid of any structuring principle of the old entelechies
-

of social metaphysics. Unless, of course, one assumes, along with Durkheim,

that none of the implicit rules constraining subjects &dquo;are to be found in
their entirety in their applications by individuals, since they may even exist
without actually being applied&dquo; 10, and consequently that the rules have
the transcendent and permanent existence that Durkheim ascribes to all col-
lective &dquo;realities&dquo;, it is impossible to escape the coarsest naiveties of legalism,
which believes practices to be the product of obedience to norms, except by
playing on the multiple meanings of the word rule: most often used in the sense
of a social norm, expressly stated and explicitly recognized, as the moral or
juridical law, sometimes in the sense of a theoretical model, a construction
developed by science in order to explain practices, the word is also used,
exceptionally, in the sense of a scheme (schème) (or a principle) that is im-
manent in practice, which should be considered implicit rather than uncons-
cious, merely in order to signify that it exists in a practical state, in the
practice of agents, and not in their consciousness.
One has only to re-read the following paragraph, from the preface of the
second edition of Structures elenrerrtaires de la pat-eiiti (Elementary structures
of kinslrip) dealing with the distinction between &dquo;preferential&dquo; and &dquo;pres-
criptive systems&dquo;, in which one may assume that the terms norm, rule or model
are used with particular care: &dquo;Conversely, a system which recommends mar-

riage with the mother’s brother’s daughter may be called prescriptive even
if the rule is seldom observed, since what it says must be done. The question
of how far and in what proportion the members of a given society respect
the norm is very interesting, but a different question to that of where this
society should properly be placed in a typology. It is sufficient to acknow-
ledge the likelihood that awareness of the rule inflects choices ever so little
in the prescribed direction, and that the percentage of conventional marriages
is higher than would be the case if marriages were made at random, to be able
to recognize what might be called a matrilateral ‘oper-ator’ at work in this
society and acting as a pilot: certain alliances at least follow the path which it

10. E. Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris, Presses Universitaires

de France, 1956, p.Downloaded
11. from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
 61

charts out for them, and this suffices to imprint a specific curve in the genea-
logical space. ~( No doubt there will be not just one curve but a great number of
local curves, merely incipient for the most part, however, and forming closed
cycles only in rare and exceptional cases. But the structural outlines which
emerge here and there will be enough for the system to be used in making
a probabilistic version of more rigid systems the notion of which is completely
theoretical and in which marriage would conform rigorously to any rule the
social group pleases to enunciate.&dquo; 11 This passage, as indeed the whole preface,
is written in the language of norms, while Structural anthropology is written in
the language of models, or if one prefers, of structures; this vocabulary is not
entirely absent here, since the system of physico-mathematical metaphors
on which the central passage is founded (&dquo;operator&dquo;, &dquo;certain alliances&dquo;
&dquo;follow the path which it charts out for them&dquo;, &dquo;curvature&dquo; of the &dquo;genealo-
gical space&dquo;, &dquo;structures&dquo;) evokes the logic of the theoretical model and the
-
both declared and repudiated equivalence of model and norm : &dquo;A pre-
-

ferential system is prescriptive when envisaged at the model level, a prescrip-

tive system must be preferential when envisaged on the level of reality.&dquo; 12
But for those who remember the passages in Structural anthropology on the
relationship between language and kinship (e.g. &dquo; ’Kinship systems’, like
’phonemic systems’, are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought. &dquo;13)
and the imperious flatness with which &dquo;cultural norms&dquo; and all the &dquo;rationali-
zations&dquo; or &dquo;secondary arguments&dquo; produced by the natives were rejected in
favour of &dquo;unconscious tructures&dquo;, not to mention those passages where
the universality of the rule lying at the origins of exogamy is affirmed, the
concessions made here to &dquo;awareness of the rule&dquo;, and the dissociation from these
rigid systems, whose notion is completely theoretical, may come as a surprise,
as may this other passage taken from the same preface: &dquo;It is nonetheless true
that the empirical reality of so-called prescriptive systems only takes on its
full meaning when related to a theoretical mode worked out by the natives
themselves prior to ethnologists.&dquo;11; or again: &dquo;Those who practise them
know .fully that the spirit of such systems cannot be reduced to the tautological
proposition that each group obtains its women from ’givers’ and gives its
daughters to ’takers’. They are also aware that marriage with the matrilateral
cross cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter) provides the simplest illustration
of the rule, the form most likely to guarantee its survival. On the other hand,
marriage with the patrilateral cross cousin (father’s sister’s daughter)
would violate it irrevocably&dquo; 15. One must mention, here, a passage in which

11. C. Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship, London, Social science paper-
backs, 1969, p. 33 (my italics).
12. Ibid.
13. C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural anthropology, London, Allen Lane, Penguin Press,
1968, p. 34.
14. Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship, op. cit., p. 32.
15. Ibid.
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62

Wittgenstein enumerates all the questions evaded by structural anthropology

and doubtless, more generally, by all intellectualism, which transfers the objec-
tive truth established by science into a practice which excludes the disposition
which would make it possible to establish this truth 16 :&dquo;What do I call the
rule by which he proceeds? The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use of
words; or the rule which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he
gives us in reply if we ask him what his rule is? But if observation does not
enable us to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light ? For he
did indeed give me a definition when I asked him what he understood by ’N’;
but he was prepared to withdraw and alter it. So, how am I to determine the
rule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself. Or, to
ask a better question: What meaning is the expression ’the rule according to
which he acts’ supposed to have left in it here?&dquo; 11 To consider regularity,
i. e. what recurs with a certain statistically measurable freguency, as the product
of a consciously laid-down and consciously respected regulation (so having
to explain both their genesis and their effectiveness), or else as the product
of the ullconsciolls regulation of some mysterious cerebral and social mecha-
nism, is to slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model: &dquo;Take
the example of the difference between ’the train is regularly two minutes late’
and ’as a rule the train is two minutes late’: [...]in the latter case it is suggest-
ed that the fact that the train is two minutes late is the result of a policy or
plan [...]I Rules relate to plans and policies, while regularities do not [...]To
claim that there ought to be rules in natural language amounts to claiming
that roads ought to be red because they correspond to the red lines on a map&dquo; 18.
All sociological statements should be preceded by a sign announcing &dquo;it is
as if&dquo; and should function in the same way as quantifiers in logic, which would

continually remind us of the epistemological status of the constructed concepts

of objective science. Everything conspires to encourage the reification of
concepts, beginning with the logic of ordinary language, which is inclined to
infer the substance from the substantive or to award to concepts the power
to act in history in the same way as the words designating them act in the sen-
tences of historical discourse, that is as historical subjects. As Wittgenstein
remarked, one has only to slip from the adverb &dquo;unconsciously&dquo; (&dquo;uncons-
ciously I have a toothache&dquo;) to the substantive &dquo;unconscious&dquo;, or to a cer-
tain usage of the adjective &dquo;unconscious&dquo; (as in &dquo;I have an unconscious tooth-
ache&dquo;) in order to produce prodigies of metaphysical profundity 19. Simi-
16. This is an unwarranted transfer of the same type as that which, according to Merleau-
cf M. Merleau-
Ponty, generates the intellectualist and the empiricist errors in psychology .
(
Ponty, La structure du comportement, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949, esp. p.
124, 135).
17. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1963,
pp. 38-39.
18. P. Ziff, Semantic analysis, New York, Cornell University Press, 1960, p. 38.
19. L. Wittgenstein, Le cahier bleu et le cahier brun, études préliminaires aux investi-
gations philosophiques, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 57-58.
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 63

larly, one can observe the theoretical (and political) effects capable of being
engendered by the personification of collectives (in such sentences as &dquo;the
bourgeoisie thinks that...&dquo; or &dquo;the working class rejects...&dquo;) which amounts
to an assertion of the existence of a group or class &dquo;collective consciousness&dquo; :

by crediting groups institutions

or with dispositions that can only arise in
individual consciousness, even if they are the product of collective conditions,
such as the awakening of consciousness of class interests, one gets out of ana-
lyzing these conditions and those, in particular, which determine the degree
of objective and subjective homogeneity of the group under consideration and
the degree of consciousness among its members.
The paralogism underlying legalism consists in implicitly placing in the
consciousness of individual agents the theoretical knowledge which can only
be constructed and conquered against practical experience; in other terms,
it consists in conferring the value of an anthropological description upon a
theoretical model constructed in order to account for practices. The theory
of action as simple execution of a model (in the dual sense of norm and of
scientific construction) is only one example among many of the imaginary
anthropology engendered by objectivism when, taking, as Marx puts it, &dquo;the
things of logic for the logic of things&dquo;, it turns the objective meaning of prac-
tices or works into the subjective purpose of the activity of the producers of
these practices or works, with its impossible homo economicus subjecting his
decision-making to rational calculation, its actors carrying out roles or acting
in conformity with models, or its speakers selecting from among phonemes.
~
’

Structures, habitus and practices .

It is necessary to go beyond methodical objectivism, which constitutes a

necessary phase in all research, as a tool facilitating the break with primary
experience and as an instrument for the construction of objective relations.
To escape from the realism of the structure, which treats systems of objective
relations as substances by converting them into wholes already constituted
outside of the history of the individual and the history of the group, it is both
necessary and sufficient to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi,
from statistical regularity or from algebraic structure to the principle of the
production of this observed order: the construction of the theory of practice
or, more precisely, of the mode of generation of practices, is the condition of
the construction of an experimental science of the dialectic of internality and
externality, that is, of the ititet-iializatioti of externality and of the extertiali.:a-
tiof2 of internality. The structures of a particular type of environment (e.g.
the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition), which
may be grasped empirically in the form of the regularities associated with
a socially structured environment, produce habitus, systems of durable dis-
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 64

positions 2°, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring struct-

ures, i.e. as the principle of the generation and structuration of practices and
representations. Consequently, these can be objectively &dquo;regulated&dquo; and
&dquo;regular&dquo; without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objec-
tively adapted to their purposes without presupposing any conscious aiming
of ends and an express mastery of those operations leading to these ends and,
. being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of a conduct-
or’s orchestrating action.
Even when they appear to be determined by the future, that is, by the expli-
cit -

and explicitly stated - purpose of a project or plan, the practices produced

by the habitus, as the generating principle of strategies enabling one to cope
with unforeseen and ever-changing situations, are determined by the implicit
anticipation of their consequences; being determined by the past conditions
of the production of their principle of production, they always tend to repro-
duce the objective structures of which they are, in the last analysis, the product.
Thus, for example, in the interaction between two agents or groups of agents
possessing the same habitus (say A and B), it is as if the actions of each of them
(say, alfor A) were organized in relation to the reactions they would call forth
in any agent possessing the same habitus (say bl, B’s reaction to al) in such a
way that they objectively anticipate the reaction which these reactions call
forth in turn (say a2, the reaction to bl). Nothing could be more naive,
however, than to accept the teleological description according to which each
action (say, al) was designed to make possible the reaction to the reaction
it provoked (say a2 as reaction to bl). The habitus generates a sequence of
&dquo;moves&dquo; which are objectively organized as strategies without in any way being
the product of a true strategic intention (which would suppose, for example,
that they be perceived as one strategy among several possible strategies).
We cannot exclude the possibility that the habitus’ responses may be accom-
panied by a strategic calculation tending to carry out, quasi-consciously,
what the habitus carries out in another manner, namely an estimate of the
chances based on the transformation of the past effect into anticipated future
effect. These responses are nonetheless primarily related to a field of object-
ive potentialities, immediately contained within the present, things to be
done or not to be done, to be said or not said, which, as opposed to the future
as &dquo;absolute possibility&dquo; (absolute Möglichkeit), in Hegel’s sense, projected

by the pure project of a &dquo;negative liberty&dquo;, has an urgency and a claim to

existence excluding all deliberation. Symbolic, that is, conrentional and condi-
tional stimuli, which only act upon agents conditioned to perceive them, tend
to impose themselves unconditionally and necessarily when inculcation of

20. The word "disposition" seems particularly appropriate for expressing what is cover-
ed by the concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions): firstly, it expresses the
result of an organizing action, having a meaning very close to such words as structure; further-
more, it designates a manner of being, an habitual state (in particular, concerning the body)
and, especially, a predisposition, a tendency, a propensity or an inclination.
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 65

the arbitrary abolishes the arbitrariness of the inculcation and of the signi-
fications inculcated: the world of emergencies, of goals already achieved, of
objects possessing a &dquo;permanently teleological character&dquo;, as Husserl puts it,
such as tools, of paths already marked out, of values transformed into things,
which is that of practice can allow only a conditional freedom - liberet si
liceret -
rather similar to that of the magnetic needle which, as Leibniz ima-
gined it, actually enjoyed pointing northwards. One regularly observes a very
close relationship between scientifically constructed objective probabilities (e. g.
opportunities of access to higher education or to museums, etc.) and subject-
ive aspirations (&dquo;motivations&dquo;) : this is not so because agents consciously
adjust their aspirations to a precise evaluation of their chances of success the -

way a gambler might modify his bets as a function of perfect information

regarding his chances of winning -

as we assume implicitly when, forgetting

the &dquo;it is as if&dquo;, we act as if the game theory or the calculus of probabilities,
both of them constructed against spontaneous dispositions, amounted to
anthropological descriptions of practice. Completely reversing the tendency
of objectivism, we can, on the contrary, seek in the rules of the scientific cons-
truction of probabilities or strategies, not an anthropological model of prac-
tice, but rather a negative description of the implicit tendencies of the sponta-
neous strategy or statistics, which they necessarily imply, since they are expli-

citly constructed against these implicit tendencies (e.g. the propensity to

ascribe an exaggerated importance to primary experiences). Unlike the
scientific calculus of probabilities that is based on controlled experiments
and on data established according to precise rules, the subjective evaluation
of a specific action’s chances of success in a specific situation brings into play
a whole body of semi-formalized wisdom, dicta, commonplaces, ethical pre-

cepts (&dquo;that’s not for us&dquo;) and, more profoundly, the unconscious principles
of the ethos, a general and transposable disposition which, being the product
of a learning dominated by a specific type of objective regularity, determines
&dquo;reasonable&dquo; or &dquo;unreasonable&dquo; behaviour for any agent subject to these
regularities 21. &dquo;We are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of
satisfying any desire&dquo;, said approximately Hume, in his Treatise on human
nature, &dquo;than desire itself vanishes&dquo;. And Marx in the Gl1mdrisse: &dquo;What-
ever I am, if I have no money to travel, then I have no need in the sense
-

of a real need to travel -

capable of being satisfied. Whatever I am, if I

feel an urge to study but I have no money to pay for my studies, then I have no
urge to study, that is no effective, true urge.&dquo; Practices may be objectively

21. "We call this subjective, variable probability —

which sometimes excludes doubt
and engenders certainty sui generis and which, at other times appears as no more than a vague
glimmer philosophical probability because it refers to the exercise of the higher faculty
—

whereby we comprehend the order and the rationality of things. All reasonable men have
a confused notion of similar probabilities; this then determines, or at least justifies, those
unshakable beliefs we call common sense" (A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de la connais-
sance et sur les caractères de la
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE
critique philosophique, Paris, UNIVHachette,
LIB on September 2, 2014
1922, p. 70).
66

adjusted to objective chances without the agents having to carry out the slightest
calculation, nor even a more or less conscious estimate of the chances of success:
so, it is as if the a posteriori or e.~ post probability of an event, which is known as
a result of past experience, would determine the a priori or ex ante probability

subjectively ascribed to it. Because the dispositions durably inculcated by the

objective conditions (which science perceives through statistical regularities as
probabilities objectively attached to a group or a class) gives rise to aspirations
and practices that are objectively compatible with these objective conditions and,
to some extent, preadapted to their objective requirements, the most impro-
bable events are excluded, either without even being examined, as unthink-
able, or at the cost of a double negation tending to make a virtue out of necessity
by refusing what is anyway refused and loving the inevitable. The very
conditions of the production of the ethos, a virtue fumed into necessity, are
such that the anticipations arising out of it tend to ignore the restriction to
which the validity of any calculus of probabilities is subject, namely that
the conditions of the experiment should not have been modified. Unlike
scientific estimates, which are corrected, following each experiment, according
to rigourous rules, practical estimates ascribe a disproportionate weight to
primary experiments: the characteristic structures of a determinate type of
conditions of existence, through the mediation of the economic and social
necessity which they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous universe of
family relationship, or better, through the mediation of specifically familial
manifestations of this external necessity (e. g. taboos, worries, lessons in moral-
ity, conflicts, tastes, etc.), produce the habitus structures which, in turn, gene-
rate the perception and appreciation of all further experience. Finally, as
a result of the effect of hysteresis necessarily entailed in the logic of the genesis
of habitus, practices are always exposed to negative sanctions, hence to a
&dquo;secondary negative reinforcement&dquo;, when the environment with which
they are in fact confronted differs too widely from the environment to which
they are objectively adjusted. It is understandable, in the same logic, that
generation conflicts oppose, not age classes separated by natural properties,
but classes of habitus produced according to different modes of generation:
by instilling different definitions of what is impossible, possible, probable
and certain, the conditions of existence cause one group to experience as natu-
ral or reasonable the same practices or aspirations which the other group finds
unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa.
In other words, one must abandon all those theories which, explicitly or
implicitly, treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by
antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the functioning of pre-estab-
lished mechanisms, &dquo;models&dquo;, &dquo;norms&dquo; or &dquo;roles&dquo;; if not, one is supposed
to assume that these mechanisms exist in infinite number, as the fortuitous
configurations of stimuli capable of releasing them from the outside, thus being
condemned to the kind of grandiose and desperate enterprise undertaken by
the anthropologist who, armed at with
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com fine STATE
GRAND VALLEY
courage, recorded 480 ele-
UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
positivist
 67

mentary units of behaviour in twenty minutes of observation of his wife in

the kitchen ~~. But, the rejection of mechanistic theories in no way implies
that, according to the traditional opposition between objectivism and subjec-
tivism, we bestow upon some free and creative will the free and arbitrary
power to produce, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projecting
the goals aiming at its transformation. Nor does it mean that we reduce the
objective intentions and constituted significations of human actions and works
to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors. Practice is, at
one and the same time, necessary and relatively autonomous reference to by
the situation considered in its precise immediacy, because it is the product
of the dialectical relationship between a situation and a habitus, understood
as a system of durable and transposable dispositions which, integrating all

past experiences, functions as a matrix of perceptions, of appreciations and

actions, making possible the accomplishment of an infinite variety of tasks,
thanks to analogical transfers of schemes, practical metaphors, in the strictest
sense of the term, which permit the resolution of problems having the same
form, and thanks to incessant correction of the results obtained, that these
results dialectically produce. As the durably generating principle of regulat-
ed improvisations (principium importans ordillem ad actllll1 , as the schol-
astics put it), the habitus produces practices which tend to reproduce the
regularities inserted in the objective conditions of the production of their
generating principle, .while adjusting to the demands inserted as objective
potentialities in the situation directly being confronted. Hence it follows
that the practices can directly be deduced neither from the objective conditions,
defined as the instantaneous sum of the stimuli which may appear directly
to have set them in motion, nor from the conditions which produced the last-
ing principle of their production. Consequently, we can only explain these
practices if we relate the objective structure defining the social conditions
of production of the habitus which engendered them to the conditions of the
operation of this habitus, that is, if we relate the former to the conjuncture
which, except when these conditions have been radically transformed, repre-
sents a particular state of this structure. The habitus is capable of functioning
as an operator which accomplishes practically this relating of these two sys-
tems of relations in and by the production of practice, because it is history
transformed into nature, that is to say, denied as such because turned into
second nature; the &dquo;unconscious&dquo; is never anything more than the forgetting
22. "Here we confront the distressing fact that the sample episode chain under analysis
is a fragment of a larger segment of behavior which in the complete record contains some 480
separate episodes. Moreover, it took only twenty minutes for these 480 behavior stream
events to occur. If my wife’s rate of behavior is roughly representative of that of other actors,
we must be prepared to deal with an inventory of episodes produced at the rate of some
20 000 per sixteen-hour day [...] In a population consisting of several hundred actor-types,
the number of different episodes in the total repertory must amount to many millions during
the course of an annual cycle" (M. Harris, The nature of cultural things, New York, Random
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
House, 1964, pp. 74-75).
68

of the history history itself produces by incorporating the objective

which
structures in the form of these quasi-natures, the habitus: &dquo;Inside each one
of us, in varying proportions, there exists part of yesterday’s man; it is yes-
terday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts
to little as compared with the long past, in the course of which we were form-
ed and from which we result. But we do not sense this man from the past,
since he is so much a part of us ; he is the unconscious part of ourselves. Con-
sequently, we do not take him into account, anymore than we take account
of his legitimate requirements. On the contrary, we are very much aware
of the most recent acquisitions of civilization since, being recent, they have
not yet had time to settle into our unconscious&dquo;23. Amnesia of the genesis,
one of the paradoxical effects of history, is encouraged, also, (if not entailed)

by objectivist perception: comprehending the product of history as opus

operatum and placing itself before the fait accompli, objectivism has to invoke
the mysteries of pre-established harmony or the prodigies of conscious concert-
ation in order to account for what, perceived purely synchronically, appears
as the objective meaning, whether it be the internal coherence of works or of
such institutions as myths, rites or laws or the objective concertation both
manifested and presupposed (insofar as they entail a community of repertoires)
by the concordant or even conflicting practices of members of the same group
or class. The fallacy of objectivism is the consequence of the complete fail-
ure to analyse the dual process of internalization and externalization or, more

precisely, the production of objectively concerted habitus, hence apt and incli-
ned to produce practices and works which are, themselves, objectively concert-
ed.
g
Because the
h identity
.d
.

of[ the
h conditions
d.. off. d
existence tends to produce similar d..1
(at least partially so) systems of dispositions, the resulting (relative) homoge-
neity of habitus generates an objective harmonization of practices and works
conferring upon them the regularity as well as the objectivity which define
their specific &dquo;rationality&dquo; and which result in their being experienced as
evident or taken for granted : they are seen as immediately intelligible and
predictable by all agents possessing practical mastery of the system of schemes
of action and interpretation objectively implied in their accomplishment and
by those alone; that is by all those who, like the members of the same group
or class, are products of identical objective conditions, which exercice a llni-

versalizing aiid pa;ticulari=iiig effect insofar as they only homogenize the mem-
bers of a group by distinguishing them from all the others. As long as we
ignore the true principle of this conductorless orchestration, which confers
regularity, unity and systematicity upon the practices of a group or class,
and that in the absence of any spontaneous or imposed organization of indi-
vidual projects, we condemn ourselves to the kind of naive artificialism which
recognizes no unifying principle of ordinary or extraordinary activity of a
23. E. Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
Durkheim,
L’évolution pédagogique en France, Paris, Alcan, 1938, p. 16.
 69

group or class other than the conscious and meditated concertation found
in conspiracies. In this way, some may deny, with no other proof than their
own fashionable impressions, the unity of the ruling class and challenge those
who hold the opposite view to establish empirical proof, that the members
of the ruling class have an explicit policy, expressly imposed by explicit concer-
tation. 2~. Others, who at least provide an explicit and systematic formulation
of this naive representation of collective action, transpose the archetypal
question of the philosophy of consciousness to the level of the group, and turn
awakening of class consciousness into a sort of revolutionary cogito, this alone
being considered capable of bringing the class into existence, by constituting
it as a &dquo;class for-itself&dquo; ( &dquo;Classe pour soi &dquo;) 25.
The objective harmonization of group or class habitus results in the fact
that practices can be objectively attuned without any direct interaction and,
a fortiori, in the absence of any explicit concertation. &dquo;Imagine, suggested
Leibniz, two clocks in perfect agreement as to the time. This may occur in
three ways. The first consists in mutual influence; the second in assigning
to each a skillful worker who would correct them and synchronize them
continually; the third way would be to construct the two clocks with such art
and precision that one could be assured of their subsequent agreement&dquo; 26.
By systematically retaining only the first, or at the most, the second of these
hypotheses when one casts a party or charismatic leader in the role of Deus
-

ex machina -

one ignores the surest foundation of the integration of groups

or classes: the practices of members of the same group or class are always ;
/

more and better attuned than the agents themselves know or would have it,

24. "As for the margin of autonomy enjoyed by political personnel with regard to the
industrial leadership, it is neither fixed, once and for all in any given country, nor is it the
same in different domains of activity. I challenge Meynaud to account for the vicissitudes
of the French decolonization process in terms of the influence exercized by capitalists
(some were colonialists, others anticolonialists). And I am sure he will be unable to
explain General De Gaulle’s diplomacy in terms of the influence of M. Villiers, or of
the French Employers’ Council." (R. Aron, "Catégories dirigeantes ou classe dirigean-
te?", Revue française de science politique 15 (1), feb. 1965, p. 24.) From his long
"demonstration" of the governing class’s unconsciousness, and incoherence, we shall
merely quote a few passages: "One of my disappointments has been to observe that those
who, according to the Marxist representation of the world, determine the course of events,
most often have no political conceptions [...] I have met a number of representatives of
this ’damned race’, I have never known them to hold resolute, or unanimous, opinions con-
cerning the policy to be adopted [...]the capitalists themselves were divided. I have disco-
vered, among ’monopolists’, or ’big capitalists’, uncertainties, doubts and quarrels which
were aired in public, in the press, and in Parliament. In order to imagine that it is they who
have directed French policy, I would have to assume that some among them were able to
impose their policies [...] In most of the cases I have been able to observe directly, the repre-
sentatives of big capitalism are less politically motivated than is generally believed" (R. Aron,
Démocratie et totalitarisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 145-149).
25. See Appendix.
26. G. W. Leibniz, "Second éclaircissement du système de la communication des subs-
tances", p. 548 in:Downloaded
P. Janetfrom(ed.), Oeuvres
ssi.sagepub.com VALLEY STATE (vol.
philosophiques
at GRAND UNIV LIB2), Paris, de
on September Lagrange, 1866.
2, 2014
70

because, as Leibniz says, &dquo;by only obeying its own laws&dquo;, each &dquo;nonetheless
is attuned to the other&dquo; 27. The habitus is nothing either than this immanent
law, lex iiisita deposited in each agent by his basic education, which is not only
the condition of the concertation of practices but also of practices of concert-
ation : the rectifications and adjustments consciously carried out by the
agents presuppose the mastery of a common code, and attempts at collective
mobilization cannot succeed without a minimum of agreement between the
habitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g. prophet or party leader, etc.) and the
dispositions of those whose aspirations they attempt to express. Far from the
concertation of practices always being the product of concertation, one of
the prime functions of the orchestration of habitus might be to allow a saving
in &dquo;intention&dquo; and in the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo; by making
possible a kind of practical behaviourism which, in most situations in life,
dispenses with close analysis of the nuances of someone else’s conduct or with
direct investigation of his intentions (&dquo;What do you mean ?&dquo;): just as someone
who posts a letter supposes simply, as Schutz has shown, that anonymous
employees will conduct themselves anonymously, in conformity with his ano-
nymous intention, in the same way someone who accepts money as an instru-
ment of exchange implicitly takes into account, as Weber shows, the chances
that other agents will agree to recognize its function. Automatic and impersonal,
significant without intending to signify, the ordinary conduct of life lends
itself to a no less automatic and impersonal decoding: the decoding of the
objective intention which they express in no way requires the &dquo;reactivation&dquo;
of the intention &dquo;experienced&dquo; by the person who accomplishes this conduct ~e.
Each agent is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning: because
his actions are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer
and of which he does not possess conscious mastery, they contain an &dquo;objec-
tive intention&dquo;, as the scholastics say, which always exceeds his conscious
intentions. Thus, just as is shown by Gelb and Goldstein, certain aphasics
who have lost the power to evoke the word or notion called forth by the mean-
ing, may pronounce, as though inadvertently, formulae in which they only
later recognize the response called for, so the internalized schemes of thought
and expression make possible the intentionless invention of regulated impro-
visation whose points of departure and support lie in ready-made &dquo;formulae&dquo;,
such as word-pairs or contrasting images 29: continually overtaken by his
27. Ibid.
28. It is one of the merits of subjectivism and moralism that it demonstrates, per
absurdum, in analyses in which it condemns actions subject to the world’s objective solli-
citations as unauthentic (whether Heideggerian analyses of daily existence and of "das Man"
or Sartrean analyses of "the spirit of serious-mindedness"), the impossibility of the "authentic"
existence which would gather into a project of liberty all the pre-given significations and ob
jective determinations.
29. If it did not constitute a rudimentary, hence economic and practical form, thought
in terms of couples would probably be less frequent in ordinary language and, even in schol-
arly language, beginning with
Downloaded from the language
ssi.sagepub.com ofVALLEY
at GRAND STATE UNIV LIB onstill
anthropologists, dominated
September 2, 2014 by numerous
 71

own words, with which he carries on a relationship of &dquo;carry and be carried&dquo;,

as Nicolai Hartmann puts it, the virtuoso discovers, in the opus operatum,
new cues and new supports for the modus operandi of which it is the product,
in such a way that his discourse continuously feeds off itself like a train bring-
ing along its own rails 3°. Witticisms surprise their author no less than their
audience and they ~mpress as much by their retrospective necessity as by their
novelty, because the discovery appears as the simple revelation, both fortuit-
ous and ineluctable, of a possibility immanent in the structures of language.
It is because subjects do not, properly speaking, know what they are doing
that what they are doing has more meaning than they suspect. The habitus
is the universalizing mediation which makes practices that have neither explicit
reason nor significant intention &dquo;sensible&dquo;, &dquo;reasonable&dquo; and objectively
orchestrated: that part of practices which remains obscure in the eyes of
their own producers is the aspect whereby they are objectively adjusted to
the other practices and structures of which the principle of their own produc-
tion is, itself, the product. In order to be finished with chitchat concerning
the &dquo;comprehension&dquo; which constitutes the last resort of those who defend
the rights of subjectivity against the &dquo;reductive&dquo; imperialism of the human
sciences, we have only to recall that the decoding of the objective intention
of practices and works has nothing to do with the &dquo;reproduction&dquo; (Nach-
bildung, as the early Dilthey put it) of subjective experiences and the reconsti-
tution, useless and uncertain, of the personal singularities of an &dquo;intention&dquo;
which did not actually generate them.
Because they are the product of dispositions which, being the internaliza-
tion of the same objective structures, are objectively concerted, the practices
of the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, of the same
class, possess an objective meaning that is both unitary and systematic,
transcending subjective intentions and conscious individual or collective pro-
jects 31 : in other words, the process of objectification cannot be described in
the language of interaction and mutual adjustment, because the interaction itself
owes its form to the objective structures which produced the dispositions of

false dichotomies, such as the individual and society, personality and culture, community
and society, "folk" and "urban", etc., which are just as inadequate as the most traditional
philosophical dichotomies, such as matter and spirit, body and soul, theory and practice, etc.
cf R. Bendix and P. Berger, "Images of society and problems of concept formation in socio-
(
.
logy", pp. 92-118 in: L. Gross (ed.), Symposium on sociological theory, New York, Harper
and Row, 1959.
30. R. Ruyer, Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l’automatisme, Paris, A. Michel,
19G6, p. 136.
31. Were this language not otherwise dangerous, one would be tempted
to say, against all forms of subjectivist voluntarism, that the unity of a class fundamentally rests
upon the "class unconscious": "consciousness" is not an originating act which would consti-
tute the class in an effulgence of freedom; its only effectiveness, as in all actions of symbolic
duplication, comes from the extent to which it brings everything that is implicitly assumed
concerning the unconscious
Downloaded mode in the class
from ssi.sagepub.com habitus
at GRAND the conscious
toSTATE
VALLEY level. 2, 2014
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72

the interacting agents and which assign them their relative positions in the
interaction and elsewhere. The apparently limitless universe of theories of
acculturation and cultural contacts can be reduced to an opposition between
the realism of ideas and the realism of the sensible. The first category of
theories treat cultural or linguistic changes as the result of contacts between
cultures and languages, subject to laws which are generic as the law of the
restructuring of borrowings or specific as those established by the analysis
of the structures specific to the languages or cultures in contact. The realism
of the sensible emphasizes contacts between the societies involved (in the sense
of populations, reducible to a set of individuals) and ignores most of the time
even the objective structure of the relations between the societies confronting
each other (domination, etc.). In fact, in every singular confrontation between
two individual agents or groups (e.g. boss giving orders to a subordinate,
colleagues talking about their pupils, intellectuals taking part in a sympo-
sium, etc.), that is in every interaction structured by the objective structure
of the relationship between the corresponding groups (e.g. colonizer and colo-
nized), generic habitus (borne by biological individuals) are confronted:
interaction occurs between systems of dispositions, such as linguistic compe-
tence and cultural competence and, through this habitus, all the objective
structures of which they are the product and, in particular, the structures of
the systems of symbolic relations, such as language. In this way, the struct-
ures of the phonological systems involved are only active (as is witnessed, for

example, by the accent of non-native users of the dominant language) if they

are incorporated into a competence acquired in the course of an individual

history (the different kinds of bilinguism being the result of different modes
of acquisition) within a learning process which implies a selective deafness
and systematic restructuring operations.
To speak of class habitus (or of &dquo;culture&dquo;, in the sense of cultural compe-
tence acquired within a homogeneous group) is, then, a reminder against all
forms of the occasionalist illusion which consists in directly relating practices
to the properties contained in the situation: &dquo;interpersonal&dquo; relations are
never, except in appearance, individual to individual relationships and the truth
of the interaction never completely resides in the interaction itself. Social
psychology, interactionism and ethnomethodology forget this when, reduc-
ing the objective structure of the relationship between individuals brought
together to the conjunctural structure of their interaction in a particular situa-
tion and group, they propose to explain everything that occurs in an experimen-
tal or observed interaction by the experimentally controlled characteristics of
the situation, such as the relative position in space of the participants or the
nature of the channels utilized. It is their past and present position in the
social structure which biological individuals carry with them, at all times and
in all places, in the form of the habitus. The dispositions are seen as signs
off social positions and, hence, of the social distance between objective posi-
put it from
tions, or, to Downloaded another way,
ssi.sagepub.com between
at GRAND theUNIV
VALLEY STATE social persons
LIB on September 2, 2014 conjuncturally
 73

brought together (in physical space, which is not the same thing as social
space) and as reminders of this distance and of the conduct necessary to strate-
gically manipulate social distances symbolically or in reality, to shorten them
(which is easier for the dominating agent than for the dominated) or to increase
them or, quite simply, to maintain them (by avoiding &dquo;permitting familia-
rities&dquo;, in short, by &dquo;standing on one’s dignity&dquo;, or, conversely, by avoiding
&dquo;taking liberties&dquo; and, in other words, by &dquo;staying in one’s place&dquo;).
Even those forms of interaction most apparently susceptible to description
in terms of the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo;, such as sympathy, friend-
ship or love, are dominated through the mediation of the harmony of habitus
or, more precisely, of and taste doubtless sensed in the imperceptible
ethos
-

indices of bodily exist- by the objective structure of the relations between

conditions and positions, as is confirmed by class homogamy. The illusion
of elective aflinity or mutual predestination arises out of ignorance of the social
conditions of the harmony of aesthetic tastes or ethical inclinations, thus per-
ceived as a proof of the ineffable afhnities it originates. In short, the habitus,
a product of history, produces individual and collective practices, hence

history, in conformity with the generative schemes generated by history. More

precisely, as a past which has survived into the present and which tends to
perpetuate itself into the future by generating practices structured in accor-
dance with its principles, as the internal law through which the law of
external necessities -

irreducible to the immediate constraints of the cir-

cumstances -

continually operates, the habitus generates on the one hand

the continuity and the regularity which objectivism observes in the social
world without being able to present a rational explanation for them, and,
on the other hand, the regulated transformations and revolutions which nei-
ther the extrinsic and instantaneous determinisms of mechanistic sociologism
nor the purely internal -

though equally punctual determination of volun-

-

tarist or spontaneist subjectivism are capable of accounting for.

It is just as true, and just as untrue to say that collective actions produce
the event or that they are the product of the event: in fact they are the pro-
duct of a conjuncture that is, of the necessary conjunction of dispositions
and an objective event. For example, the conditional stimulation of the revo-
lutionary conjuncture calls forth a determinate response on the part of all
those who perceive it as such, that is those who are disposed to perceive it
as such because they possess a determinate type of habitus, which may be

duplicated and reinforced by the awakening of class consciousness, that is,

the possession, direct or indirect, of a form of discourse capable of ensuring
symbolic mastery of the practically mastered principles of class habitus ~.
32. The illusion of free creation probably finds some of its justification in the character-
istic circle of any conditional stimulation: habitus can only give rise to the type of response
objectively contained within its logic insofar as it bestows its effectiveness as a cue upon the
conjuncture by constituting it according to its own principles, in other words, by making
it exist as a question in reference to a at GRAND VALLEY
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com particular
manner of interrogating reality.
STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
74

The conjuncture capable of transforming practices which are objectively coord-

inated because adapted to partially or totally identical objective necessities
into collective action is the product of the dialectical relationship between
the dispositions and the event. Without ever being totally coordinated, since
they are the product of &dquo;causal series&dquo; characterized by different structural
durations, the dispositions and the situation, which combine synchronically
in order to constitute a determinate conjuncture, are never totally independent,
since they are engendered by objective structures, that is, in the final analysis,
by the economic structures: the hysteresis of habitus, which is implied in the
logic of the process of reproduction of the structures within habitus, is one
of the foundations of the structural gap between opportunities and the dispo-
sition to grasp them which leads to missed opportunities and, in particular,
to the incapacity to analyse historical crises according to categories of percep-
tion other than those of the past, even revolutionary ones.
So, the objective structures are products of historical practices continuously
reproduced (with or without transformations) by historical practices whose
productive principle is, itself, the product of structures which, because of
this, it tends to reproduce. When one is unaware of the dialectical relationship
between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures
they produce and which tend to reproduce them, one has no choice but to
reduce the relationship between the different social agencies -

seen as &dquo;diffe-
rent translations of the same sentence&dquo;, according to a Spinozist metaphor
-
to the logical formula which permits us to rediscover any one of them on the
basis of any other and to find the principle of the development of structures
in a kind of theoretical parthenogenesis, thus offering an unexpected revenge
to the Hegel of the Philosophy of history and to his Ti’eltgeist, who &dquo;develops
his unique nature&dquo; while always remaining identical to itself. As long as
one accepts the canonic opposition which continually reappears in new forms

throughout the history of social thought and today, for example, places the
&dquo;humanist&dquo; interpretations of the early Marx in opposition to &dquo;structuralist&dquo;
readings of Capital, one can only escape subjectivism by falling into fetishism
of social laws: by establishing the relationship of the potential to the actual,
of the musical score to the execution, of the essence to the existence, between
structure and practice, objectivism merely substitutes a man subjugated by
the dead laws of natural history for the creator man of subjectivism. The,
challenging of the indiridual, considered as ens realissimum, leads merely
to his being treated as an epiphenomenon of hypostasized structure, and the asser-
tion of the primacy of objective relations leads to bestowing upon these pro-
ducts of human action -

structures -
the power to develop according to
their own laws and to determine, or to overdetermine, other structures. The
problem is not a new one, and the attempt to transcend the opposition between
subjectivism and objectivism always came up against that epistemological
obstacle, the individual, still capable of haunting the theory of history, even
when he is reduced, as with Engels, to the state of a molecule which, in its
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
 75

relations with other molecules, in a kind of Brownian motion, produces an

objective meaning reducible to the mechanical composition of singular
chances 33.
Just as the opposition of language to speech as simple execution, or even
as preconstructed object, masks the opposition between the objective relations
of language and the dispositions of linguistic competence, so, the opposition
between structure and individual (against which structure has to be conquered,
and conquered over and over again), obstructs the construction of the dialec-
tical relationship between the structures and the dispositions of the habitus.
The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation which
is necessary to make possible the reproduction of these products of collective
history: thanks to this work, objective structures (e.g. of language, eco-
nomics, etc.) come to reproduce themselves, in the form of durable dispositions,
in all individual organisms (which one may call individuals) durably subjected
to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of
existence. In other words, sociology treats all those biological individuals
which, being the product of the same objective conditions, act as supports
for the same habitus, as identical: social class, as a system of objective rela-
tions, must be related, not to the individual or to the &dquo;class&dquo; as a population,
i.e. as the sum of enumerable and measurable biological individuals, but to
the class habitus as a system of dispositions which are (partially) common
to all the products of the same structures. If it is not possible that all mem-
bers of the same class (or even two of them) can have had the same experi-
ences in the same order, it is nonetheless clear that any member of the same class
has a greater chance than any member of another class of having found himself
confronted, either as an actor or as a witness, by those situations which are
most common for the members of that class. The objective structures, which
science grasps in the form of statistical regularities (for example, in the form
of rates of employment, of income curves, of chances of access to secondary
education, etc.) and which confer its physiognomy upon a collective landscape,
with its closed careers, its &dquo;inaccessible&dquo; positions, its &dquo;blocked horizons&dquo;,
inculcate, through convergent experiences, that kind of &dquo;art of evaluating

33. "History is made in such a way that the final result always emerges from the conflict
of a great number of individual wills, of which each one in turn is made what it is as the result
of a crowd of specific conditions of existence; in it, consequently, innumerable forces mutually
cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which one resultant
emerges the historical event
— —
which may, in turn, be seen as the product of a force acting
as a whole, unconsciously and blindly. Because, what an individual desires is obstructed
by every other individual and what emerges is something that nobody wanted. In this way,
up till now, history has unfolded like a natural process and is also subject, in its entirety, to
the same laws of movement" (F. Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, sept. 21, 1890). "Men make
their history themselves, but, not, up till the present, with the collective will of an overall plan,
not even in a given, clearly delimited society. Their efforts cancel each other out and that
is precisely why necessity, completed and expressed by chance, reigns in all societies of this
type" (F. Engels, Downloaded Hans
Letter tofrom at GRANDjan.
Starkenburg,
ssi.sagepub.com 25,STATE
VALLEY 1894).
UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014
76

likelihoods&dquo;, as Leibniz puts it, that is, of anticipating the objective forth-
coming, in short, that sense of reality, or realities.
The relationship between class, habitus and organic individuality, which
can never entirely be removed from sociological discourse insofar as being
-

immediately available to perception (intuitus personae), it is also socially

designated and recognized (name, legal person, etc.) and insofar as it is defin-
ed by a social trajectory irreducible to any other can be expressed, at least
-

metaphorically, as those who use the notion of the unconscious sometimes

do implicitly, within the language of transcendental idealism. Considering
the habitus as a subjective, but not individual, system of internalized structures,
of perception, conception and action schemes common to all the members
-

of the same group or class which constitutes the condition of all objectifica-
tion -

we are, in this perspective, brought to found the objective concertation

of practices and the uniqueness of the world view on the perfect impersonality
and substitutability of singular practices and views. But this amounts to
claiming that all practices or views produced by identical schemes are imper-
sonal and interchangeable, in the manner of individual intuitions of space
which, according to Kant, reflect none of the peculiarities of the empirical
ego. In fact, the diversity within homogeneity, which is characteristic of the
individual habitus of the different members of the same class and which reflects
the diversity within the homogeneity of the social conditions of production
of these habitus, is based on the fundamental relationship of homology which
develops between the habitus of the members of a single group or class because
they are the product of the internalization of the same fundamental structures:
to employ Leibnizian language, the homology of world views correlative with
the identity of perceptual schemes does not exclude the systematic differences
separating individual world views, developed from individual -
and yet con-
certed -

points of view.
Owing to the very logic of its genesis, the habitus is a chronologically order-
ed series of structures, a structure of definite rank specifying the structures
of lower rank (hence genetically antecedent), and structuring the higher rank-
ing structures through the intermediary of its structuring action upon the
structured experiences which generate these structures : thus, for example,
the habitus acquired in the family gives its structure to school experiences
(and in particular to the reception and assimilation of the specifically educa-
tional message), the habitus transformed by scholastic action itself, in turn,
giving its structure to all subsequent experiences (for example, to the reception
and assimilation of messages produced and diffused by the cultural industry,
or professional experiences). These experiences are integrated into the unity
of a systematic biography which is developed on the basis of the original situa-
tion of class, experienced in a determinate type of family structure. The
history of the individual is never any more than a certain specific case of the
collective history of his group or class and, in consequence, the systems of
individual dispositions are structural variants of the September 2,or
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB ongroup
class habitus,
2014
 77

systematically arranged even in the differences which separate them and which
reflect the differences between trajectories and positions within, or outside
the class. &dquo;Personal&dquo; style, that is, the particular mark borne by all the products
of a single habitus, practices or works, is simply a deviation, itself regulated
and sometimes even codified, in relation to the style of a period or a class.
As such, it relates back to the common style, not only by its conformity, in
the manner of Phydias who, according to Hegel, had no &dquo;style&dquo;, but also
by the difference which makes the &dquo;style&dquo;.

APPENDIX (note 25)

Sartre offers an ultra-subjectivist response to the ritual question underlying the endless
debate over objectivism and subjectivism. Treating revolutionary consciousness as the
product of a kind of imaginary variation, he claims for it the power to create present mean-
ing by creating the revolutionary future which negates it: &dquo;For it is necessary here to reverse
the common opinion and on the basis of what it is not, to acknowledge the harshness of a
situation or the sufferings it imposes, both of which are motives for conceiving another state
of affairs in which things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we can con-
ceive a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and
that we decide that these are unbearable&dquo; (J.P. Sartre, Bering and nothingness, London,
Methuen, 1957, pp. 434-435). Having ignored or rejected the question of the economic
and social conditions of awakening of consciousness of economic and social conditions, Sartre
can put an absolute act of attribution of meaning, an &dquo;invention&dquo; or a conversion, at the
origin of action (J.P. Sartre, &dquo;R6ponse A Lefort&dquo;, Les temps modemes 89, apr. 1953, pp. 1571-
1629). If the world of action is nothing other than an imaginary universe of interchange-
able possibles, entirely dependent upon the decrees of the consciousness which creates it
and hence totally void of objectivity, if it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved,
revolting because he chooses to be revolted, emotions, passions and actions are merely games,
of &dquo;bad faith&dquo; and of &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo;, sad farces in which one is both bad
actor and good audience: &dquo;It is not by chance that materialism is serious; it is not by chance
that it is found at all times and places as the favorite doctrine of the revolutionary. This
is because revolutionaries are serious. They come to know themselves first in terms of the world
which oppresses them [...] The serious man is ’of the world’ and has no resource in himself.
He does not even imagine any longer the possibility of getting out of the world [...]he is
in bad faith.&dquo; (Sartre, Beirrg and rrothirrgrress, op. cit., p. 580.) The same incapacity to treat
&dquo;seriousness&dquo; other than in the disapproved form of the &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo;
can be seen in an analysis of emotion which, and this is significant, is separated by the Ima-
ginary from the less radically subjectivist descriptions of The outline of a theory of emotions
(L’esquisse d’une theorie des émotions): &dquo;What will make me decide to choose the magical
aspect or the technical Downloaded aspect of the world?
from ssi.sagepub.com It cannot
at GRAND VALLEY LIB onworld
be the
STATE UNIV September 2, 2014 for this in order
itself,
 78

to be manifested waits to be discovered. Therefore it is necessary that the for-itself in its

project must choose being the one by whom the world is revealed as magical or rational;
that is, the for-itself must as a free project of itself give to itself magical or rational existence.
It is responsible for either one, for the for-itself can be only if it has chosen itself. Therefore
the for-itself appears as the free foundation of its emotions as of its volitions. My fear
is free and manifests my freedom.&dquo; (Ibid., p. 445.) This theory of action ought inevitably
to lead to the desperate project of a transcendental genesis of society and of history (one
recognizes here the Critigue de la raison dialectique, Paris, Gallimard, 1960) which Dur-
kheim seems to be pointing to when he writes in Les règles de la métllOde sociologigue (Paris,
Alcan, 1895): &dquo;It is because the imaginary offers no resistance to the spirit that the latter,
feeling itself contained within nothing, indulges in limitless ambitions and believes in the
possibility of constructing, or rather, of reconstructing the world with his own strength alone
and according to its wishes&dquo; (Durkheim, ibid., p. 18). Although we can oppose, to this
analysis of Sartrean anthropology, numerous texts (especially among his earliest and his
latest works) in which Sartre recognizes, for example, the &dquo;passive syntheses&dquo; of a universe of
already constituted significations, or in which he expressly rejects the very principles of his
philosophy, such as the passage from L’etre et le néant (Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 543) in
which he proposes to distinguish himself from Descartes’ instantaneiste philosophy or the
sentence from the Critique de la raison dialectique (op. cit., p. 161) in which he announces
a study of &dquo;agentless actions, of totalizations having no totalizer, of counter-finalities, of
vicious circles&dquo;, Sartre nonetheless rejects, and with visceral repugnance, &dquo;those gelatinous
realities, more or less vaguely haunted by a supra-individual consciouness which shameful
organicism is still seeking to retrieve, against all likelihood, in the rough, complex but clear-
cut field of passive activity in which there are individual organisms of indefinite number and
inorganic material realities&dquo; (ibid., p. 305). Objective sociology is given the highly suspect,
because essentialist, task of studying the &dquo;sociality of inertia&dquo;, that is, for example, class
reduced to inertia, hence to impotence, class as a thing, &dquo;viscous&dquo; and &dquo;sticky&dquo; in its being,
in other words, in its &dquo;having been&dquo;: &dquo;The seriality of class turns the individual (whoever
he is and whatever his class) into a being who defines himself as a humanized thing [...] The
other form of class, that is the group adding up to a praxis, is born at the heart of the passive
form and as its negation&dquo; (ibid., p. 357). The social world, where those &dquo;bastard&dquo; compro-
mises take place between the thing and the meaning which define &dquo;objective meaning&dquo; as
meaning transformed into thing, constitutes a positive challenge to those who are only able
to breath in the pure and transparent universe of consciousness or of individual &dquo;praxis&dquo;.
This artificialism recognizes no other limit to the liberty of the ego than that which liberty
imposes upon itself by the free abdication of an oath or through the resignation of &dquo;bad
faith&dquo;, the Sartrean term for alienation, or that which the alienating liberty of the alter
ego imposes upon it in Hegelian struggles between master and slave; consequently, unable
to see in &dquo;social arrangements, anything other than artificial and more or less arbitrary
combinations&dquo;, as Durkheim puts it (op. cit., p. 19), he subordinates, without a second thought,
the transcendance of the social - reduced to the &dquo;reciprocity of constraints and autonomies&dquo;
-

to the &dquo;transcendance of the ego&dquo;, as the early Sartre said: &dquo;In the course of this action,
the individual sees the dialectic as rational transparency, inasmuch as he produces it, and
as absolute necessity inasmuch as it escapes him, in other words, quite simply, inasmuch as
others produce it; finally, insofar as he recognizes himself in transcending his needs, he recog-
nizes the law imposed on him by others in transcending their needs (to say that he recognizes
it is not, however, to say that he submits to it), he recognizes his own autonomy (inasmuch
as it can be utilized by another and inasmuch as it is, daily, in the form of blutTs, manoeuvrcs,
etc.) as a foreign power and the autonomy of others as the inexorable law which per-
mits him to constrain them&dquo; (Critique..., op. cit., p. 133). The transcendance of the social can
only be the effect of &dquo;recurrence&dquo;, that is, in the last analysis, of number (hence, the importance
accorded to &dquo;series&dquo;) or of the &dquo;materialization of recurrence&dquo; in cultural objects (ibid.,
p. 234, 281), alienation consisting
Downloaded in theat free
from ssi.sagepub.com GRANDabdication
VALLEY STATE of liberty
UNIV in favour
LIB on September 2, 2014of the demands
 79

of &dquo;worked upon matter&dquo;: &dquo;The nineteenth century worker makes hinrselfwhat he is, that
is, he practically and rationally determines the order of his expenditure hence he decides
-

within his free praxis -

and by this liberty he makcs himself what he was, what he is and
what he must be: a machine whose salary amounts to no more than running costs [ ...I The
classbeing as practico-inert being comes to men through men, through the passive syntheses
of worked upon matter&dquo; (ibid., p. 294). Elsewhere, the affirmation of the &dquo;logical&dquo; primacy
of &dquo;individual praxis&dquo; as constituent Reason, over History as constituted Reason, leads
us to pose the problem of the genesis of society in the same terms as those employed by theo-
reticians of the social contract: &dquo;History determines the content of human relations in its
totality and these relations [...]refer to everything. But human relations in general are not
the result of History. It is not problems of organization and the division of labour which
have led to the development of relationships between those primarily separate objccts, namely
men&dquo; (ibid., p. 179). Just as for Descartes, &dquo;Creation is continuous, as Jean Wahl says,
because duration is not&dquo; and because extended substance does not contain within itself
the power to subsist, God finding himself charged with the continuously renewed task of
creating the world ex nihilo, by a free act of w ill, so, the typically Cartesian rejection of the
viscuous opacity of &dquo;objective potentialities&dquo; and of objective meaning leads Sartre to
entrust the undefined task of ripping the social w hole, or class, from the inertia of the &dquo;prac-
tico-inert&dquo; to the absolute initiative of &dquo;historical agents&dquo;, whether individual or collective,
such as &dquo;The Party&dquo;, which is a hypostasis of the Sartrean subject. At the finish of his
immense imaginary novel of the death and resurrection of liberty, with its dual movement,
&dquo;the externalization of internality&dquo; leading from liberty to alienation, from consciousness
to the materialization of consciousness or, as the title puts it, &dquo;from praxis to the practico-
inert&dquo;, and the &dquo;internalization of externality&dquo; which, by abrupt shortcuts in awakening of
consciousness and &dquo;fusion of consciousnesses&dquo;, leads &dquo;from the group to history&dquo;, from
the reified state of the alienated group to the authentic existence of the historical agent,
consciousness and thing are as irremediably separated as at the outset, without there ever being
any possibility of observing or constructing anything resembling an institution or a sj mbolic
system in the sense of an autonomous universe (the very choice of examples bears this out).
The appearance of a dialectical course (which is nothing more than the dialectical appearance
of discourse) cannot hide the infinite oscillation between the en-soi and the pOllr-soi or, in
the new language, between materiality and praxis, between the inertia of the group reduced
to its &dquo;essence&dquo;, in other words, to its outlived past and to its necessity (w hich is abandoned
to sociologists), and the continued creation of the free collective project, seen as a series
of deciding acts indispensable for saving the group from annihilation in pure materiality.
So, the objective intentions of Sartrean philosophy are fulfilled, with certain differences
in language, against the author’s subjective intentions, against a permanent project of &dquo;con-
version&dquo;, never so manifest and manifestly sincere as in certain of his anathema, which
would probably be less violent if they savoured less of conscious or unconscious self-criticism.
Thus, for example, one must bear in mind the famous analysis of the café waiter in order
fully to appreciate a sentence such as this one : &dquo;To all those w ho take themselves for angels,
their neighbour’s activities seem absurd because of the former’s claim to transcend the human
enterprise by refusing to take part in it&dquo; (ibid., pp. 182-183). The constancy of the project
of conversion finds its principle in the permanence of the habitus which renders this project
at the same time necessary and necessarily doomed to failure. Sartre’s theory concerning
Flaubert’s relationship with the bourgeoisie is probably the most manifest and most direct
expression of the bourgeois relationship to existence and to the material conditions of exis-
tence which, by turning the awakening of consciousness into the generator of an existence
and a work, demonstrates that it is not enough to become conscious of one’s class condition
in order to free oneself of the durable dispositions it produces (cf. P. Bourdieu, &dquo;Champ du
pouvoir, champ intellectucl et habitus de classe&dquo;, Scolies 1, 1971, pp. 7-26, esp. 12-14). The
project of devcloping a &dquo;sociology of action&dquo;, defined as the &dquo;sociology of freedom&dquo; -
an expression already used by Le Play -

belongs,
Downloaded from ssi.sagepub.com at GRAND
mutatis mutandis,
VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB
to the same logic (cf.
on September 2, 2014
80

A. Touraine, Sociologie de I’action, Paris, Seuil, 1965, and &dquo;La raison d’être de la sociologie
de 1’action&dquo;, Revue francaise de sociologie 7, oct.-déc., 1966, pp. 518-527). The rejection
of the &dquo;reductive&dquo; definition of sociology finds here those eternal themes and language
of which Bergson supplied the archetype, that of the closed and the open, of continuity
and rupture, routine and creation, the institution and the person.

Pierre Bourdieu, Professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, VI e Section, is head
of its Centre de Sociologie Européenne. Among his numerous publications, we particularly
wish to mention the following titles concerning the Ethnology of North Africa: The Algerians
(1962); Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (1963) (with others); Le déracinement: La
crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (1964), (with A. Sayad); and in the same
theoretical approach, a recent article: "Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système des
stratégies deDownloaded
reproduction", Annales
from ssi.sagepub.com 3, mai-juin
at GRAND 1972.
VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014