Bourdieu vs. Post-Structuralism

Those of us who end up being associated with 'postmodernism' or 'theory' often find ourselves confused or infuriated by the attempt of our opponents to lump us into a single category. It is amusing, therefore, to read one of those 'postmodernists' or 'theorists' or -- more plainly -- 'Frenchmen' get upset about this lumping-in with people he views himself to be in competition with. The last chapter, indeed the last section of that chapter, in Bourdieu's Science of Science and Reflexivity sees him attempt to articulate -- for an audience in France at the College de France -- his relationship, that is departure from, philosophy and, consequently, his relationship to the stars of French academic philosophy. This section, "Sketch for a self-analysis", sees him go after, as it were, Althusser and Foucault (and, by consequence, Deleuze), primarily, but also Derrida. His problem with the first group is that they disavow the social sciences while taking the object of the social sciences for themselves and his problem with the second group, exemplified (symbolized?) by Derrida, is its 'aristocratic' tendencies. (Do recall, Bourdieu often revisited the theme of his petit bourgeois origins in relation to his thought, in general, and, more specifically, the context of the elite French academies.)

Throughout this work, the published version of his last set of lectures at the College de France, Bourdieu subtly prepares the reader for what is to come: while ostensibly discussing the possibilities of a sociology of science (and, therefore, a sociology of sociology; a reflexive social science), Bourdieu goes to great lengths to associate himself with Gaston Bachelard and, less frequently, Georges Canguilhem. These references are no doubt lost on many an Anglo-American reader -- even those who view themselves as 'specialists' on Foucault and Althusser; or, worse as 'Foucauldians' or 'Althusserians' -- and they would appear as mere citations. "I say this and I support my claim with reference to this book by Bachelard."

This, however, is too easy. These constant references to Bachelard and Canguilhem have another meaning: they are not aimed at the sociology of science, but rather right at Foucault and Althusser. Avoiding great detail, it is sufficient to note the following: Canguilhem and Bachelard studied what is now called the philosophy and history of science, following to a large extent, in the footsteps of Alexandre Koyre. (The other Alexandre, Alex Kojeve, of course, followed Koyre as well, but in another direction.) First Bachelard and then Canguilhem ended up at the Sorbonne where they taught, among other people, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. (A veritable boys club!) Thus, in addition to the division between sociology and philosophy, what is at stake is the legacy of the philosophy of the concept.

Before moving to Bourdieu's characterization of the issue, first a passage from Foucault's preface to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological:

Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Castel, Passerson and what marks them so strongly within sociology; you will miss an entire aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysts, particularly by the followers of Lacan. Further, in the entire discussion of ideas which preceded or followed the movement of '68, it is easy to find the place of those who, from near or from afar, had been trained by Canguilhem.

And, now, passages from the final chapter of Science of Science and Reflexivity:

But I was no less strongly opposed to philosophy, whether it was the institutional philosophers who clung to the defence of the agregation and its archaic syllabi, and especially the aristocratic philosophy of philosophy as a caste of higher essence, or all the philosophers who, in spite of their anti-institutional mood and, in some cases their flaunted break with 'philosophies of the subject', continued to profess the statutory contempt for the social sciences that was one of the pillars of the traditional philosophical credo -- I am thinking of Althusser referring to the 'so-called social sciences', or Foucault placing the social sciences in the lower order of 'knowledges'. I could not fail to feel a certain irritation at what seemed to me to be a double-game played by these philosophers, who would take over the object of the social sciences, while seeking to undermine their foundation. [...]

This collective conversion, a kind of unbridled revenge of the 'genetic fallacy', 'symbolized', in France, by the transition from Koyre and Vuillemin to Foucault and Deleuze, made the attachment to formal, universal truths appear outmoded and even somewhat reactionary, compared with the analysis of particular historical-cultural situations, illustrated by Foucault's texts, which, brought together under the title Power/Knowledge, shaped his American reputation [...]. It would be easy to show that, while remaining rooted in the most aristocratic philosophy of philosophy, this transformation of the philosophical mood was very directly linked, both in its style and in its objects, to the experiences and influence of May '68 which led philosophers and philosophy to discover politics or, as they like to say, 'the political'.

I think that this analysis, however much it simplifies, enables one to understand -- it certainly enables me to understand -- why I have constantly found myself out of step with those whom campus radicalism has generically placed under the umbrella of 'postmodernists' (those who are interested in 'reception theory' would probably find in this disjunction the key to the way my work has been received in the USA: is he modern or postmodern, a sociologist or a philosopher; or, secondarily, is he an anthropologist or a sociologist; or even, is he right-wing or left-wing?) Having left philosophy for sociology (a 'defection' which, from the standpoint of those who remain attached to the title of philosopher, makes all the difference in the world), I was bound, as an aspiring scientist, to remain committed to the rationalist vision -- rather than simply using the social sciences, like Foucault or Derrida, so as to reduce them or destroy them, while practising them without saying so and without paying the price of genuine conversion to the constraints and demands of empirical research. [...] I made a point -- following in this respect the kind of aristocratism of refusal which in my eyes characterized Canguilhem -- of systematically confining to notes or parentheses the reflexions that might have been called 'philosophical' (I am thinking for example of one of the few explicit discussions that I devoted to Foucault, which is relegated to the final note of an obscure article in the journal Etudes rurales, in which I returned to the research I had done thirty years earlier on peasant celibacy.) Always firmly bearing the title of sociologist, I quite consciously excluded (at the cost of a loss of symbolic capital that I entirely accepted) the widespread strategies of the 'double game' and the double profit (sociologist and philosopher, philosopher and historian) which, I have to admit, were profoundly antipathetic to me, not least because they seemed to me to announce a lack of ethical and scientific rigour.

Comments

[s0metim3s]

Gosh. It's refreshing that he's so candid about the cultural capital aspects of canonical formation (and so on), but strange that he can't seem to think outside the box of it. Who, other than the disciplinarians, cares whether Bachelard or Canguilhem, or Derrida or Foucault, are sociologists, philosophers or writers?

I majored in sociology, and did the phd on sociology. And, aside from a lot of other things that Bourdieu wrote that I found useful for thinking through the emergence of the discipline, my sense is that, aside from the academically competitive tone of the above, Bourdieu ultimately won't think the emergence of the object of sociology (society) - and its particular contingencies - because he's a nationalist. And in sociology, for the most part, 'society' is an oblique way to talk about 'nation'.

[Jon]

In my view, Bourdieu's late pontifications on these (as well as many other) matters are much less interesting than his earlier, sometimes more veiled, attacks on, for instance, Althusser in Outline and Derrida in Distinction.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Angela, I had the exact reaction. After all the complaining about this pomo and that pomo, and how they care not at all about the good stuff that PB is doing/pursuing, after all the condemnations of the "aristocratic" philosophy of philosophy, he seems to counter with an aristocratic sociology of philosophy that is equally tangential to the historical and cultural particulars. This from a guy who ran several journals and book series with somewhat of an iron grip, if I remember correctly.

[Matt]

OT, or meta (sorry). Bourdieu is an interesting scientific case, certainly. Shall we bin him? And as a nationalist, maybe?

[Matt]

Sorry, more off topic: at Digby
Not even close to topic, I apologize.

[Vladimir]

1 Calling Bourdieu a nationalist? Cheap shot, even for LS. But funny.

2 Claiming Bourdieu'd no idea of his own stake in the field, or its "emergence"? Just lame.

3 Claiming sociology is a way of saying nation? Good for a chuckle -back in 1979.

4 But claiming disciplines don't matter and then waving around a phd on sociology to try
'n back the claims up, thus confirming Bourdieu's point? Well, that's just priceless.

[s0metim3s]

Bourdieu has a lot to say about what's at stake in his discipline (and in the academy) - this I mentioned. But that he has insisted a nationalist perspective in recent times (on 'globalisation', on precarious labour) is not news - nor did it occur in 1979.

And if, after that particular trajectory of mine in the university I called myself a sociologist or was interested in working along those lines, you might have a point.

Richard Beardsworth:

French critical thought in the last thirty to forty years has either avoided the political
dimension to love or implicitly criticized its totalitarian pretensions when placed in the
political domain. Hence its series of moves to critique ‘ethically’, ‘deconstruct’ or ‘genealogize’
either the embracing movement of love between self and other and/or the apparent reduction,
through the act of love and community, of difference to a common trait of humanity. Hence
Emmanuel Lévinas’ distinction between infinite justice and Hegelian recognition in Totality
and Infinity as a result of which the relation to the other is always seen to exceed the act of
oneness through which members of a community recognize themselves in each other.
15
This
basic distinction, together with focus on the way in which the Freudian death-drive ruptures
the associations of Eros, informs Jean-Francois Lyotard’s own radical critique of Hegelian and
Marxist notions of substantive community in works from Libidinal Economy through The
Differend to Heidegger and the Jews, together with his general reflection on the immemorial,
the inhuman and the Kantian sublime (the excess of temporalization and community).
16
Hence, also, Jacques Derrida’s aporetic understandings of political friendship and community
in works like Glas, Politics of Friendship, and Specters of Marx which, while more attentive
than Lévinas and Lyotard to the necessary movement of universality in any act of thought
or law, at the same time always track the violence of this movement in its exclusions.
17
This
violence is registered in the name of a radical justice, a nonphenomenal relation towards
the other (human and non-human) that always already exceeds the metaphysical tradition
of political friendship, fraternity, or love. If Derrida and Lyotard are both indebted here to
the historically critical work of Lévinas on the justice of radical alterity, Jean-Luc Nancy,
Georgio Agamben and Alain Badiou’s work on the ellipsis of community and universality
in, respectively, The Inoperative Community, The Community to Come and, more recently,
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism derive from Heideggerian-inspired aporetics.
18
Whatever their differences (and there are many), each work situates the coming together of
any community not in its common trait, procedures of deliberation or normative horizon, but
in the very ellipsis of this trait, procedure or horizon. This ellipsis either marks the universality of
a community to come (Nancy, Agamben) and/or is thought as a punctual event irreducible
to immanent forms of time, space and, therefore, law (Badiou). In other words, what is
common to humanity is a bond that, as universal, must be rethought in terms of the excess
of determinate form. If this bond is analyzed through the tradition, from Jesus of Nazareth,
through Paul and Augustine to Hegel and the inversions of Nietzsche and Freud, as that
of ‘love’, with Derrida, Nancy, Agamben and, to a lesser extent, Badiou, this love will not
produce a community except at the risk of domination. The bond is therefore conceived less
in terms of what embraces, and more in terms of what exceeds embrace. Thought conceptually,
it is understood as normative impossibility and universal singularity.
The work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault represent the more material dimension to
French thought. While they have in common with the above an ambivalence towards reason
and a critical suspicion of the very concept of community, neither Deleuze nor Foucault, as
far as I am aware, affirm a collective understanding of love. Given their own problematic, this
is understandable. Both are concerned to work from under the totalizing and dominating
forms of modern reason towards concepts, strategies and practices of multiplicity, hybridity
and resistance. In the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
for example, love is only theorized within the multiple constellations of desiring production.
19
What is always more important than love, in resistance to the homogenizing desire-machine
of capital, is the way in which desire moves in constant displacement, reconfiguration and
rupture behind all forms of unifying sensibility (of which love would be one form). Equally,
for Foucault, it is the force of love, in relation to other forces, that is not theoretically and
practically pertinent to an understanding of modernity, since its discursive field is intimately
related to that of power and violence in the western Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian
traditions. Rather a genealogical understanding of its discursive mechanisms in a general
history of sexuality must predominate for a critical apprehension of our politico-sexual
identities to be possible.
20
I would therefore contend that, just as for those French thinkers
that come out of modern phenomenology and/or modern phenomenology and Marxism, so,
for more immediately historical and materialist thinkers like Deleuze and Foucault, the same
critical suspicion towards the act of oneness of both community and/or love is outstanding.
As a result, love is avoided as an affirmative political theme.
21
The above account is far too brief and generalizing not to be a simplification. Its
straightforward simplicity underscores, nevertheless, my contention: in recent French
critical thought love is in general eschewed in the political domain because of its understood
associations with universality and oneness. The reason for this seems increasingly clear. All of
the above authors have worked for most of their intellectual life in the shadow of two major
political events of the twentieth century: first, the inversion of the idea of communism into
state socialism and, second, the Shoah of the Jews in the Second World War. Following, in
part, these two events, the bond of the community is less thought critically in terms of what
gathers together, contra other more divisive forces, than in terms of what both gathers and
dissipates as such. Consequently, critical thought places itself more on the side of dissipation
than assembly in order to remain critical. The influence of Heidegger’s radical ontology
and ‘Destruktion’ of metaphysics has been crucial in determining the parameters of this
move—whatever the many disagreements with Heidegger regarding justice and the Shoah.
For the fundamental gesture of radical ontology places the procedure and determination of
reason within a metaphysics of presence that moves to one side of the empowering historical
movement of reason.
My hypothesis regarding recent French thought is, then, that its basic gesture of critical
suspicion is not appropriate to our historical age. For, if our age is marked by new forms of
diremption between religion, politics and economics, what is needed is a response to this
diremption that upholds life in its manifold differences in a collective, secular manner. Without
entering here into the critical question of how one determines this response, suffice it to say
in this philosophical note that this response, as the recognition of life as life in its separated
economic, political, and religious forms, embodies love. Love marks, that is, the recognition
of the continuum of life from out of its separate(d) parts, constitutes the vehicle of future
cognitive determination between the philosophical, the political and the economic, and
therefrom, the active promise of future polity.

http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/contents.html

[Matt]

An interesting article, ___, even if simplifying. It certainly sounds nice to call for a politics of secular love. Pragmatically speaking, it may even be a first step in opening up secularism beyond inherently patronizing or closed horizons.

There's an argument to be made, of course, that Derrida was drifting/turning in some of those directions, certainly, calling for new institutional formations, &c.

Whether the "basic gesture of critical
suspicion is not appropriate to our historical age" or not...or what tack to take in guarding (eternally?) against the possibility of 'the worst', is something "recent French thought" can hardly be said to agree upon. See for instance Badiou's Metapolitics.

Without entering here into the critical question of how one determines this response, suffice it to say in this philosophical note that this response, as the recognition of life as life in its separated economic, political, and religious forms, embodies love.

Be curious if he ever enters into the critical question elsewhere.

[Kenneth Rufo]

I don't know, but I'm more than a little suspicious of these politics of love arguments, whether from hooks or Beardsworth or whomever. Too much Carl Schmitt reading, I guess.

[s0metim3s]

critical suspicion towards the act of oneness of both community and/or love

I'm suspicious of those who make love synonymous with "the oneness of community", or who suppose that love is indeed "an act of oneness". Narcissism may well extrapolate this particular corelation between love and community, but who can have a relationship with a narcissist?

I read those assumptions too, Ken, to be particularly Schmittian. Love is not or cannot be "an act of oneness", surely.

[Matt]

Hence its series of moves to critique ‘ethically’, ‘deconstruct’ or ‘genealogize’ either the embracing movement of love between self and other and/or the apparent reduction, through the act of love and community, of difference to a common trait of humanity.

Hm..is the reduction only apparent though? It certainly begs for further explanation, I agree. Maybe that's the "critical question" part, to-come?

Anyway speaking of the...exigency of nonrelations...a poem (via).

Suppose we all like to deny the multiplicity of our narcissisms, sometimes...

[s0metim3s]

That may be so. But, then according to these senses, this would not be an "act of oneness".

[Matt]

Yes, perhaps I'm just trying to dust his neck a little first.

[Christoph]

Just read that CT thread. Crikey. Very peculiar stuff.

[Christoph]

Oh, and here's the passage Craig's post reminded me of (On Television, p8).

[Christoph]

Apologies for missing passage -- a "comment spam filter" keeps blocking my actual quote. Have now taken the liberty of simply putting it on my own blog.

[pat]

The post began with Bourdieu's take on the philosphy of Foucault and Althusser. His take is that this philosophy, like his own, is susceptible to being known through science.

One point was made that equated Bourdiue's thought in nationalism. This is an attempt at understanding Bourdiue's perspective in the same way that Bourdieu tried to know others. Was he a nationalist? I think of him as a universalist.

What is missing from this critique is an account of nationalism that is not a knee jerk, something that accounts for that knee jerk and situates it as you say sociologically.