The first two years of Bourdieu’s teaching at the Collège de France constitute less of a general introduction to his concepts than a long dive into his method, at the crossroads of reflexivity, symbolism and structural analysis.
Elected to the Collège de France in the spring of 1981, Bourdieu chose to title his first five years of teaching “ General sociology course ”, with the obvious aim of “ present the fundamental lines » of his work. Unlike his courses previously published posthumously (those very general on the State and those more detailed, but just as captivating, on Manet), this first volume, which brings together his first two years of teaching, resumes in the all of the research that he has just published (Distinction, Practical Sense« The holy family ” And What it means to speak) or which have been published since (Homo Academicus and The Rules of the Art).
If they do not present new reflections, these lessons do not lack interest. We enjoy rediscovering Bourdieu’s speaking, his modesty, his humor, his scientific intransigence, the plurality of his fields of research and the corrosive power of his concepts. Unlike the aggregation lesson or the eloquence competition, whose complacent self-satisfaction horrifies him, he voluntarily progresses in small steps, defusing in advance the misinterpretations and criticisms while questioning the presuppositions of the slightest assertion that he risks making (this extreme caution also gives the whole, and in particular the first four courses, a sometimes somewhat laborious, hesitant and repetitive appearance, which would make me advise against this volume for readers wishing to learn about Bourdieusian thought).
Sociology, science of reflexivity and symbolism
Addressing a large audience, made up of apprentice or experienced sociologists (whom he encourages to continue his reflections), completely novice listeners (whom he treats with great thoughtfulness), but also colleagues from the College (whom he hopes to convince people of the usefulness of his tools to update “ the epistemological unconscious of specialists in the human sciences “), Bourdieu begins his course with the fundamentals: what does the sociologist do ? How does he do it ? What is its purpose ? What pitfalls should he avoid? ?
And for him, the main problem that any sociologist encounters is classifying individuals who themselves spend their time classifying and classifying themselves. What to do with the divisions that people and groups constantly make to differentiate themselves from each other ?
To avoid projecting one’s own representations onto those of social actors, the sociologist’s first task “ consists of collecting as naively as possible these categorems (which everyone uses spontaneously to classify), recording them as they are while always trying to know by whom they are produced, by whom they are used, what is their field of validity “. So we must try to understand, for example, what criteria university professors use to define and distinguish themselves from one another.
In his eyes, society is the seat not so much of a class struggle as of a “ rankings fight » to know how individuals are classified, in which categories, by whom, according to what criteria, etc. Exercising power, very often, means legitimately establishing distinctions, drawing boundaries and establishing a group by delimiting it. All power is thus coupled with a symbolic powerthe possession of which makes it possible to impose known and recognized classifications, to circumscribe a group where these classifications are effective, to represent this group (in all senses of the term), to speak to it with authority and to speak in its name, or, more generally, to impose a legitimate mode of representation of the social world. And Bourdieu returns here to the contributions of sociolinguistics and the analytical philosophy of language, to the acts of institution, constitution, nomination and consecration, as well as to the notions of mandate and delegation – all published reflections particularly in What it means to speakthen supported in Language and symbolic powerwhich he summarizes here with a strong sentence: “ Words are always watchwords. »
Over the course of these two years of teaching, sociology thus takes on the features of a “ science of symbolic powers ”, as he defined it in his inaugural lesson. And it is not insignificant that he devotes his entire first year of classes to the symbolic dimension of the social.
Bourdieu structuralist ?
The second interest of these courses is to show what Bourdieu owes to the structural method. For example, he admits to having developed the notion of field “ by the application to the social sciences of a mode of thought that could roughly be called structuralist “. A field is a space of positions which only have meaning in relation to each other. ; and the characteristic of a position is that it differs from other possible positions (I am what the others are not).
As he describes it here, the social world is organized by antagonistic poles, according to plays of opposites and contrasts. “ The logic of the symbolic is almost automatically dualist “, he explains, observing that “ all spaces tend to be organized according to oppositions +/- » (high/low, interior/exterior, distinguished/vulgar, masculine/feminine, public/private, right/left, etc.). Reality is relational, and relational is very often oppositional (a boss is not a foreman, and a foreman is not a worker, and a native French worker is not an immigrant worker, etc.). Our thousand ways of us to classify each other are so many ways of differ from each other, consciously or unconsciously, and we often deploy phenomenal energy to defend the boundaries that distinguish us from those from whom we want to distinguish ourselves. In the words of Spinoza: “ all determination is negation », Bourdieu adds: “ this is particularly true in the social world “.
If he claims to be structuralist, he reaffirms his aversion to Marxist thinkers and to the concept ofideologywhich reduces representations to the rank of misleading illusions. It is also opposed to interactionist sociology, which gives insufficient importance to the symbolic dimension of the social and can lead to a Machiavellian conception of history (such a small group is responsible for such acts which caused such consequences, etc.) . “ The notion of field is constructed against the notion of interaction », he even says bluntly (because he too poses in opposition).
Sociology, in his eyes, does not consist of observing interactions visible ; she analyzes relationships and positions social, with all that is hidden, unconscious, unthought, and unsaid. There is not necessarily a need for interactions for there to be a relationship, just as there is not necessarily a need for objectifiable representations for there to be meaning. According to him, “ what sociology aims to describe are completely invisible things, relationships that cannot be photographed. » If the sociologist must start from the categories that individuals use to classify themselves, he must then re-inscribe them in power relations and games of positions within fields which are generally unknown. In short, he must construct the social spaces whose logic he intends to explain.
To do this, Bourdieu proposes replacing the oppositions practice/representation, realism/idealism and individual/society with the triad field/habitus/capital. Devoting most of these first two years of teaching to his method, to symbolic power, to the notion of habitus and to an outline of the concept of field, he refers to the following courses the study of the relationships between habitus and field, the analysis of the relationship between fields and capital, and the search for invariants in the functioning of fields. Which promises a second volume that is undoubtedly more fascinating, which will form with this one the abundant draft of the great work of synthesis on his field theory that Bourdieu ultimately never published.