The publication of a conversation with broken sticks between Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier gives the opportunity to measure the vitality of the thought of the disappeared sociologist, which was trying to make communications of knowledge held for foreigners, in particular sociology, ‘History, literary criticism and psychoanalysis.
In February 1988, Roger Chartier received Pierre Bourdieu on France-Culture for a series of interviews, as part of the program “ Naked ». It is these conversations between a historian open to sociology and a sociologist who was not locked in a closely academic conception of his discipline that we give us today to read the collection “ Bench »From Agone editions. The idea of publishing these oral exchanges is excellent, because they show the sociologist dialoguing with a friendly interlocutor but who does not refrain from any criticism, nuancing his answers according to the reminders, accepting the contradiction and even admitting even its formulation errors. Thus, about Flaubert and Manet, after saying that they “ must be considered, basically, as founders of fields “, The sociologist resumes following a remark from his interlocutor:” You are absolutely right to correct me. I seemed to give a very classic vision of the solitary, excluded, isolated revolutionary, etc. I was quite bad (P. 93).
The whole thing is very pleasant to read, as much by the diversity of the themes or problems addressed and by the relaxed tone of the conversation, which allows Pierre Bourdieu on many occasions to show his report both serious and playful to the questions dealt with. In addition, in a very precise preface, Roger Chartier strives to contextualize the moment of this meeting in the intellectual trajectory of the sociologist as from the point of view of the state of historian problems of the time. The interview takes place in particular a few years before the 1995 social movement, also before the creation of Reasons of Acting in 1996 and the publication by Pierre Bourdieu of more clearly political texts. He could then say: “ What I might add compared to Foucault is that I have a fairly militant conception of science, which does not mean “committed” at all (P. 24).
What is a question in these dialogues ? Of the profession of sociologist compared to that of the historian or the philosopher, but also in his relationship to the type of knowledge brought by literary creation ; of social sciences scientificity ; liberating potentials of rational knowledge on social determinisms ; of the necessary rupture with the common sense and of the permanent struggle that the scholars must engage against the Sophists (or doxosophes) ; of sociological criticism which does not deny the resistances and defenses specific to the dominated and which even arises the question of its difficult transmission to the latter ; subtle and complex relationships between the incorporated provisions (the “ individual social ») And the situations in which they are triggered ; contributions from the concept of “ field »To understand cultural producers ; Or a series of false oppositions that animate the social science world (objectivism/subjectivism, society/individual, structuralism/phenomenology, etc.). All this, and other themes still, is chained or nested and engages in a very lively and never abstract word, but mobilizing many examples.
What profit can a social science researcher withdraw these conversations in 2010, which took place over twenty years ago ? It will, of course, depend on his theoretical point of view and his knowledge of knowledge. Here we would like to note here first of all the epistemological and theoretical evolution of a large part of sociology, in the past twenty years, in a sense that Pierre Bourdieu would not have wished. “” Break with common sense “, Objectify the properties and behaviors of actors or situations by not taking for” cash The words made, are attitudes or approaches that have been criticized (we have often talked about “ contempt of the actor “Or the reduction of the latter to the status of” cultural idiot And underlined, on the contrary, his reflexive capacities, stigmatized the “ overhang Sociologist, etc.) or more simply abandoned in favor of more or less sophisticated or simplistic forms of social phenomenology, as if this sociology was an outdated scientism. The examples given by Pierre Bourdieu (p. 58-66) show that we are very far from the caricatures that have been made of the “ Critical sociology ” (Or “ classic »). The researcher’s work, according to him, is simply to connect and articulate Objective data – which are collected independently of the consciousness that the actors can have, but which define them or define the context in which they act – with the subjective representations that the same actors deliver in interview or in a series of other situations where their “ views ». No contempt in such an objectification company which does not spare the scientist himself and his relationship to the object.
We can then underline the fact that Pierre Bourdieu intended to go beyond the opposition individual/society and that he refused to define the “ social ” speak “ collective “Or by” structures “, As Durkheim had done before him from any other constraints and especially in another, less advanced state of the social sciences. In preparation for Art rulesbut also work on Manet, he explains: “ This is the work I do. I go to the most individual of the most individual : to the particularity of Manet, to his relations with his parents, with his friends, to the role of women in her relationships … and, at the same time, I study the space in which it was located To understand the beginning of modern art. (P. 92, underlined by me). Society “ exists in the individual state, in the incorporated state (P. 77) As much as in social structures, institutions or groups. And it is no coincidence that Pierre Bourdieu has more than once called for the merger of sociology and psychoanalysis which generally sets itself the aim of finely examining this individualized state of the social.
Finally, among many other points that deserve to be commented on, we will notice the attention that Pierre Bourdieu could have, at this precise moment in his career, for the properly literary forms of knowledge of the social world: the novels of XIXe century, those of Balzac of course who “ thought of as a sociologist “, But especially those of Flaubert (“ For me, the inventor of sociology, the most sociologist of the novelists, is Flaubert ) Operating “ an objectification of the dominant class of its time which competes with the most beautiful historical analyzes (P. 98). If it is undoubtedly necessary to consider with caution the way in which, taken by his admiration, he seems to want to make the author of Sentimental education A proto-sociologist or an unusual sociologist, and if we can dispute the assertion that the sociologist would differentiate himself from the novelist by the fact that he says “ Things, like that, without formatting “, As the novelist would deliver the truth of the social world” in a bearable form, that is to say shaping “(P. 102), we can only pay tribute to the ability that Pierre Bourdieu had to clear land at high risk and to make swings of knowledge and creations held by many as perfectly irreconcilable.