Taking Bourdieu Into the Field *
Loïc Wacquant
At the outset of our dialogue, I want to ask you how you met Pierre Bourdieu—not
your seminar meeting in Chicago in the winter of 1987 which led you to write An
Invitation to Reflexive Sociology together (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), but the
first time you came face-to-face with him. If you will forgive this joke, how did the
‘ontological complicity’ between the ‘history embodied’ in you and the ‘history
objectivized’ in his writings take place concretely?
It is a joke that I like because it captures something very real in the process of knowledge
sharing and intellectual production: theories elaborated by one thinking can come to live
and evolve in the minds, activities, and works of many others around and after him. We
saw this well with Marx and especially with Durkheim and the members of the Année
sociologique in the classical era, and we are witnessing it again with Bourdieu, who has
spawned not disciples (social science is not a religion, and its innovative figures leaders
of sects, as some would like to believe) but collaborators and co-workers in the project of
a critical and reflexive science of society, all across the world.
I met Pierre Bourdieu by chance, in November of 1980. At the time, I was a first-year
student in industrial economics at the Ecole des hautes études commerciales (HEC),
France’s top business school. I was disappointed and bored by my studies and groping
about for something intellectually engaging. A friend of mine took me to a lecture
Bourdieu was giving on “Questions of Politics” at the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris, on
the occasion of the publication of Le Sens pratique (I had only read The Inheritors
[Bourdieu and Passeron 1979] at that point, so I had only the vaguest notion of who
Bourdieu was and what he was up to). I was impressed and intrigued by that talk, even as
I did not understand half of it, frankly! I understood just enough to sense that something
novel and important was being said which deserved to be inquired into. So I hung about
with a group of students who cornered Bourdieu at the close of the event. We went to a
nearby cafeteria and launched into a discussion of the upcoming elections—this was a
few months before the presidential contest that brought Mitterrand and the Socialist Party
to power in May of 1981. There, till four the next morning, Bourdieu proceed to dissect
French politics and society with surgical acuity, cutting the social system open and
displaying its innards in a way I had never imaged possible. I was instantly taken: I
thought, “if this is what sociology is about, that’s what I want to do.”
So I took up sociology at the University of Paris, concurrently with my training in
economics, and a year later, when Bourdieu gave his inaugural address at the Collège de
France (Bourdieu 1982), I went to hear and congratulate him. He encouraged me to
attend his course. Soon I found myself skipping classes at HEC to go and listen to his
lectures at the College. And I developed the habit of waiting him out to ask questions and
more questions. Out of this pattern of ‘intellectual harassment’ grew an exchange that
evolved over the next few years while I was doing research in New Caledonia that later
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blossomed into full-fledged collaboration when we rejoined in Chicago, resulting in our
book An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.
Could you tell us more about the strategy you followed in that book, in particular
your use of a “linear technique of exposition” to render Bourdieu’s characteristic
“recursive and spiral-like way of thinking” (as you put it yourself)? How did this
technique of questioning influence his strategy of answering?
You must realize that the central part of the book consists of an ‘interview’ in appearance
only: in reality, it was fully thought out and written out, directly in English, as a text, and
a text in which we invested nearly three years of work—but we could not call it a
‘Socratic dialogue on the theory of practice’ without risking being misconstrued… We
took from the workshop on Bourdieu’s thought I had organized with other graduate
students at the University of Chicago the dialogical format in order to produce an
accessible yet systematic explication of his theories, show internal linkages between his
various investigations, answer typical queries and respond to recurrent objections. The
goal was to enable a reader unfamiliar with his oeuvre to gain access to its conceptual and
thematic core without being sidetracked, hampered, or misled into culs-de-sac by the
common misreadings and misunderstandings, slogans and stereotypes about that work
(such as the widespread but silly idea that Bourdieu is a proponent of ‘reproduction
theory’).
For the middle section of the book, disguised as the ‘Chicago Workshop’, we worked by
assembling questions and answers step by step, rewriting both back and forth across the
Atlantic via post, fax and telephone (this is before the era of e-mail and the Internet),
circling outward from the main conceptual nodes, reflexivity, habitus, capital, field,
symbolic domination, doxa, the mission of intellectuals, etc., and striving in each case to
situate Bourdieu dynamically in a space of possible positions, to better clarify his
distinctive methods and stances in relation to rival approaches and critics—for instance,
on practical logics, to distinguish clearly his dispositional theory of action from both the
teleology of rational choice theory and the ethnocentric mechanicalism of utilitarianism:
for Bourdieu, action is oriented without conscious aiming at a goal and the springs that
motivate it transcend narrow material interest.
The main challenge was to try and ‘linearize’ a thought that is indeed recursive and
spiraling without disfiguring it, to ‘stretch’ it out along intersecting but separable vectors
while respecting its internal articulations. If Bourdieu’s mode of argumentation is
weblike and ramifying, if his key concepts are relational (habitus, field, and capital are all
constituted of ‘bundles’ of social ties in different states, embodied, objectified,
institutionalized, and they all work most powerfully in relation to each other), it is
because the social universe is made that way, according to him. So we wanted to retain
the intrinsic connectivity of social reality and sociological reasoning while disentangling
both enough to enable readers and users of the book to capture the kernel of Bourdieu’s
social ontology, method and substantive theories. The fact that An Invitation is now
translated in seventeen languages and is considered the standard entryway into Bourdieu
in many countries suggest that we were not entirely unsuccessful…
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You recently published a book in France Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of
an Apprentice Boxer (Wacquant 2000, forthcoming in English with University of
California Press) which reports on three-and-a-half years of intensive fieldwork
carried out in a black gym in the ghetto of Chicago. You told me that it applies and
develops the theory of habitus. Could you elaborate on this experiment in taking
Bourdieu into the field and on how it illuminates the problematics of practical
logics?
Body & Soul is an anthropological account of prizefighting as a bodily craft in the black
American ghetto, based on intensive immersion and ‘observant participation’ during
which I became part of the phenomenon in order to parse it. It recounts my tribulations
in and around the ring as an apprentice of the trade (including my fight at the Chicago
Golden Gloves) and mixes sociology, ethnography and litterary narrative, text and
pictures, ‘cool’ analysis and ‘hot’ experience, to take the reader into the workaday world
of run-of-the-mill boxers and recapitulate in vivid color the manufacturing of their
distinctive ‘body-mind complex’ — to use an expression of William James that suggests
an affinity between pragmatism and Bourdieu’s conception of action.
So it is a study of the social production of the pugilistic habitus as a particular set of
dispositions assembled collectively via a silent pedagogy that transforms the totality of
the being of the fighter by extracting him from the profane realm and thrusting him into a
distinctive sensual, moral, and practical cosmos that entices him to remake himself and
achieve (masculine) honor by submitting himself to the ascetic rules of his craft. It is an
empirical radicalization of the theory of habitus in that it shows in quasi-experimental
fashion, how habitus as a set of socially constituted desires, drives, and abilities, at once
cognitive, emotive, aesthetic and ethical, is fashioned and how it operates concretely. Let
me cite a passage from Bourdieu (1997a: 168) that summarizes what I tried to
demonstrate and indicates what boxers can teach us about all social agents:
One could, through a Heidegger play on words, say that dis-position is ex-position. It is
because the body is (at different degrees) exposed, put into play, into danger in the world,
confronted with the risk of emotion, hurt, suffering, sometimes death, and thus obliged to
take the world seriously (and nothing is more serious than emotion, which touches on the
innermost depth of our organic dispositions), that it can acquire dispositions which are
themselves opening to the world, that is, to the very structures of the social world of
which they are the embodied form.
Body & Soul also takes seriously Bourdieu’s admonition that the most fundamental and
distinctive competencies that we have as social beings are embodied knowledges and
skills that operate beneath the level of discourse and consciousness, in an incarnate sense
arising out of the mutual interpenetration of being and world. If it is true that our
‘presence-in-the-world’ operates via what he calls ‘bodily knowledge’ (most cogently in
the chapter of Pascalian Meditations by that title, Bourdieu 1997a: chapter 4), then it
follows that to penetrate a given universe as social analysts, we must gain knowledge of
that universe through our bodies: we must acquire, and then probe and problematize, the
practical categories, sensitivities, and abilities that natives have evolved in and for
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practice. We must elucidate ‘illusio as this manner of being in the world’ that arises from
being of that particular world (Bourdieu 1997a: 162). We must, in short, do not only a
sociology of the body — animal creatures as social constructs — but also a sociology
from the body — the socialized and sensuous organism as social constructor — that
foregrounds the kinetic mastery of the world that makes recognized members of a given
universe what and who they are.
At yet another level, Body & Soul is an implementation of reflexivity as a research
requirement and epistemic strategy, and it demonstrates by display one of the central
arguments of An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology: that the purpose and touchstone of
good social theory is to help us produce new objects, detect dimensions and dissect
mechanisms of the social world that we otherwise would not be able to grasp. There are
two ways of conceiving and using social theory: one is a scholastic mode in which we
‘split, polish and clean concepts’, to paraphrase C.-Wright Mills’s (1958) critique of
Talcott Parsons in The Sociological Imagination, that is, produce theoretical categories as
an end in themselves, for ritual display and worship. The other is a generative mode,
wherein we develop theory to put it to use in empirical research and to prove and expand
its heuristic capacity in systematic confrontation with sociohistorical reality. I hope that
Body & Soul offers an engaging exemplification of that second conception, although it
also implies that the theory is less conspicuous and must thus be extracted through a close
reading of the observations it guides (and in which it sometimes hides).
Precisely, our choice of practical logics as theme for this issue dedicated to Bourdieu
not only recognizes that he has founded a new topic for inquiry; it is also meant to
underline its arrested development, the fact that it remains, for the time being, an
unfulfilled promise. Would you not agree that, although Bourdieu has proposed a
theory of the non-coincidence of theory and practice and even states explicitly that
the problem of a logic that can be grasped only in action finds “its solution solely in
a theory of theoretical logic and of practical logic” (Bourdieu 1980: 155), he seems
reluctant to develop the theory of practical logics as such? Is this reluctance not due
to the fact that, as far as he thinks it possible, he would think of it as an algebra (see
Bourdieu 1976: 73; also Bourdieu 1980: 435)?
In my view, Bourdieu’s focus on and elaboration of the specific logic of practice and
everything that distinguishes it from the ‘logic of logic’ is arguably his greatest discovery
and contribution to social theory. We have barely begun to realize its importance and it
will take years of work in a variety of disciplines, from philosophy to linguistics to
aesthetics to sociology, to draw out all of its implications (see Wacquant 1998)
Now, this is a thorny problem to which Bourdieu suggests two possible resolutions. In the
‘soft’ version, he proposes that there exists a hiatus between the immanent logic of
practice, which is temporally embedded, spatially situated, ad hoc, fuzzy, unconscious of
itself, etc., and the logic of scholastic knowledge, which eliminates this built-in wooliness
and ambiguity by disembedding action and stripping it of some of its distinctive
properties qua action. But this hiatus can be bridged by a conscious effort of theorizing,
by a reflexive return upon and analysis of the theoretical posture itself, its social
5
conditions of possibility, and how it impacts research as a practical activity (what
questions we ask or fail to ask, what data we construct, what observations we carry out,
etc.). This is the Bourdieu of Le Sens pratique, for instance when he explicates the
decisive shift in the analysis of kinship from a set of ‘rules’ (as with Lévi-Straussian
structuralism) to a unfolding sequence of situated ‘strategies’ guided by the position of
groups in social space and the body as ‘analogical operator’ of practice (see Bourdieu
1980 and 1987). Or the Bourdieu of Masculine Domination (1997b, 1998), who probes
the concrete workings of the mechanisms of symbolic violence that are at the root of
men’s hegemony through an analysis of Kabyle ritual and mythology and how their
structures inform everyday life in their—and in our—society society.
In the ‘hard’ version, which is first expressed gingerly in Bourdieu’s (1990, also 1994)
piece ‘The Scholastic Point of View’ and surfaces again in parts of Pascalian
Meditations (although that work is ambiguous on this count: it also advances the ‘soft
thesis’…), there is an insurmountable gap between practical knowledge and scientific
knowledge, even a antinomy between practice as an unthought, im-mediate and mutual
‘inhabiting’ of being and world, carnal entanglement with the active forces that make
social existence what it is, and the effort to capture it through thought, ratiocination, and
language. The dilemma is not an aporia but an impasse; the hiatus cannot be bridged. But
then again, asserting the hard thesis does not stop Bourdieu from ploughing ahead in his
own analysis of the social conditions that account for the ‘fundamental ambiguity of the
scholastic disposition’, namely, that it enables us to know the world while mutilating it
insofar as it requires that we retire from that world and inclines us to view it as something
other than what it is for itself, as a spectacle liable to be read in the manner of a text (as
with Clifford Geertz’s “thick description”) or the autotelic workings of a semiotic algebra
(as with Lévi-Strauss and so-called poststructuralism, which is really structuralism by
another name) rather than urgent tasks to be practically accomplished hic et nunc.
I think the tension is unresolved and the question is whether it will prove fruitful, that is,
whether leads to progressive heuristics in Lakatos’s sense of the term. This is what, with
Pascalian irony, we could christen the Bourdieu wager: that, even though there might be
an insuperable contradiction between the logic of practice and the logic of science as a
historically dated and situated form of human practice, we are better off doing as if there
was not and forging ahead in the project of a science of society. The proof of the
theoretical pudding of practice will be found in its practical eating.
*Excerpted from a dialogue with Ivan Deyanov published in KX Magazine (Sofia,
Bulgaria), Spring 2001.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1976. “Le sens pratique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.
(February) 1:43-86.
__________. 1980. Le Sens pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit (The Logic of Practice,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
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__________. 1982. Leçon sur la leçon. Paris: Editions de Minuit (“Lecture on the
Lecture,” in In Other Words, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, corrected edition).
__________ 1987. Choses dites. Paris: Editions de Minuit (In Other Words, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1993, corrected edition).
__________ 1990. “The Scholastic Point of View.” Cultural Anthropology 5-4
(November), 380-391 (reprinted in Practical Reasons, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1998).
__________. 1994. Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Editions du Seuil
(Practical Reasons, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)
__________. 1997a. Méditations pascaliennes. (Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
__________. 1997b. “Masculine Domination Revisited: The Goffman Prize Lecture.”
Berkeley Journal of Sociology 41: 189-203.
__________. 1998. La Domination masculine. Paris: Editions du Seuil (Masculine
Domination, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. [1964] 1979. The Inheritors. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C.-Wright. 1958. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Wacquant, Loïc. 1998. “The Double-Edged Sword of Reason: The Scholar’s Predicament
and the Sociologist’s Mission.” European Journal of Social Theory 2-3 (Spring):
275-281.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2000. Corps et âme. Carnets ethnographiques d’un apprenti boxeur.
Marseille et Montréal: Agone, Comeau et Nadeau (Body & Soul: Ethnographic
Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Berkeley, University of California Press,
forthcoming).