tinuous genesis of discontinuity. When we retrospectively project the
concept of artist before the 1880s, we commit absolutely fantastic
anachronisms: we overlook the genesis, not of the character of the artist
or the writer, but of the space in which this character can exist
as such.
And the same is true of politics. We take the risk of formidable historical
fallacies when we fail, as do some historians who, today, take a
fancy to "political philosophy," to pose the question of the social
genesis of the political field (Bourdieu 1981a) and of the very notions
that political philosophy eternalizes by treating them as transhistorical
essences. What I just said about the words "art" and "artist" would
apply to notions such as "democracy" and "public opinion" (see Bourdieu
1979e, Bourdieu and Champagne 1989, Champagne 1990). Paradoxically,
historians often condemn themselves to anachronism
because of their ahistorical, or dehistoricized, usage of the concepts
they employ to think the societies of the past. They forget that these
concepts and the reality they capture are themselves the product of a
historical construction: the very history to which they apply these
concepts has in fact invented, created them, oftentimes at the cost of
an immense— and largely forgotten—historical work.41
3 The Logit of Fields
The notion of field is, together with those of habitus and capital, the central organizing
concept of your work, which includes studies of the fields of artists and
intellectuals, class lifestyles, Gnndes etoles, science, religion, the field of power,
of law, of housing construction, and so on/2You use the notion of field in a highly
41. This fruitful tension between history and sociology encouraged by Bourdieu is
particularly well illustrated by the historical research of his colleagues and collaborators
Christophe Charle (1987,1990,1991), Dario Gamboni (1989), Alain Viala (1985) and Victor
Karady, who has undertaken an ambitious long-term project in the historical sociology
of Hungary and other Eastern European countries (see Karady 1985, Don and
Karady 1989, Karady and Mitter 1990). On the question of historical discontinuity and
the temporal rootedness of conceptual categories or episternes, there are many parallels
between Bourdieu and Foucault, some of which can be traced directly back to their
common training in the history of science and medicine under Canguilhem (Bourdieu
1988e: 779). The major differences are rooted in Bourdieu's historicizing of reason via
the notion of field.
42. On the intellectual and artistic field, see Bourdieu 1971a, 1975b, 1975c, 1983a,
1983d, 1988a; on the space of classes and classlifestyles, Bourdieu 1978b, 1984a, 1987b; on
94 I Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquanl
The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop) I 95
technical and precise sense that is perhaps partly hidden behind its commonsense
meaning. Could you explicate where the notion comes from (for Americans, it is
likely to evoke the "field theory" of Kurt Lewin) and what its meaning and theoretical
purposes are?
I do not like professorial definitions much, so let me begin with a brief
aside on their usage. I could refer here to Le metier de sociologue (Bourdieu,
Chamboredon, and Passeron 1973), which is a didactic, almost
scholastic, book,43but a book which nevertheless contains a number
of theoretical and methododological principles that would make
people understand that many of the gaps or shortcomings for which I
am sometimes reproached are in fact conscious refusals and deliberate
choices. For instance, the use of .open concepts4* is a way of rejecting
cultural goods, Bourdieu 1980h, 1985d, and Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975; on the religious
field, Bourdieu 1971b, 1987h, Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1982; on the scientific field
Bourdieu 1981d, 1987e, 1990e; on the juridical field and the field of power, Bourdieu
1981a, 1986c, 1987g, 1989a, and Bourdieu and de Saint Martin 1978,1982, 1987; the field
of private housing construction is explored in Bourdieu et al. 1987 and in the articles
that make up the March 1990 issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.
Others studies of fields conducted at the Center for European Sociology include,
inter alia, the fields of comic books (Boltanski 1975) and of children's book publishing
(Chamboredon and Fabiani 1977), the field of the French university and intellectuals at
the turn of the century (Charle 1983 and 1990, Karady 1983, Fabiani 1989), the field of
power under the Third Republic (Charle 1987), and the fields of religion (Grignon 1977),
the arts and sciences in the classical age (Heinich 1987), seventeenth-century literature
(Viala 1985), the management of the "elderly" (Lenoir 1978), peasant trade-unionism
(Maresca 1983), social work (Verdes-Leroux 1976,1978), political representation (Champagne
1988, 1990), and feminist studies in France (Lagrave 1990).
43. This book (whose translation was for years blocked for obscure copyright reasons
and has just been published by Walter de Gruyter) is essential to an understanding
of Bourdieu's sociological epistemology. It consists of a dense exposition of the
foundational principles of "applied rationalism" in the social sciences, and of a selection
of texts (by historians and philosophers of science, Marx, Durkheim, Weber,
Mauss, and other sociologists) that illustrate key arguments. Each comprises three
parts which theorize the three stages that Bourdieu, following French epistemologist
Gaston Bachelard, considers central to the production of sociological knowledge and
that he encapsulates in the following formula: "Facts are conquered [through rupture
with common sense], constructed, confirmed (lesfaits sont conquis, construits, constates)’’
(Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1973:24). A worthwhile critical introduction to
Bachelard's philosophy can be found in Tiles 1984; see MacAllester 1991 for a selection
of texts.
44. For examples of criticisms of Bourdieu for the lack of closure or rigor of his concepts,
see DiMaggio 1979:1467, Swartz 1981:346-48, Lamont and Larreau 1988:155-58.
96 I Retie Bourdieu and Lotc J. D. Wacquant
positivism— but this is a ready-made phrase. It is, to be more precise, a
permanent reminder that concepts have no definition other than systemic
ones, and are designed to be put to work empirically in systematic
fashion. Such notions as habitus, field, and capital can be defined, but
only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in isolation.45
This also answers another question that is often put to me in the
United States: why do I not propose any "laws of the middle range"? I
think that this would first of all be a way of satisfying a positivistic
expectation, of the kind represented in earlier times by a book by Berelson
and Steiner (1964) which was a compilation of small, partial
laws established by the social sciences. This kind of positivistic gratification
is something that science must deny itself. Science admits
only systems of laws (Duhem showed this long ago for physics, and
Quine has since developed this fundamental idea).46And what is true
of concepts is true of relations, which acquire their meaning only
within a system of relations. Similarly, if I make extensive use of correspondence
analysis, in preference to multivariate regression for instance,
it is because correspondance analysis is a relational technique
of data analysis whose philosophy corresponds exactly to what, in my
view, the reality of the social world is. It is a technique which "thinks"
in terms of relation, as I try to do precisely with the notion of field.47
To think in terms of field isto think relationally.48 The relational
45. The distinction between relational or "systemic concepts" (rooted in a theoretical
problematics of the object) and "operational concepts," defined in terms of the pragmatic
requirements and constraints of empirical measurement, is elaborated in
Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1973: 53-54.
46. The now famous "Duhem-Quine hypothesis" states that science is a complex
network that faces the test of empirical experience as a whole: evidence impinges not
orfany particular proposition or concept but on the entire net they form.
47. The technique of correspondence analysis is a variant of factor analysis developed
by the school of "French Data Analysis" (J. P. Benzecri, Rouanet, Tabard, Lebart,
Cibois), which has elaborated tools for a relational use of statistics that are increasingly
being employed by social scientists in France, the Netherlands, and Japan in particular.
Two useful and accessible presentations in English are Greenacre 1984 and Lebart et al.
1984; correspondence analysis has recently been included on standard computer packages
by SAS and BMDP.
48. Bourdieu (1982a: 41-42, my translation) explains: "To think in terms of field demands
a conversion of the whole ordinary vision of the social world which fastens only
on visible things: the individual, this ens realissimum to which we are attached by a sort
of primordial ideological interest; the group, which is only in appearance defined solely
by the temporary or durable relations, formal or informal, between its members; and
The Puipose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop) I 97
(rather than more narrowly “structuralist") mode of thinking is, as
Cassirer (1923) demonstrated in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff,
tTie hallmark of modem science, and one could show that it lies behind
scientific enterprises apparently as different as those of the Russian
formalist Tynianov,49 of the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, of
Norbert Elias, and of the pioneers of structuralism in anthropology,
linguistics and history, from Sapir and Jakobson to Dumezil and LeviStrauss.
(If you check, you will find that both Lewin and Elias draw
explicitly on Cassirer, as I do, to move beyond the Aristotelian substantialism
that spontaneously impregnates social thinking.) I could
twist Hegel's famous formula and say that the real is the relational: what
exist in the social world are relations—not interactions between
agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations
which exist "independently of individual consciousness and
will," as Marx said.
In analytic terms, a field may be defined as a network, or a configuration,
of objective relations between positions. These positions are
objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they
impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present
and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of
species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to
the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective
relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology,
etc.).
In highly differentiated societies, the social cosmos is made up of a
number of such relatively autonomous social microcosms, i.e., spaces
of objective relations that are the site of a logic and a necessity that are
specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields. For instance,
the artistic field, or the religious field, or the economic field all follow
specific logics: while the artistic field has constituted itself by rejecting
even relations understood as interactions, that is, as intersubjective, actually activated
connections. In fact, just as the Newtonian theory of gravitation could only be constructed
against Cartesian realism which wanted to recognize no mode of action other
than collision, direct contact, the notion of field presupposes a break with the realist
representation which leads us to reduce the effect of the environment to the effect of
direct action as actualized during an interaction."
49. Jurii Tynianov (1894-1943) was, with Roman Jakobson and Vladimir Propp, a
leading member of the Russian Formalist school which advocated a structuralist approach
to the study of literature and language.
98 I Pierre Bourdieu and LoTcJ. D. Wacquant
or reversing the law of material profit (Bourdieu 1983d), the economic
field has emerged, historically, through the creation of a universe
within which, as we commonly say, "business is business," where the
enchanted relations of friendship and love are in principle excluded.
You often use the analogy of a "game" to give a first intuitive grasp of what you
understand by field.
We can indeed, with caution, compare a field to a game (jeu) alt
though, unlike the latter, afield is not the product of a deliberate act
of creation, and it follows rules or, better, regularities,50that are not
explicit and codified. Thus we have stakes (enjeux) which are for the
most part the product of the competition between players. We have
an investment in the game, illusio (from ludus, the game): players are
taken in by the game, they oppose one another, sometimes with ferocity,
only to the extent that they concur in their belief (doxa) in the
game and its stakes; they grant these a recognition that escapes questioning.
Players agree, by the mere fact of playing, and not by way
of a "contract," that the game is worth playing, that it is "worth the
candle," and this collusion is the very basis of their competition. We
also have trump cards, that is, master cards whose force varies depending
on the game: just as the relative value of cards changes with
each game, the hierarchy of the different species of capital (economic,
social, cultural, symbolic) varies across the various fields, fin other
words, there are cards that are valid, efficacious in all fields—these
are the fundamental species of capital—but their relative value as
trump cards is determined by each field and even by the successive
states of the same field^
This is so because, at bottom, the value of a species of capital (e.g.,
knowledge of Greek or of integral calculus) hinges on the existence of
a game, of a field in which this competency can be employed: a species
of capital is what is efficacious in a given field, both as a weapon
and as a stake of struggle, that which allows its possessors to wield a
power, an influence, and thus to exist, in the field under consideration,
instead of being considered a negligible quantity. In empirical
work, it is one and the same thing to determine what the field is,
where its limits lie, etc., and to determine what species of capital are
50. On the difference between rules and regularities and the equivocations of structuralism
between those two terms, see Bourdieu 1986a, and 1990a: 30-41.
The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop) I 99
active in it, within what limits, and so on. (We see here how the notions
of capital and field are tightly interconnected.)
At each moment, it is the state of the relations of force between
players that defines the structure of the field. We can picture each
player as having in front of her a pile of tokens of different colors,
each color corresponding to a given species of capital she holds, so
that her relative force in the game, her position in the space of play, and
also her strategic orientation toward the game, what we call in French her
"game," the moves that she makes, more or less risky or cautious,
subversive or conservative, depend both on the total number of
tokens and on the composition of the piles of tokens she retains, that
is, on the volume and structure of her capital. Two individuals endowed
with an equivalent overall capital can differ, in their position
as well as in their stances ("position-takings"), in that one holds a lot
of economic capital and little cultural capital while the other has little
economic capital and large cultural assets.fT o be more precise, the
strategies of a "player" and everything that defines his "game" are a
function not only of the volume and structure of his capital at the moment
under consideration and of the game chances/Huygens spoke of
lusiones, again from ludus, to designate objective probabilities) they
guarantee him, but also of the evolution over time of the volume and
structure of this capital, that is, of his social trajectory and of the dispositions
(habitus) constituted in the prolonged relation to a definite
distribution of objective chances^
But this is not all: players can play to increase or to conserve their
capital, their number of tokens, in conformity with the tacit rules of
the game and the prerequisites of the reproduction of the game and
its stakes; but they can also get in it to transform, partially or completely,
the immanent rules of the game. They can, for instance, work
to change the relative value of tokens of different colors, the exchange
rate between various species of capital, through strategies aimed at
discrediting the form of capital upon which the force of their opponents
rests (e.g., economic capital) and to valorize the species of
capital they preferentially possess (e.g., juridical capital).51 A good
number of struggles within the field of power are of this type, notably
51. For an illustration of the growing conflict between juridical and economic capital
involved in the rise of new legal professions (notably "bankruptcy experts") at the intersection
of the two fields, see Dezalay 1989.
100 I Pierre Bourdieu and Lolc J. D. Wacquanl
those aimed at seizing power over the state, that is, over the economic
and political resources that enable the state to wield a power over all
games and over the rules that regulate them.
This analogy displays the links between the core concepts of your theory, but it does
not tell us how one determines the existence of a field and its boundaries.
[The question of the limits of the field is a very difficult one, if only
because it is always at stake in thefield itself and therefore admits of no a
priori answerj Participants in a field, say, economic firms, high fashion
designers, or novelists, constantly work to differentiate themselves
from their closest rivals in order to reduce competition and to
establish a monopoly over a particular subsector of the field. (I should
immediately correct this sentence for its teleological bias, the very bias
attributed to me by those who construe my analysis of cultural practices
as based on a search for distinction. There is a production ofdifference
which is in no way the product of a searchfor difference. There are
many agents—I think for instance of Gustave Flaubert— for whom to
exist in a given field consists eo ipso in differing, in being different, in
asserting one's difference, oftentimes because they are endowed with
properties such that they should not be there, they should have been
eliminated at the entrance to the field.) Their efforts to impose this
or that criterion of competency, of membership, may be more or less
. successful in various conjunctures/Thus the boundaries of the field
I can only be determined by an empirical investigationjO nly rarely do
they take the form of juridical frontiers (e.g., numerus clausus), even
though they are always marked by more or less institutionalized "barriers
to entry."
* We may think of a field as a space within which an effect of field is
exercised, so that what happens to any object that traverses this space
cannot be explained solely by the intrinsic properties of the object in
j question/The limits of the field are situated at the point where the
~i effects of the field ceasej Therefore, you must try by various means
to measure in each case the point at which these statistically detectable
effects decline. In the work of empirical research the construction
of a field is not effected by an act of imposition. For instance, I seriously
doubt that the ensemble of cultural associations (choirs, theater
groups, reading clubs, etc.) of a given American state or of a French
region form a field. By contrast, the work of Jerry Karabel (1984) suggests
that major American universities are linked by objective rela-
tions such that the structure of these (material and symbolic) relations
has effects within each of them. Similarly for newspapers: Michael
Schudson (1978) shows that you cannot understand the emergence of
the modem idea of "objectivity" in journalism if you do not see that it
arose in newspapers concerned with standards of respectability, as
that which distinguishes "news" from the mere "stories" of tabloids.
It is only by studying each of these universes that you can assess how
concretely they are constituted, where they stop, who gets in and
who does not, and whether at all they form a field.
What are the motor causes of the functioning and transformation of a field?
I The principle of the dynamics of a field lies in the form of its structure j
and, in particular, in the distance, the gaps, the asymmetries betweenthe
various specific forces that confront one another. [The forces that|
are active in the field— and thus selected by the analyst as pertinent1
because they produce the most relevant differences— are those which
define the specific capital. A capital does not exist and function except in j
relation to a field. It confers a power over the field, over the materi-j
alized or embodied instruments of production or reproduction whose
distribution constitutes the very structure of the field, and over the
regularities and the rules which define the ordinary functioning of
the field, and thereby over the profits engendered in it.
As a space of potential and active forces, the field is also a field of
struggles aimed at preserving or transforming the configuration of
these forces. Furthermore, the field as a structure of objective relations
between positions of force undergirds and guides the strategies
whereby the occupants of these positions seek, individually or collectively,
to safeguard or improve their position and to impose the principle
of hierarchization most favorable to their own products/The
strategies of agents depend on their position in the field, that is, in
the distribution of the specific capital, and on the perception that they
have of the field depending on the point of view they take on the field
as a view taken from a point in the fieldy/
52. Bourdieu takes pains to emphasize the discontinuity between a social field and a
magnetic field, and therefore between sociology and a reductionistic "social physics":
"Sociology is not a chapter of mechanics and social fields are fields of forces but also
fieldsof struggles to transform or preserve these fields of forces. And the relation, practical
or reflective, that agents entertain with the game is part and parcel of the game and
may be at the basis of its transformation" (Bourdieu 1982a: 46, my translation).
The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop) I 101