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Abstract Starting from the controversies surrounding Bourdieus political involvement, this article investigates the form of ethico-political involvement consistent with Bourdieus notion of reexivity. The argument begins by drawing the ethico-political dimensions of Bourdieus methodology, especially his notions of socio-analysis and reexivity. These latter emerge as the counterparts of Bourdieus politics of the eld, grounding the conversion of the gaze required for political action and presenting possibilities for social agents to comprehend, accept and even re-create their selves. Applying a dispositional reading to some of Bourdieus texts, the article proposes a new interpretation of the tense relation between Bourdieus biography and writings, consistent with the ethico-political reading of socio-analysis and reexivity. Bourdieus texts can be read as an example of a socio-analysis, a rhetorical strategy devised to enlist individuals into the painful exercise of rewriting their social biographies. Key words biography Bourdieu intellectual reexivity
Vou la mort, cette n qui ne peut tre prise pour n, lhomme est un tre sans raison dtre. Cest la socit, et elle seule, qui dispense, des degrs diffrents, les justications et les raisons dexister; cest elle qui, en produisant les affaires ou les positions que lon dit importantes, produit les actes et les agents que lon juge importants, pour eux-mmes et pour les autres, personnages objectivement et subjectivement assurs de leur valeur et ainsi arrachs lindiffrence et linsigniance. (Bourdieu, 1982: 512)
Bourdieus late political involvement generated considerable debates and controversies regarding his public interventions, the relationships between his academic work and political positions, and more generally, the nature of the relationships between the postures of the academic and the public intellectual (Mongin and Roman, 1998; Verds-Leroux, 1998; Grenfell, 2004; Kauppi, 2000; Swartz, 2003; Poupeau and Discepolo, 2004; Pinto, 2000).1 To a large extent, these debates
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Yet, Bourdieu as a committed social scientist and Bourdieu as a vocal public intellectual were not two strangers, united solely by their temporal succession. As Poupeau and Discepolo have argued, Bourdieus work contains a political dimension illustrated by his numerous political interventions in a number of debates, ranging from Algeria in the 1960s to the reform of the public sector in the 1990s (2002, 2004). Moreover, Bourdieu addressed in various writings the working of the political eld, analyzing issues such as the modes of production of political opinions, the practice of delegation, the construction of a public opinion, the structure and logic of the political eld, the modes of production of the dominant ideology, the relations between political capital and other forms of capital, the modes of representation of dominated groups and the conditions of possibility of political action (Fritsch, 2000). But the main critique of the thesis of the rupture resides in the relationships between Bourdieus science and political involvement. In other words, whereas the above-mentioned argument pointed to the fact that Bourdieus political involvement predates the 1990s, the following part argues that there are close links between Bourdieus writings and the political positions he took. Bourdieus analysis of symbolic capital and violence provides one of the theoretical bridges with his later political interventions, and thus a continuity between his academic research and political involvement. But the main link between his theories and politics, or his academic and public postures, is his analysis of the logic of elds, endowing his political involvement with a reexive dimension. His analyses of the functioning of the scientic and the artistic elds provide the blueprint for his political interventions, resulting in a realpolitik of reason aiming at the instauration of social conditions conducive to the establishment of truth (Bourdieu, 1997).4 The political implications of these exemplar elds are the defence of elds autonomy, the guarantee of rationality and emancipation from the interventions of external forces or as Pinto puts it: that which follows more deeply from the immanent forces of the eld, rather than from external powers, is rational, and it is this that deserves to be preserved and developed (2000: 102). The danger represented by neo-liberalism and the encroachment of economic and political considerations on the autonomy of elds of cultural and intellectual production became the main targets for Bourdieus political involvement. But, more importantly, this strategy contained a reexive moment in its focus on the social conditions of possibility of intellectuals political interventions. Even at the height of his political period, Bourdieu was aware of the conditions that allowed him to full this role and thus directed his political interventions at defending them. In this respect, he avoided the self-gratifying tendency of thinking of the intellectual as a marginal, lonely, sometimes eccentric gure, who sacrices the advantage and comfort of power and social recognition for his unquenchable thirst for truth, or as Said described him, as an outsider, in a constant state of exile, whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, unwilling to accept
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The denition of the political as the general mode of vision and division of the social world has two main implications. The rst implication relates to the possibility of political action, which is about altering the ways social agents perceive and comprehend the social world. As such, political action starts with a rupture
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The move from one biography to the other, from the more or less fortuitous encounters to the project directed in a methodical way, from the disparate contingent self to the consistent subject, represents the ethico-political dimension of socio-analysis and the individual counterpart of a reexive politics. By providing the biographical undertones of his uvre, Bourdieu presented his own process of socio-analysis, undertaken over the course of his social trajectory. His theoretical models allowed him to provide a perspective through which to comprehend his habitus, in terms different than resentment. His writings, in addition to their sociological worth, were a way to come to terms with his biography, or as he puts it, the task of sociology was to strip the terrorism of resentment from its objective and subjective awlessness (Bourdieu, 1982: 289). For instance, Bourdieu described his work in Barn as a controlled return of the repressed, allowing him to re-appropriate a part of himself, of clarifying his relation to his social origins away from the initial feelings of guilt and shame (Bourdieu, 2004b: 82; Reed-Danahay, 2005: 122). Bourdieus writings on education were similarly justied by the need to gain rational control over the disappointment felt by an oblate faced with the annihilations of the truths and values of which he was destined and dedicated (Reed-Danahay, 2005: 27). The biographical components of Bourdieus writings do not imply that his work can be reduced to the interests of his biography, in a crude Marxian reading. On the contrary, as Jenkins noted in relation to Bourdieus writings on Barn, the successive renements of theoretical concepts were accompanied by a growth in retrospective understanding of his primary experiences with his object of study (2006). His socio-analysis can be read as different attempts to transubstantiate his primary experiences into social scientic interventions, creating a perspective on the world where he could reconcile his split habitus. And it is through this double dimension of socio-analysis, as both a tool for social research and a way to deal with ones blind impress, that Bourdieu emerges as an example of a successful socio-analysis, one that can serve as a benchmark for others to follow. The various autobiographical comments represent Bourdieus rhetorical strategy to enlist individuals into undertaking the painful exercises of rewriting their social biographies by positing himself as an example of a socioanalysis.9 Akin to Rortys Proust who became autonomous by explaining to himself why others were not authorities, but simply fellow contingencies (1999: 102), Bourdieu became autonomous by socially grounding his life and denaturalizing it. Whereas the eld dimension of the reexive politics was captured by Bourdieus later political involvement and his theorization of elds and their
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Notes
1 I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. 2 The rupture involved in this reading between a sociological period and a political period has been challenged by a number of authors, for whom Bourdieu has always been involved in politics. Conceding that this date should not be seen as a rupture, pitting two entirely different postures, one can make the claim that Bourdieus political involvement became more prominent in the 1990s, emerging as the major public intellectual in France. For a critique of the rupture thesis, see Poupeau and Discepolo (2004) and for an interpretation of the rupture, see Swartz (2003). 3 For a review of these critiques, see Swartz (2003).
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