Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Sketch for a Self-Analysis PIERRE BOURDIEU

Translated by RICHARD NICE

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

This is not an autobiography Pierre Bourdieu

Contents

Publisher's Note to the French Edition Sketch for a Self-Analysis Index

ix i i14

Publisher's Note to the French Edition A sociological analysis excluding psychology, except for some moods. Pierre Bourdieu, preparatory notes

This text, which Pierre Bourdieu wrote between October and December 2001 - but which he had worked and reflected on for several years, wondering in particular what form it should take - was conceived, starting from his last lecture at the College de France, as a new (extended and reworked) version of the last chapter of Science of Science and Reflexivity} And, to mark clearly the continuity between the two texts, he gave them the same title: 'Sketch for a self-analysis'. He had decided that the book should first be published in Germany" and, although he envisaged reworking it for the French edition, we have chosen to publish the German version, only adding some bibliographical notes for the explicit references. Just as he had made his entry to the College de France with a very reflexive 'Lecture on the lecture','" so Pierre I

Science of Science and Reflexivity (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). Ein So{iologischer Selbstversuch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). jii Lecon sur la lecon (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982), trans, as 'A lecture on the lecture', in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 177-98. II

Publisher s Note to the French Edition

Bourdieu decided to deliver his last lecture by subjecting himself, as if as afinalchallenge, to the exercise of reflexivity that he had defined throughout his life as a researcher as one of the necessary preliminaries to scientific research. He knew that to take himself as his object exposed him to the risk not only of being accused of self-indulgence, but also of giving weapons to all those who only wait for an opportunity to deny the scientific character of his sociology - precisely on the grounds of his own position and his trajectory - and who do not see that the exercise of reflexivity was built up over a long time as an instrument of scientificity. In this supremely paradoxical project, it was much less a question of an ostentatious gesture ('to summon the reader to ask himself why he is reading this', Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his preparatory notes) than of an entirely original undertaking that wouldfinallybring the researcher into conformity with his conception of scientific truth, a will to give a kind of ultimate guarantee of the scientific character of the propositions set out throughout his whole oeuvre, by means of a very controlled return upon himself ('I place the most objective analysis at the service of what is most subjective,' he also wrote, commenting on this text). It is clear now that he was right to fear the ill-use that could be made of it. In one of the early versions he wrote: 'This is not an autobiography. That genre is forbidden to me not only because I have identified and denounced the biographical illusion; it is also profoundly antipathetic to me, and the aversion mingled with fear that has led me to discourage several "biographers" is inspired by reasons that I think legitimate.' December 2003

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

I

do not intend to indulge in the genre of autobiography, which I have often enough described as both conventional and illusory. I would simply like to try to gather together and present some elements for a selfsocioanalysis. I do not conceal my apprehensions, which go far beyond the habitual fear of being misunderstood. I have indeed the feeling that, particularly on account of the scale of my path through social space and the practical incompatibility of the social worlds that it links without reconciling them, I cannot wager - being far from sure of achieving it myself with the instruments of sociology — that the reader will be able to bring to bear on the experiences that I shall be led to evoke, the gaze that, in my view, is the appropriate one. In adopting the point of view of the analyst I oblige (and authorize) myself to retain all the features that are pertinent from the point of view of sociology, in other words necessary for sociological explanation and understanding, and only those. But, far from seeking to produce thereby, as one might fear, an effect of closure, by imposing my interpretation, 1 intend to subject that experience, set out as honestly as possible, to critical confrontation, as if it were any other object. I am well aware that, analysed in that perspective, and as is appropriate all cases, in

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

accordance with the 'principle of charity', all the moments of my history, and in particular the various choices I have made in matters of research, may appear as reduced to their sociological necessity, that is to say, in that respect, justified, and, in any case, much more rational or even reasoned and reasonable than they were in reality, rather as if they had emerged from a project conscious of itself from the outset. But I know, and will do nothing to conceal it, that in reality I discovered only little by little, even on the terrain of research, the principles that guided my practice. Without being truly unconscious, my 'choices' manifested themselves above all in refusals and in intellectual antipathies that were most often barely articulated; and they expressed themselves explicitly only very belatedly (for example, the fairly deep revulsion that the cult of Sade, which was briefly fashionable, or the vision of sexuality associated with Georges Bataille or Pierre Klossowski inspired in me found afirstexpression only in an issue of Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales devoted to 'The body trade' in 199V)- Perhaps because I was too fully committed to my work and to the group I was leading to look around me, perhaps because I thought I had too much to do to devote a part of the time I so much needed to discussing or criticizing even the most prominent of those who surrounded me, in France or abroad, in the social sciences and philosophy, and for whom I did not always have much regard, perhaps because I am somewhat clumsy and 1

'Le corps et le sacre', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 104 (1994) ('Le commerce du corps'): 2.

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

ill at ease in intellectual discussions about problems that are not my own (I have a somewhat mitigated memory of an encounter with Habermas, admittedly a very warm one, organized in Paris by Dreyfus and Rabinow), I have tended to plough my own furrow in my own way, and it was only slowly, and almost always retrospectively, that I began, especially when abroad, to spell out my 'difference' from authors such as Habermas, Foucault or Derrida, about whom I am often questioned nowadays, and who were infinitely less present and less important in my research than the likes of Cicourel, Labov, Darnton or Tilly, and many other historians, ethnologists or sociologists unknown in intellectual or media spheres. In my effort to explain myself and understand myself, I shall nonetheless be able to draw on the scraps of self-objectivation that I have left in my path, throughout my research, and which I shall endeavour here to deepen and also systematize.

T

o understand is first to understand the field with which and against which one has been formed. That is why, at the risk of surprising a reader who perhaps expects to see me begin at the beginning, that is to say, with the evocation of my earliest years and the social world of my childhood, I must, as a point of method, first examine the state of thefieldat the moment I entered it, in the 1950s. If I recall that I was then a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in philosophy, at the summit of the scholastic hierarchy, at a time when philosophy could appear as triumphant, I shall have said, it seems to me, what one essentially needs to know in order to explain and understand my subsequent trajectory within the academic field. But in order to understand why and how one became a 'philosopher', a word whose ambiguity helped to favour the enormous over-investment that is excluded by less indeterminate choices, more directly adjusted to the real chances, I must also try to evoke the space of possibles as it then appeared to me and the rites of institution that tended to produce the element of inner conviction and inspired attachment which, in those years, were the condition for entry into the tribe of philosophers. I cannot relate here the whole machinery of the process of consecration which, from the concours general and the classes preparatoires to the concours for entry to the Ecole Normale, leads the elect (and most especially the oblats — 4 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

miracules)1 to elect the School that has elected them, to recognize the criteria of election that have constituted them as an elite; and, then, to orient themselves - no doubt with all the more eagerness, the more they have been consecrated - to the 'queen of disciplines'. One became a 'philosopher' because one had been consecrated and one consecrated oneself by securing the prestigious identity of 'philosopher'. The choice of philosophy was thus a manifestation of status-based assurance which reinforced that status-based assurance (or arrogance). This was more than ever true at a time when the whole intellectual field was dominated by thefigureof Jean-Paul Sartre and when the khdgnes? notably with Jean Beaufret, the addressee of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, and the entrance examination for the Ecole Normale itself, with its jury composed at one point of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Vladimir Jankelevitch, were, or could appear as, peaks of intellectual life. Khdgne was the site where French-style intellectual ambition in its most elevated, that is to say, philosophical, form was exhibited. The total intellectual, the model of which had just been invented and imposed by Sartre, was called for by 2

Concours general: a national competition for lycee pupils; classes preparatoires: the lycee classes training for the competitive examinations for entry to the grandes ecoles; oblat miracule or 'oblate': Bourdieu's term for a pupil who commits himself entirely to the scholastic success which gives him a 'miraculous' social mobility (trans.). 3 khdgne: the classes preparatoires training for the entrance examinations in the 'humanities' for the grandes ecoles (trans.).

— 5 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

a curriculum which offered a vast range of disciplines - philosophy, literature, history, ancient and modern languages and which, through its training in the dissertation de omnire scibili (as Durkheim put it4), the keystone of the whole edifice, encouraged a self-confidence often verging on the unself-consciousness of triumphant ignorance. Belief in the omnipotence of rhetorical invention could only be encouraged by crafted, theatricalized exhibitions of philosophical improvisation: I am thinking of masters like Michel Alexandre, a belated disciple of Alain, who used his prophetic poses to cover the weaknesses of a philosophical discourse reduced to the unaided resources of reflection without any historical basis, or Jean Beaufret, who initiated his dazzled pupils into the arcana of the thinking of a Heidegger who was not yet translated, except for a few fragments. (The extraordinary fortune of the Black Forest philosopher in France is fully explicable only if one sees that, as the exemplary incarnation of professorial aristocratism and the undisputed philosophy of philosophy that inhabits philosophy teachers - without their being aware of it - he is closer than it seems to the old French tradition of Lagneau and Alain - as is shown by the fact that so many 'philosophers' trained in the 1950s were able to glide from admiration for Alexandre to a passion for Heidegger.) And so were constituted the status-linked legitimacy of a universally recognized scholastic aristocracy and - noblesse oblige - the sense of elevation which imposes the greatest 4

'About everything that can be written' - ironically quoting the motto of Pico della Mirandola (trans.). — 6 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

intellectual ambitions on every 'philosopher' worthy of the name and forbids him to stoop to certain disciplines or certain objects, in particular those that are of interest to specialists in the social sciences (for example, it took the shock of 1968 to bring the philosophers trained in the khagnes of the late 1940s to consider the problem of power and politics, albeit in a highly sublimated mode. There is no doubt that Deleuze and Foucault, and all the others after them, would not have been able to pose a question so clearly excluded from the old-style philosophical canon as that of power, if it had not been brought right into the heart of the universityfieldby the student contestation that drew its inspiration from theoretical traditions entirely ignored or despised by the academic orthodoxy, such as Marxism, the Weberian conception of the state, or sociological analysis of the educational institution). The grip of strongly integrated groups, the limiting case (and practical model) of which is the standard family, is to a larg&exrent due to the fact that they are linked by a collusio in the illusio, f deep-rooted complicity in th# Iective fantasy, ^hich provides each of its members with ihe-expenence of an exaltation of the ego, the principle of a solidarity rooted in attachment to the group as an enchanted image of the self. It is indeed this socially constructed feeling of being of a 'superior essence' which, together with the solidarities of interests and the affinities of habitus, does most to engender and support what must indeed be called an 'esprit de corps' - however strange the expression may seem when applied to a set of individuals persuaded of their perfect non-substitutability. One of the

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

functions of initiation rites is to create a community of unconsciousnesses that makes possible the discreet conflicts between intimate adversaries, the hidden borrowing of themes or ideas that everyone feels entitled to attribute to himself because they are the product of schemes of invention very close to his own, the tacit references and allusions intelligible only within the small circle of initiates (to look in this way on what has been written since the 1960s is to discover, beneath the glitter of proclaimed differences, the profound homogeneity of the problems and themes, and to be able to recognize, for example, in the Derridean motto of 'deconstruction' beyond the transfiguration resulting from the complete change of theoretical context - the Bachelardian theme of the break with preconstructions which, having become a scholastic topos, was also orchestrated, at the same moment, at the other pole of the field of philosophy - by Louis Althusser, especially, and in the social sciences - particularly in Le Metier de sociologue? But the most important and also most invisible property of the philosophical universe of that time and that place perhaps at all times and in all countries - is no doubt the scholastic enclosure which, even if it characterizes other high places of academic life - Oxford or Cambridge, Yale or Harvard, Heidelberg or Todai - takes one of its most exemplary forms in the closed, separate world, set apart 5

With J.-C. Chamboredon and J.-C. Passseron, Le Metier de sociologue (Paris and The Hague: Mouton), trans, as The Craft of Sociology (New York and Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991).

—

8 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

from the vicissitudes of the real world, which, around the 1950s, produced most of the French philosophers whose message now inspires a worldwide 'campus radicalism',6 particularly through 'cultural studies'.7 The effects of enclosure, compounded by those of scholastic election and the prolonged cohabitation of a socially very homogeneous group, can indeed only favour a social and mental distance from the world that, paradoxically, is never more apparent than in the (often desperate) attempts to rejoin the social world, particularly through political commitments (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) whose ^responsible utopianism and irrealist radicalism attest that they remain a paradoxical wayftTdenying the realities of the social world. It is clear that, for me as for all those who then had any connection with philosophy, the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre exerted a fascination that was not without ambivalence, as much in the intellectual order as in the domain of politics. However, the domination of the author of L'Etre et le Neant* was never exerted without contest in those spheres, and those people (of whom I was one) who sought to resist 'existentialism' in its fashionable or academic forms could draw support from a set of dominated currents: first, a history of philosophy very closely linked to the history of the sciences, the 'prototypes' of which were represented by 6

In English in the original (trans.). In English in the original (trans.). 8 J.-P. Sartre, L'Etre et le Neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), trans. as Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). 7

— 9 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

two major works, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniyennes, by Martial Gueroult,9 a graduate of the Ecole Normale and professor at the College de France, and Physique et metaphysique kantiennes, by Jules Vuillemin,10 another normalien, then a young lecturer at the Sorbonne and a contributor to Les Temps Modernes, who later succeeded Gueroult at the College de France; and, then, an epistemology and a history of the sciences represented by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyre. Often of lower-class or provincial origin, or brought up outside France and its academic traditions, and attached to peripheral university institutions, like the £cole des Hautes Etudes or the College de France, these marginal and temporally dominated authors, hidden from common perception by the celebrity of the dominant figures, offered a recourse to those who, for various reasons, sought to react against the fascinating but rejected image of the total intellectual, present on all the front lines of thought. (I should add the name of Eric Weil, whose commentaries on Hegel I had attended at the time, and whom I later came to know better when I was appointed to the faculty at Lille, in the early 1960s.) Georges Canguilhem, a contemporary at the Ecole Normale of Sartre and Raymond Aron, from whom he was separated by his lower-class provincial origin, could be 9

M. Gueroult, Dynamique et metaphysique leibni{iennes (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1935). 10 J. Vuillemin, Physique et metaphysique kantiennes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955).

10

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

invoked by the occupants of opposite positions in the university field. As an exemplary homo academicus^ he was to serve as an emblem for professors who occupied positions in the institutions of reproduction of the teaching corps entirely homologous to his own, such as Francois Dagonet; but as the advocate of a tradition of the history of science and epistemology which, at the height of the triumph of existentialism, represented the heretical refuge of seriousness and rigour, he would be consecrated, with Gaston Bachelard, as the maitre a penser of philosophers more remote from the heart of the academic tradition, such as Althusser, Foucault and some others. It was as if his at once central and minor position in the university field and the entirely rare, even exotic dispositions that had predisposed him to occupy it had designated him to play the role of a totemic emblem for all those who sought to break with the dominant model and who constituted themselves as an 'invisible college' by rallying around his name. The desire to shun fashionable enthusiasms could also lead one to seek another antidote to the 'facile* aspects of existentialism - often identified, especially in its Christian version, with a somewhat fatuous exaltation of le vecu ('lived experience') - in reading Husserl (translated by Paul Ricceur11 or Suzanne Bachelard,12 the daughter of the philosopher, herself a historian of science), or among those 1

' E. Husserl, /dees directrice pour une phenomenologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). 12 E. Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957).

11

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

phenomenologists who were most inclined to conceive phenomenology as arigorousscience, such as Maurice MerleauPonty, who also offered an opening towards the human sciences, through child psychology, which he taught at the Sorbonne, before moving to the College de France; but also towards Saussure, Weber and Mauss. In this context, the journal Critique, edited by Georges Bataille and Eric Weil, by giving access to an international and transdisciplinary culture, made it possible to escape from the closure effect exerted by every elite school. (The reader will have understood that, in this evocation of the space of the philosophical possibles as it then appeared to me, are expressed the often very strong and always lively admirations I felt in my early twenties, and the particular point of view from which my representation of the academic field and of philosophy was engendered.) So it can be seen that it is possible to produce at will the appearances of either continuity or rupture between the 1950s and the 1970s, depending on whether or not one takes account of the dominated figures of the 1950s who served as references for some of the leaders of the antiexistentialist revolution in philosophy. But just as - except perhaps for Bachelard, who sprinkled his writings with ironic comments on the peremptory assertions of the existentialist masters, particularly as regards science - the dominated thinkers of the 1950s provided many indications, both in their lives and in their works, of their submission to the dominant philosophical model, so too the new dominant figures of the 1970s did not perhaps carry 12

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

through to its conclusion the revolution they had undertaken against the empire of the total philosopher. The works of theirs that are most liberated from the grip of academia still bear the marks of the hierarchy, inscribed both in the objective structure of institutions - with, for example, the opposition between the major thesis, the vehicle of the most ambitious, original and 'brilliant' developments, and the minor thesis, formerly written in Latin, devoted to humble products of erudition or the human sciences — and in the cognitive structures, systems of classification incorporated in the form of the opposition between the theoretical and the empirical, the general and the specialized, philosophy and the social sciences. They were no doubt all the more intent on marking and maintaining their distance from those 'common' sciences because, by the early 1960s, those sciences had started to threaten the hegemony of philosophy. So it was that, in their very confrontation with those sciences, they were led to mimic the rhetoric of scientificity (particularly through what I call the '-ology' effect: 'grammatology', 'archaeology', etc., and other rhetorical resources, particularly seen among the Althusserians) and to appropriate, discreetly, a number of their problems and discoveries (one day someone should catalogue the borrowings that the philosophers of that generation made, almost invariably without saying so - not so much out of dishonesty as on account of a tradition of sovereign elevation and so as not to lose status - from the lower caste of linguists, ethnologists and even, especially after 1968, sociologists). This played a significant part in preventing them from seeing that the — 13 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

break they were making with the pious naiveties of personalist humanism only led them Back, by the indirect paths of structural anthropology and structural linguistics, to the 'philosophy without subject* that the social sciences had advocated from the beginning of the century. (As I tried to show in an article I wrote with Jean-Claude Passeron just before the events of 1968,13 the swing of the pendulum that had led the normaliens of the 1930s, and especially Sartre and the young Raymond Aron (the Aron who wrote Introduction to the Philosophy of History)1* to react against Durkheimianism, which was perceived as somewhat 'totalitarian', had started to move back in the opposite direction, in the early 1960s, particularly through the impetus given by Claude Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, towards to what was then called, by Paul Ricoeur and contributors to Esprit, a 'philosophy without subject*. And the immobile motion of philosophical life was merely bringing the game back to its starting point when, in the 1980s, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut - abetted in their dirty tricks by Esprit, of course, but also by the journal Le Debat, under Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet, and by the whole band of media acolytes of Francois Furet, with the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur taking the lead - tried to restart the 13

With J.-C. Passeron, 'Sociology and philosophy in France since 1945: death and resurrection of a philosophy without subject', Social Research, 34, no. 1 (spring 1967): 162-212. 14 R. Aron, Introduction a la philosophic de Vhistoire. Essaisur les limites de Vobjectivite'(Paris: Gallimard, 1938), trans, as Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).

14

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

pendulum of fashion by declaring, in a squalid polemic based on a paradoxically sociologistic amalgam, the 'return of the subject' against those who, in the 1960s, had themselves proclaimed the 'death of the subject'.) The consciously denied 'return' to the 'despiritualized' philosophy of the social sciences that 'Zarathustra's nephews', as Louis Pinto calls them,15 performed in the 1960s, under the aegis, of course, of prestigious and semiheretical ancestors (especially Nietzsche), is quite the opposite of a true reconciliation. Even for those most 'liberated' from the spirit of caste, like the Foucault of the post-'68 theory of power, the frontier with the social sciences, and especially sociology, remained socially uncrossable. Perceived by outsiders as being close, by virtue of its object, to a kind of journalism, sociology is also devalued with respect to philosophy by its air of scientistic, even positivistic, vulgarity, which is never more visible than when it touches on the most undisputed beliefs nf t^e intellerhial

^Qildr-such as those that concern art and literature, and when it threatens to 'reduce' (one of the vices most regularly attributed to 'sociologism') the sacred values of the person and of culture, and therefore the value of the cultured person. I have had many occasions to experience the fact that the tranquil iconoclasm of VAmour de l'arty16 which, with its h

L. Pinto, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra. La reception de Nietzsche en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995). 16 With A. Darbel and D. Schnapper, VAmour de Van. Les museesdart et leurpublic (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1966); 2nd edn 1969, trans, as The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).

—

15 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

statistics and its mathematical model, was directly (and coldly) opposed to the academic cult of the work of art, was no less opposed to the academically tolerated, if not programmed, transgressions of the anti-academic academicism of the disciples of Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. (And I can testify that it was much better received and understood by the artists, who, at that same moment, were calling artistic belief and the very game of art into question in their works, than by those philosophers who were seemingly most liberated from artistic fetishism. It was, for example, only the fear that its demonstrative (and critical) context would be undermined by artistic derealization that prevented me from authorizing a conceptual artist to use in one of his works a statistical table showing the mathematical probability of access to museums and galleries according to level of education.) There is no better way of measuring the structural discredit that sociology and everything associated with it suffers in the intellectual world than by comparing its fate (any aspiring author or philosopher can enhance his objective and subjective stature by expressing all the elegant contempt he has for it) with the treatment given to psychoanalysis, with which it nonetheless shares some important features, such as the ambition of giving a scientific account of human behaviours. As Sarah Winter has shown,17 psychoanalysis has draped itself in the transhistorical universality and grandeur that are traditionally granted to the 17

S. Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

—

16 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Greek tragic poets, deliberately dehistoricized and universalized by the scholastic tradition. By setting the new science in the line of descent of Sophocles* tragedy, one of the jewels of classical Bildung^ Freud gave it its academic letters of nobility. And Jacques Lacan, returning to the Greek sources to put forward new interpretations of Sophocles' tragedy, reactivated thatfiliation,which is also attested by a style of writing that combines the obscurities and audacities of a Mallarme and a Heidegger. But this is only one of the factors that explain the (at least apparent) affinity between psychoanalysis, as a 'cure of souls', and spiritualism (and, more precisely, Catholicism). What is certain is that psychoanalysis, at least in 1970s France, was lodged among the noblest and purest intellectual activities, in short, at the antipodes of sociology. The latter, a plebeian and vulgarly materialist science of ordinary things, is commonly seen, especially in nations with a long cultural tradition, as given to coarse analyses of the most vulgar, common and collective dimensions of human existence, and its excursions into humanist culture, taken as a reference or an object, far from having the effect of a captatio benevolentiae, are seen as sacrilegious usurpations or intrusions tending to compound the exasperation of the true believers. The French university system, too immersed in the literary fads of the intellectual field and too attentive to journalistic preoccupations and consecrations, does not offer the researcher what he is granted on the other side of the Atlantic by an autonomous and self-sufficient university field, with, in particular, its tight networks of specialists in 17

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

different disciplines, its forms of scientific exchange, at once supple and strict - seminars, informal colloquia, etc. This coherent set of specific institutions provides satisfactions capable of discouraging the pursuit of the dubious prestige and factitious recognition of non-academic worlds and shields him from the unwanted intrusions of the innumerable cohort of essayists, the 'daubers' [iousilleurs], as bad painters were called in the nineteenth century, who, perpetuating the inflated ambitions of the khdgne, live as semi-plagiaristic parasites on the works of others. (One may concede, if one is entirely realistic, that, despite everything, they do play a role, in the long run, in making known the works on which they feed, while masking them, and to which they owe the appearance of originality that makes their success, especially abroad.) That is why, when I compare the overall style of my scientific work - albeit in permanent discord with the great humanist traditions of France, and some other European countries - with that of an American researcher like Aaron Cicourel, with whom I share not only the interest in certain privileged objects, such as the educational system, but also the intention of founding a materialist theory of knowledge, I cannot fail to note with some envy the irreplaceable role played in his case by a scientific environment that is both stimulating and demanding. I wonder in fact if a number of the difficulties that our research group constantly encountered, outside the university field but especially within it, from the most heteronomous sectors of thefield,do not derive from the fact that in trying to introduce - like the Durkheimians a 18

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

century earlier, and with analogous difficulties - the rigorous and modest logic of collective work, and the associated ethic, it constituted itself as a foreign body, threatening and worrying for all those who are able to live intellectually above their means only thanks to an almost Mafia-style collusion capable of providing a social context of indulgence for their usurpations of identity, their cultural embezzlements and their literary or philosophical frauds. I think in fact that a good proportion of the negative or hostile reactions that I have aroused, and increasingly so as the autonomy of the university field with respect to the journalistic field has tended to weaken, stem — as much as from the critical content of my remarks and writings (which is clearly not without effect, especially when it touches on intellectual interests) - from the existence and particularities of the group that I formed. The metaphors used to describe the group when it is mentioned in gossip or journalism are those of political indoctrination (an article about me in the newspaper Liberation a few years ago referred to an 'Albania', no less) or sectarian affiliation. What is neither perceived nor understood, except as an object of fear or indignation, is the intense intellectual and affective fusion that, to different degrees and in different ways from one period to another, united the members of the group in participation in a mode of organization of the work of thought that was perfectly antinomic to the literary (and very Fdiisiail') vision ot 'creation^as the singular act flf pn kr^ lated researcher (a vision which inclines so many ill-trained and intellectually ill-equipped researchers to prefer the sufferings, the doubts and, very often, the failures and the —

19 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

sterility of solitary labour to what they perceive as the depersonalizing alienation of a collective undertaking). How can one deny that the intense intellectual and moral integration that favours collective work which is both gratifying and highly productive does not come without the permanent effort of encouragement and unification that falls to the leader [animateur] of the group, a kind of orchestral conductor or stage director, or, more modestly, trainer, as the role is called in the world of sport, on whom the group that he galvanizes confers in return his 'charismatic' powers through the affectionate recognition that they accord him? Does it need to be said that this integration is indissociable from a mobilization against certain intellectual adversaries and in favour of certain causes, which are inseparably scientific and political? The members of the Centre18 acted - without using those grand words - as activists of the univecsal, or, in HusserFs phrase, 'functionaries of humanity'7 conscious of receiving mucrTTrorn the collectivity, in the form of salary and information in particular, and concerned to repay it. It goes without saying that the seriousness, without any 'spirit of seriousness' (but perhaps a little too grave and too tense), which sustained the group, and also the high standards it set itself in terms of work and publications, were not likely to be understood and applauded by all those who, even in the

Centre de Sociologie Europeenne, the research centre within the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales which Pierre Bourdieu directed and/or 'animated' from the early 1960s (French editors' note).

20

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

world of research, affected-lhe-kindof- 'role distance- bywhich distinguished intellectuals are recognized in France. That is why, by its very existence as much as by its productions, it presented something like a challenge and a questioning. And the effects of a school of thought, whether they be real, like the affinity of style (in all senses of the word), or fantasized (like the myth of the 'clan' or 'sect'), could only favour, encourage, and, in any case, justify undertakings of imitation and distinction, but above all resistances that could go as far as exclusion from all the institutions of power over reproduction of the corps, not to mention symbolic aggression through gossip and rumours more or less orchestrated by powerful rivals (both in the university world and in journalism), which surface at intervals even in newspaper articles.

T

he field effect is partly exerted though the confrontation with the position-takings of all or some of those who are also engaged in the field (and who are themselves so many different, and antagonistic, embodiments of the relationship between a habitus and a field): the space of possibles is realized in individuals exercising an 'attraction' or 'repulsion' that depends on their 'weight' in thefield,in other words their visibility, and also on the more or less great affinity of habitus, which leads one to find their thought and action 'sympathetic' or 'antipathetic'. (Unlike posterity, which can only judge the works, contemporaries have a direct or quasi-direct experience, through newspapers, radio and now television, but also through rumour and gossip, of the person in his totality, his body, his manners, his dress, his voice, his accent - so many features of which, with a few exceptions, narratives leave no trace - and also of the company he keeps, his political positions, his loves and friendships, etc.). These sympathies and antipathies, which pertain to the person as much as to his works, are the principle of many intellectual affinities, which remain entirely obscure and are often experienced as inexplicable, because they engage the two habitus concerned. After having shared for a moment the vision of the world of the 'lyjos-French-normalien-philosopher that Sartre brought to fulfilment, and one might say, to its 22

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

pinnacle - and in particular the disdain with which, especially in Being and Nothingness, he regarded the sciences of man - psychology, psychoanalysis, not to mention (but, precisely, he did not mention it) sociology - 1 can say that I constructed myself, as I left the scholastic universe, and in order to leave it, against everything that the Sartrian enterprise represented for me. What I liked least in Sartre was everything that made him not only the 'total intellectual' but also the ideal intellectual, the exemplary figure of the intellectual, and in particular his unparalleled contribution to the mythology of the free intellectual, which earned him the eternal recognition of all intellectuals. (My sympathy for Karl Kraus stems from the fact that to the idea of the intellectual as constructed and imposed by Sartre he adds an essential virtue, that of critical reflexivity: there are many intellectuals who call the world into question, but there are very few intellectuals who call the intellectual world into question. This can be readily understood when it is seen that one cannot dare to do so without running the risk of having the weapons of objectivation turned back on oneself, or worse, suffering ad hominem attacks aimed at destroying in his principle, i.e. in his person, his integrity, his virtue, someone who can only be seen as setting himself up, through his interventions, as a living reproach, while being himself without reproach.) I shall never place myself, however, in the camp of those who now proclaim the death of Sartre and the end of the intellectuals or who, more subtly, invent a Sartre/Aron couple which never existed, in order to award the palm (of reason and lucidity) to the latter. In fact, between the two

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

figures (who, as Aron himself knew, had no common measure) the resemblances are much greater than the differences - starting with what makes both of them, despite everything, profoundly appealing to me: I mean by this what I shall call their naivety or even the innocence of overgrown bourgeois adolescents who have succeeded in everything (while I cannot testify as regards Sartre, I knew and - need I say it? - felt affection for Raymond Aron enough to be able to attest that behind the cold, disenchanted analyst of the contemporary world was a sensitive, even tender and sentimental man, and an intellectual believing naively in the powers of the intelligence). Pure products of a triumphant scholastic institution which granted an unconditional recognition to its 'elite', for example, turning a teachers' recruitment examination (the philosophy agregation) into a tribunal of intellectual consecration (one has to see how Simone de Beauvoir describes all this in her memoirs)19 these child-prodigies-by-decree found themselves endowed, at the age of twenty, with the privileges and duties of genius. In a France that was economically and politically diminished, but intellectually as self-confident as ever, they could devote themselves in all innocence to the mission they were assigned by the university and by a whole university tradition imbued with the certainty of its own universality — in other words a kind of universal rergn-of the intellect. Armed with their sheer inteHrgenc^- n^ ^ply has m )ook at their footnotes to see that they scarcely burdened themselves with positivistic 19

S. de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (London: Putnam, 1965).

— 24 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

knowledge - they could confront the most immense intellectual tasks, such as that of philosophically grounding the science of society or of history, or peremptorily adjudicating the ultimate truth of political regimes or the future of humanity. But their unbounded self-assurance was accompanied by the uncompromising acknowledgement of the obligations attached to their dignity. No one believed more than Sartre in the mission of the ., intellectual of did more than him to endow jthis self/ interestedmyth with the force of soriq] helief/The myth ancH>artre himself, who, in the splendid innocence of his generosity, is both its producer and its product, its creator and its creature, are, I think (no doubt by an effect of the same innocence), something to be defended at all costs, against everything and everyone, and especially perhaps against a sociologists interpretation of the sociological description of the intellectual world: even if it is still much too great for even the greatest of intellectuals, the myth of the intellectual and his universal mission is one of those ruses of historical reason intellectualsmostjunrrptihlf toihi |iinfil • "f unlu^^ily can be led to contribute to the progress ofthe universal, in the name 6f motivations which mayliaye nothing universal about them. Another 'beacon' (phare - the metaphor is perhaps hackneyed, in spite of Baudelaire,20 but it well expresses what certain individuals, constituted if not always as models, at 20

Cf. Charles Baudelaire's poem 'Les Phares* in Les Fleurs du Mal (trans.).

—

25 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

least as references, represent for a new entrant) was a figure who is almost perfecdy antithetical to Sartre: Georges Canguilhem, who helped me a great deal to conceive the realistic possibility of living the intellectual life differently. It is no doubt in his relationship to Sartre that one sees most clearly what there was in this man and in his work that could have inspired such admiration and affection in a whole generation of French thinkers. Extending the work of Gaston Bachelard, of which he gave an admirable presentation,21 Georges Canguilhem made a decisive contribution to historical epistemology, or, more precisely, to the historicization of epistemology, to therigorousanalysis of the genesis of scientific concepts and the historical obstacles to their emergence, in particular through clinical descriptions of the pathologies of scientific thought, the false sciences and the political uses of science, especially biology. Thereby he no doubt represents what is best in the tradition of the rationalism that can be called French, inasmuch as it is rooted in a political, or, more precisely, civic tradition, although it is, in my view, truly universal (as witness, for example, its fortune on the other side of the Atlantic, through Alexandre Koyre and Thomas Kuhn). What made him an exemplary figure, for me and also, I think, for many others, was his dissonance, not to say his resistance: although he occupied the apparently most conventional positions at the heart of the university system, he was not wholly of this world, which, moreover, granted 21

G. Canguilhem, Etudes d'histoire et de philosophic des sciences (Paris: Vrin, 1968).

— 26

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

him all the signs of recognition and towards which he fulfilled all his duties. He simply did his job, without indulgence or bombast, but also without concessions, as a teacher, and a teacher of philosophy; he never played the philosopher. Those who evoke his memory speak of his gravelly voice and his accent, which made him sound permanently angry, and the wry look and ironic smile which accompanied his remorseless judgements on academic mores. Marked by the tradition of a region and a milieu where, as one can tell from the vibration of the voice or the sharpness of the eyes, the body is always engaged, committed, in speaking, he was hardly disposed to join in the gratuitous games of irresponsible thinking with which some people identify philosophy or in mystico-literary exaltation of the Holderlinian-Heideggerian thinking that enchants the poet-thinkers. He took a liking to me, in one of those movements of sympathy obscure to itself that are rooted in the affinity of habitus. I remember that after the agregation, he offered me a post at the lycee in Toulouse, thinking that I would be delighted to be sent back to my 'home territory', and that he was astonished, even a little shocked, when I turned it down (in favour of the lycee in Moulins which brought me closer to Clermont-Ferrand and Jules Vuillemin). When I envisaged a thesis, I turned to him, rather than to Jean Hippolyte, for example, as others did, in a kind of relation of identification which many signs make me think went both ways (he had laid out for me an academic and scientific career modelled on his own). Later, when I used to visit him, in his office in the Rue du —

27

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Four, he would set aside whole afternoons for me (he would search in his library and give me offprints of articles by great foreign scientists, such as Annie Jump Cannon, often signed and dedicated by the authors) and 1 would stay until it began to grow dark. I was struck by the fact that his thought and speech did not have those relaxations of tension that so disappointed me when I saw them in so many other philosophers of my acquaintance (some of them dazzling and profound when they spoke of Kant or Malebranche) as the conversation shifted from the most technical subjects of philosophy or science to the mundane questions of life. He would say things, with extraordinary adroitness of expression, that seemed to me very audacious and very wise. After a brief falling-out (he was greatly annoyed that I had turned down the post at the Lycee Pierre Fermat in Toulouse where he had started his own career), we resumed our exchanges and we often talked during the turbulent days of May 1968, which were a great trial for him: he was one of those 'oblates' who had given everything to the educational system and who saw the sympathy of their pupils (of my generation) for the student movement as a betrayal inspired by opportunism or ambition. He told me, because he was no doubt discovering it at that moment, how difficult it had been for him to adapt to the scholastic world (for example, when he arrived, as a new boarder, at the lycee in Castelnaudary, he did not know what washbasins were for). It seems to me that he was becoming aware, for thefirsttime, of what it was that separated him from his fellow students at the Ecole Normale, Sartre or — 28 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Aron (the latter played tennis, at a very high level, whereas he played rugby) and which, although the integrative power of the 'republican schoor had led him to forget or repress it, was perhaps at the root of the kind of rage that seemed always to inhabit him, beneath an exterior of the warmest civility, and which occasionally exploded in the face of some forms of Arrogant incompetence. ___ He left the limelight to others, who were happy to praise his modesty, integrity and rigour. He sometimes wrote for the regional newspaper, La Depeche de Toulouse (I think that is where I first read him, in my summer vacations), whereas others wrote for the major Paris newspapers; he was a resistant (and not only during the Occupation) to all forms of compromise with temporal power. And those who do not forgive him for his pitiless judgements, or even his mere existence, may even reproach him for having completely fulfilled his role as a 'mandarin' — he was successively a teacher in khagne, a chief inspector of schools, a member of the jury for the agregation - rather than devoting himself to activities more becoming to the image of the free philosopher. He never gave interviews, never spoke on radio or television. (I was able to confirm that this was a quite deliberate choice: after a mutual friend had told me that if he were to make an exception, it would be for me, I one day invited him to grant me an interview, and, after asking me, with a hint of a smile, what it was I so much wanted to know, he talked to me about a great number of very personal things that I had never read or heard before, but took care to do so while we were standing in a small street on the —

29 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, in other words in conditions such that no form of recording was possible.) Although Georges Canguilhem, and other philosophers, such as Jules Vuillemin, or, in my generation, Jean-Claude Pariente, Henri Joly and Louis Marin, never ceased to be part of it, at least during the long period of transition between philosophy and the social sciences (I showed them what I was writing, before it was published, and discussed my research with them), scientific life was elsewhere. To reconstitute the space of possibles that offered itself to me, I have to start by describing the state of the social sciences as it appeared to me, and in particular the relative positions of the various disciplines or specialities. The sociology of that time was a closed world where all the places were assigned: first, the generation of the elders - Georges Gurvitch, who held the Sorbonne in a fairly despotic manner; Jean Stoetzel, who taught social psychology at the Sorbonne and ran the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques, but also IFOP,22 and who controlled the CNRS;23 and Raymond Aron, recently appointed at the Sorbonne, who, to the native, spontaneously relational, perception, appeared as offering an unhoped-for opening to those who wanted to escape from the forced choice between the theoreticist sociology of Gurvitch and the scientistic, Americanized psychosociology of Stoetzel. Then, the rising generation, all aged around forty, who carved up research 22 23

French Institute of Public Opinion. French national science research council.

—

30 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

areas and powers among themselves, in accordance with a division into specialties, often defined by common-sense concepts, and clearly demarcated like so manyfiefdoms:the sociology of work, with Alain Touraine, Jean-Daniel Reynaud and Jean-Rene Treanton; the sociology of education, with Viviane Isambert; the sociology of religion, Francois-Andre Isambert; rural sociology, Henri Mendras; urban sociology, Paul-Henri Chombard de Lauwe; the sociology of leisure, Joffre Dumazedier; and no doubt a few other minor or marginal provinces that I forget. The space was marked out by three or four recently founded major journals: the Revue Fratifaise de Sociologies controlled by Stoetzel and some second-generation 'barons' (Raymond Boudon inherited it a few years later); the Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologies controlled by Gurvitch (and inherited by Georges Balandier); the Archives Europeennes de Sociologies founded by Aron, and edited, with great rigour, by feric de Dampierre; and a few secondary journals, less decisive in the structure - rather like Georges Friedman in the older generation - Sociologie du Travail and Etudes Rurales. Everything that might appear new, in thefieldof the social sciences, was then clustered at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, run by Fernand Braudel, who, although critical of my early work on Algeria, because in his view it took too little account of history, always gave me very friendly and very trusting support, both in my research and in my running of the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne - with the incomparable 'mover and shaker' who seconded him in everything (sometimes ahead of him .. .), Clemens Heller. — 31

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

(The passage that Raymond Aron devoted to me in his memoirs24 was a very partial evocation of my relationship with him, which, in i960, on the eve of the generals' putsch in Algiers, was what enabled me to make a rapid return to Paris, when he invited me to become his assistant - a debt that could never be forgotten. (I had made his acquaintance shortly before, on the advice of Clemence Ramnoux, professor of Greek philosophy at the University of Algiers, a contemporary of his at the £cole Normale, who had advised me to ask him to supervise, for a thesis, the work that I was doing for other purposes on Algeria, and he had received me very warmly - one sees, once again, the role of the Ecole Normale in the seeming accidents that have shaped my career.) His analysis of our relationship, a retrospective reconstruction slanted by the bitterness stemming from the final crisis, was based, as is shown by the allusions to my supposed mistreatments of my disciples, on a selective and very misinformed perception of certain events (in particular those surrounding the election of his daughter, who had studied and worked with me, to the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), of which he had a very imperfect knowledge and understanding. Few people recognized me as early and as fully as he - even in the reproach he often addressed to me and in which he expressed the fears he had for me: 'You are like Sartre, you have got a system of concepts too soon/ I remember the long evenings we spent together, in his apartment on the 24

See R. Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection

(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990) (trans.).

— 32 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Quai de Passy, when he would discuss my sketches in a very friendly way, as an equal, no doubt on the basis of normalien fraternity (which led him, a few years later, when, after the publication of Les Heritiers25 and shortly before 1968, our relations were becoming more tense, to start using tu to me, to my great embarrassment). The esteem that Canguilhem, with whom he discussed me, had for me perhaps also played a part. At the time when - to rid myself of the thesis which was a great burden to me, and the 'logic' of which would have forced me to precede what I really had to say (the theory of practice that, once any idea of a doctorate was abandoned, was to become the Esguiss£26^wi&xwcrenormoiis, purely scholastic sections, one, phenomenological in inspiration, on the primary experience of the social world, the other on the structuralist conception of language and, by transposition, of culture — I suggested to him that I should bring together the work that had served as the basis for Travail et travailleurs en Algerie and Le Deracinement, adding a third section on the domestic economy of Algerian families, based on an extensive statistical inquiry (this, fully analysed, is still in a cupboard at the College de France. . . ) , he said to me: 'It would not be worthy of you/ It was a sincere and profoundly generous warning, but a very 25

Les Heritiers. Les etudiants et la culture (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964), trans, as The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 26 Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique, precedee de trois etudes d'ethnologie kabyle (Geneva : Droz, 1972), trans, as Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

— 33 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

ambiguous one too, being the perfect form of the symbolic violence that one exerts without realizing it, because one undergoes it in the very moment and movement of exerting it. I shall say no more about my relationship with him, which was something very important to him, I think, among other things because it was my principle never to lie to him - while more or less consciously stressing our points of agreement, with the intention, itself quasi-conscious and no doubt somewhat naive, of doing him a service by awakening in this way the critical velleities or virtualities that would have brought him closer to the liveliest fraction of the intelligentsia, which was always so fascinating for him (he showed many times in many ways the immense admiration he still had for Sartre), I never disguised our points of disagreement, especially in politics — except to say that our 'rupture', if it ever happened (I met him from time to time for interminable discussions that would have alarmed his conservative friends, who had 'taken him in hand* after 1968), sprang not from some disagreement, political or other, but a bitterness commensurate, I think, with the (no doubt excessive) affection he had had for me - and which, ^n his view, I had not lived up to.) L'Homme, the journal founded and controlled by LeviStrauss, occupied a quite separate and dominant position: although almost entirely devoted to ethnology, it exerted a great attraction on a number of new entrants (of whom I was one). That is another indication of the pre-eminent position of ethnology, and the dominated position of sociology. One should even say doubly dominated - dominated within the field of the 'hard' sciences, where it had difficulty in gaining — 34 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis >

acceptance, while ethnology, through Levi-Strauss, was fighting to be recognized as a science in its own right (particularly by making use of reference to linguistics, which was then at its zenith); and also dominated within the university field, where, for many philosophers, still full of statutory self-assurance, and for many literary scholars concerned for distinction, the 'human sciences' were jumped-up newcomers and intruders. Not surprisingly, in this 'refuge' discipline - a welcoming, indeed, too welcoming haven that, as Yvette Delsaut has neatly put it, 'did not intimidate' - one found a small stratum of professors teaching the history of the discipline and doing little or no research, and a 'mass' (not in fact a very large one) of researchers attached to the CNRS and some other institutions, who came from the most diverse academic origins (the licence11 in sociology did not exist when the second generation entered the field). These researchers devoted themselves mainly to empirical research which was as ill-armed theoretically as it was empirically — so many indices and factors of an enormous dispersion (especially as regards level of qualifications) which was not conducive to the establishment of a universe of rational discussion. It is not exaggerated, I think, to speak of a pariah discipline-, the 'devaluation' of everything concerned withTajcial mutters, in an intellectual milieu nonetheless very occupied and preoccupied with politics (but many commitments, especially those in the Communist Party, are still a paradoxical way of keeping the social world at arm's length), compounded - or was the primary cause of - a dominated 27

Equivalent of Bachelor's degree (trans.).

— 35 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

position within the university field. (And one sees, if one reads Frederique Matonti,28 how, in their debates, which were in appearance open to the whole world, the intellectuals grouped around the journal La Nouvelle Critique managed to reproduce the oppositions and hierarchies of the small enclosed world of the kkagnes and the Ecole Normale, of which Louis Althusser is no doubt the exemplary figure.) The social world was absent, because ignored or repressed, from an intellectual world that might seem obsessed with politics and social realities. While specifically political interventions — petitions, manifestoes or statements, even the most intellectually adventurous ones — could bring prestige to their authors, those who devoted themselves to the direct knowledge of social realities were at once somewhat despised (the prestige of historical specialisms increases with the distance in time of the periods studied), and, as in the Soviet regimes, viewed with discreet suspicion: for example, condensing the essence of the normalien sense of the scholastic hierarchies and their commitment to 'Marxist' prejudices, the Althusserians would refer to the 'so-called social sciences'. And there was no philosopher, writer or even journalist, however minuscule, who did not feel authorized to teach lessons to the sociologist, especially, of course, in matters of art or literature, and entitled to ignore the most elementaryfindingsof sociology, even when talking of the social world, and who was not profoundly convinced that, whatever the problem, one 28

F. Matonti, La Double Illusion. La Nouvelle Critique9, une revue du PCF, 1966-1980 (Paris: La Decouverte, 2004).

— 36 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

had to 'go beyond sociology' or 'transcend [depasser] purely sociological explanation', and that such a depassement is available to anyone who chooses. My perception of the sociological field also owed much to the fact that the social and academic trajectory that had led me there set me strongly apart. Moreover, returning from Algeria with experience as an ethnologist which, having been acquired in the difficult conditions of a war of liberation, had marked for me a decisive break with scholastic experience, I was inclined to a rather critical vision of sociology and sociologists - the vision of the philosopher being reinforced by that of the ethnologist - and, above all, perhaps, a somewhat disenchanted, or realistic, representation of the individual or collective position-takings of intellectuals, for which the Algerian question had constituted, in my eyes, an exceptional touchstone. It is not easy to think and to say what this experience was for me, and in particular the intellectual but also personal challenge represented by that tragic situation, which would not let itself be contained within the ordinary alternatives of morality and politics. I had refused to enter the reserve officers' college [Ecole des Officiers de Reserve, EOR], no doubt partly because I could not bear the idea of dissociating myself from the rank-and-file soldiers, and also because of my lack of affinity with the candidates for the EOR, often graduates of HEC29 or lawyers, with whom I felt little common ground. After three months of 29

The leading French business school (trans).

— 37 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

fairly tough training in Chartres (every week I had to step out from the ranks at the call of my name to be presented, before the assembled troops, with my copy of L 'Express, the magazine which had become the symbol of a progressive policy in Algeria, and to which I had somewhat naively subscribed), I first landed in the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privileged route reserved for students of the Ecole Normale. But heated arguments with high-ranking officers who wanted to convert me to 'I'Algerie francaise soon earned me a reassignment to Algeria. The Air Force had created a regiment, a kind of sub-infantry whose task was to guard airbases and other strategic sites, made up of all the illiterates of Mayenne and Normandy and a few recalcitrants (in particular some communist workers from the Renault works, who were lucid and congenial and who told me how proud they were of 'their' cell in the Ecole Normale). On the ship that took us to Algeria, I tried in vain to indoctrinate my fellow soldiers, who were full of inherited military memories and in particular all the stories from Indochina about the dangerous terrorists who would stab you in the back (even before setting foot in Algeria, from their contact with the junior officers who had trained them, they had acquired and assimilated the whole vocabulary of everyday racism - terrorists, fellaghas, fellouses, bicots, ratons, etc. - and the vision of the world associated with it). We were assigned to guard an enormous explosives store in the plain near Orleansville. It was a long, gruelling mission. The officers were young and arrogant; they had been educated to the first level of the baccalaureat and done — 38 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

their national service, then been recalled, integrated, and promoted. One of them entered the crossword competition in Le Figaro and asked me, in front of everyone, to help him. My fellow soldiers could not understand why I was not an officer. I found it hard to sleep and would often take their place on guard duty. They would ask me to help them write to their girlfriends; I would write their letters for them in doggerel. Their extreme submissiveness towards the military hierarchy and everything that it imposed on them severely tested such populism as remained in me, nourished by the muted guilt at sharing in the privileged idleness of a bourgeois adolescent that had led me to leave the Ecole Normale, immediately after the agregation, in order to take up a teaching post and do something useful, when I could have spent a fourth year there. I started to take an interest in Algerian society as soon as, in the last months of my military service, thanks to the intervention of a colonel from Beam, whom my parents had approached through relatives of his who lived in a nearby village, I was able to escape from the fate which I had chosen for myself and which had become very hard for me to bear. Being seconded to the military staff of the French administration (Gouvernement general) in Algiers, where I was subjected to the obligations and schedules of a private soldier assigned to clerical duties (drafting correspondence, contributing to reports, etc.), I was able to embark on writing a small book (for the Que Sais-je? series) in which I would try to tell the French, and especially people on the left, what was really going on in a country of which they often knew next to nothing - once

— 39 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

again, in order to be of some use, and perhaps also to stave off the guilty conscience of the helpless witness of an abominable war. While telling myself that I was moving into ethnology and sociology, in the early stages, only provisionally, and that once I hadfinishedthis work of political pedagogy, I would return to philosophy (indeed, during the whole time that I was writing Sociologie de VAlgene and conducting my first ethnological fieldwork, I continued to write each evening on the structure of temporal experience according to Husserl), I flung myself totally, oblivious to fatigue and danger, into an undertaking whose stake was not only intellectual. (No doubt the transition was eased by the extraordinary prestige that the discipline of anthropology had just acquired, among philosophers themselves, thanks to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who had also contributed to this ennobling by substituting for the traditional French designation of the discipline [ethnologic] the English label anthropology*, thus combining the prestigious connotations of the German sense - Foucault was then translating Kant's Anthropologic - with the modernity of the Anglo-American meaning.) But there was also, in the very excess of my commitment, a sort of quasi-sacrificial will to repudiate the specious grandeurs of philosophy. For a long time, oriented no doubt by the dispositions I owed to my origins, I had been trying to tear myself away from what was unreal, if not illusory, in a good part of what was then associated with phi30

Sociologie de VAlgerie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), trans, as The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).

—

40 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

losophy: I was moving towards the philosophy of science, the history of science, towards the philosophers most rooted in scientific thought, such as Leibniz, and I had filed with Georges Canguilhem a thesis subject on 'The temporal structures of affective life' for which I intended to draw both on philosophical works such as those of Husserl and on works in biology and physiology. I found in the work of Leibniz, to read which I had to learn some mathematics (diffprpntifll aqH integral calculus, topology) and a bit of logic, another opportunity for /partjvp iHpnrifirari™i (I remember my indignation at a commentary, as worthless as it was ridiculous — because it was always in the register of the grandiose - that Jean Hippolyte had produced of a passage in Leibniz's Animadversiones about a 'finite surface of infinite length', which integral calculus enables us to know, but which Hippolyte had converted, misled by an elementary error on the grammatical agreement in the J Latin text, into 'an infinite surface of finite length', some-j thing infinitely more metaphysical). I thus understood retrospectively that I had entered into sociology and ethnology in part through a deep refusal of the scholastic point of view which is the principle of loftiness, a social distance, in which I could never feel at home, and to which the relationship to the social world associated with certain social origins no doubt predisposes. That posture displeased me, as it had for a long time, and the refusal of the vision of the world associated with the academic philosophy of philosophy had no doubt contributed greatly to leading me to the social sciences and especially to a certain way of practising them. But I was to discover — 41 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

very quickly that ethnology, or at least the particular way of conceiving it that Levi-Strauss incarnated and that his metaphor of th^ 'view from afar5 encapsulates,31 also makes it possible^-frTa somewhat paradoxical way, to hold the social world at a distance, even to 'deny* it in Freud's sense, and thereby to aestheticize it. Two anecdotes seem to me to express very exactly, in the mode of the parable or the fable, all the difference between ethnology and sociology (at least as I construe it): In the Course of a visit to him, on the occasion o f my candidacy for the College de France, an art historian who was very hostile to me for reasons that were not only political (he had written, for the front page of Le Monde, a very hostile article on Erwin Panofsky, just when I had published my translation of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism'1), and who, to demolish me, had spread the rumour that I was a member of the Communist Party, said to me: * What a pity that you did not stop after your Kabyle house!'33 An Egyptologist,

31

C. Levi-Strauss, Le Regard eloigne (Paris: Plon, 1983), trans, as The View from Afar (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 32 E. Panofsky (ed. and trans. P. Bourdieu), Architecture gothique etpensee scolastique. Precede de VAbbe Suger de Saint-Denis (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967). 33 'La maison kabyle ou le monde renverse', in J. Pouillon and P. Maranda (eds), Echanges et communications. Melanges offerts a Claude Levi-Strauss a Voccasion de son 6oe anniversaire (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1970). English trans, in Algeria i960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

—

42

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

the secretaire perpetuel of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, one of the most conservative institutions of cultural France (which has no lack of them), told me, at the reception for the new academic year - 1 had not visited him [during my candidacy], he was away from Paris - alluding to the extraordinary score (two votes) that I had obtained in the ballot of the Institut to ratify the election by the College (a purely formal procedure, despite a few 'accidents' without consequence in the past, linked to the names of Pierre Boulez, who, in reality or legend, also obtained two votes, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, three votes): 'My colleagues (or confreres^ I no longer remember) did not much appreciate your writing about the obituaries of the alumni of the Ecole Normale Superieure.' (He was alluding to an article on 'The categories of professorial understanding'34 in which I had taken as my object the obituaries published in the Newsletter of the Alumni of the ENS.) This gives a good measure of the distance, often unnoticed, between sociology, especially when it confronts the most burning issues of the present (which are not necessarily where one thinks they are, namely, on the_ terraia-of puliiicu), and ethnology, which authorizes and even fosters, among authors as much as readers, the postures of the aesthete Never having fully "Broken with the tradition of the literary journey and the artist's cult of exoticism (a lineage within which stand 34

'Les categories de l'entendement professorar (with Monique de saint Martin), Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 3(1975)169-93.

— 43 —

Sketch for a Self Analysis

Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques but also a good part of the writings of Michel Leiris and Alfred Metraux, all three linked in their youth to tfre avant-g^rde artistic movement^ of the time), this science without a contemporary stake, otherthan a purely theoretical one, can at best churn the social unconscious (I think for instance of the problem of the division of labour between the !WAi!S), bill vuy deli ^ cately, without ever wounding or traumatizing it. (I think that, although he always gave me very generous support - it was he who, along with Braudel and Aron, brought me, when I was still very young and had published next to nothing, into the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and was the first to call me to discuss the College de France — and although he always wrote me very kind and laudatory things about each of my books, Levi-Strauss never felt great sympathy for the fundamental orientations of my work and for the relation to the social world engaged in my research in ethnology and, even more, in sociology (I remember that he had asked me some oddly naive questions about the sociology of art, in particular). For my part, while I had immense admiration for him, and while I placed myself in the tradition he had created (or recreated), I had very soon discovered in him, as well as the objectivism that I explicitly criticized in Outline of a TJt^s^j Practice and in The Logic of Practice^ a pcientistic naturalism which, manifest in the metaphors and bft^n superficial references to the natural sciences — to cladistics, for instance — with which he sprinkled 35

Le Sens pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, f.1980), trans, a s The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).

— 44 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

his writings, underlay his profoundly dehistoricized vision of social reality. It was as if the science of nature was for him, aside from a source of inspiration and of 'effects of science', an instrument of order which allowed him to legitimize a vision of the social world founded on the denial of the social - to which aestheticization also contributes. I remember that, at a time when he was surrounded by an aura of critical progressivism - he was in debate with Sartre and Maxime Rodinson about Marxism - he had distributed, in his seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, a text by Teilhard de Chardin, to the total stupefaction of even his most unconditional followers. But the profoundly conservative vision that has always been at the basisofhialhought unveils or betrays itself unequivocallyTn The ViewJromAfar, with the eulogy of Germany and Wagner, the apologia for realist painting, the defence of authoritarian and repressive education (he had written, in 1968, a rather mediocre text on the 'student revolt' which he interpreted as a conflict of generations), and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July 1983, he critiqued, under cover of the ambiguous, more political than scientific, concept of 'spontaneism', both the subversion of the students of 1968 who (like Aron, Braudel and Canguilhem, and many others) had profoundly called him into question, and the critique of 'structuralism' to which I had contributed, in particular in the Outline-, he could only or wanted only to see in this critique a regression from the objectivist vision that he had imposed in ethnology, that is, a return to subjectivism, to the subject and his or her lived experience, which he had sought to expel from ethnology, and which I was revoking just as radically as he, with the notion of habitus.) — 45 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

With military service over, to be able to continue the investigations that I had undertaken, and to which I was increasingly committed, I took up a post of assistant professor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers and, especially during the short and long university vacations, I was able to continue my ethnological inquiries and then - thanks to the Algerian branch of the INSEEV> - my sociological inquiries. I can say that, throughout the years I spent in Algeria, I never ceased to be, so to speak, in the field, carrying out more or less systematic observations of one kind or another (I had for instance collected several hundred descriptions of sets of clothing with the intention of relating the various possible combinations of elements borrowed from European dress and from the variants of traditional dress - chechia, turban, sirwal, etc. - to the social characteristics of their wearers), taking photographs, making surreptitious recordings of conversations in public places (I had, for a time, intended to study the conditions of the shift from one language to another, and I continued the experiment for a time in Beam, where it was easier for me to do so), conducting in-depth interviews with informants, questionnaire surveys, archival forays (I spent whole nights copying out by hand the surveys on housing, locked, after the curfew, in the basement of the HLM37 office), administering tests in schools, holding discussions in social service centres, etc. The somewhat exalted libido 36

French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (trans.). 37 Municipal social housing.

— 46 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

sciendiihax drove me, rooted in a kind of passion for everything about this country, its people and its landscapes, and also in the dull but constant sensation of guilt and revolt in the face of so much suffering and injustice, knew neither rest nor bounds. (I remember for instance the rather gloomy day in autumn when I was trekking up [with Abdelmalek Sayad] towards Ait Hichem, a village in Greater Kabylia, the site of my first fieldwork on social structure and ritual. In Tizi Ouzou, the clatter of machineguns could be heard; we started into the valley through a road littered all along with carcasses of burnt-out cars; in the climb up to the pass, above a curve, sitting on top of a kind of alluvial cone beside the road, we saw a man dressed in a djelljba^rrir\a rifle between his knees. Sayad showed great sang-froidJie acted as if he had seen nothing untoward — though, as an Algerian, he was perhaps taking even greater risks than me. We kept going without speaking a word and my only thought was that we would have to come back along this path in the evening. But so great was my desire to return to my fieldsite and confirm a number of hypotheses onritualthat my thoughts went no further.) This total engagement and disregard for danger owed nothing to any sort of heroism but, rather, was rooted, I believe, in the extreme sadnes&^and anxiety in which I lived and which, with the desire to decipher a conundrum of ritual, to collect a game, to see an artefact (a wedding lamp, an ancient coffer or the inside of a well-preserved house, for instance) or, in other cases, the simple desire to observe and witness, led me to invest myself, body and soul, in the frenzied work that would enable me to measure up to — 47 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

experiences of which I was the unworthy, disarmed witness and which I wanted to account for at all costs. It is not easy to describe simply, as I lived through them, situations and events — perhaps adventures — that have profoundly shaken me, to the point sometimes of coming back in my dreams — and not only the most extreme of them, such as the accounts that one informant gave me, while apologizing for paining me, in an entirely white cell of the monastery of the missionary White Fathers, and another at the end of the pier of Algiers, so that no one would overhear us, of the torture the French army had inflicted on them. (At Djemaa Saharidj, where I had come to gather data on the allocation of land - something I had not been able to do in Ait Hichem, where I had to content myself with drawing up the distribution of the different lineages in the space of the village - on the day I arrived, the White Fathers were not there (I had forgotten that it was Sunday, they were at mass). I walked along a path above the monastery all the way to a small grove where I came upon an old Kabyle man, with a thin face, an aquiline nose and a superb white moustache - he reminded me of my maternal grandfather - busy drying figs on wicker trays. I started to speak with him about the ritual and about lakhrif the season of fresh figs and fighting . .. Suddenly, he seemed to me strangely nervous. A shot rang out, very close to us, and while remaining very courteous, he quickly disappeared. I learned a few days later from a young man who did odd jobs for the White Fathers and with whom I had spoken at length, that the grove was a place where the soldiers of the ALN [National Liberation Army] used to 48

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

come and sleep in the afternoon, and that they hadfireda shot to warn us to make off. A few days later, when I had already become quite accustomed to the village and was well accepted by the residents, thanks no doubt to the sponsorship of my hosts, two White Fathers - Father Devulder, a tall, bearded, very friendly man whose name I readily recall because he was the author of some very fine studies of the symbolism of murals in Kabylia that I used extensively in my work, and another, younger man, who had links with the ALN - there was suddenly great agitation and the French soldiers (in whom I readily recognized myself, since, only a year earlier, I was still wearing their uniform) advanced in single file along a sunken path towards the mountains. I knew from my young friend (who had himself learned it from the children who circled around the soldiers) that they were setting out to search for a hide-out, which they suspected was on the side of the mountain, where the ALN held its meetings and kept its archives. I followed their progress, amidst the men and women of the village, who, like me, hoped that they would notfindthe place before the evening and that the occupants would be able to make their escape. And that is what happened. But, the next day, the cache was taken, together with the papers that were deposited there, including lists of the names of all the ALN supporters in the country. My friend, who was directly threatened, asked me to take him in my car. So I set off the next morning, although my work was far from finished, and we passed through the military checkpoints, despite some scares, without too much difficulty.)

49

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

To conduct sociological fieldwork in a situation of war compels one to reflect on everything, to monitor everything, and in particular all that is taken for granted in the ordinary relation between the observer and the informant, the interviewer and the interviewed: the identity of the interviewers, even the composition of the interviewing unit — one or two persons, and, if two, a man and a woman, an Algerian man and a Frenchwoman, etc. (I evoked a small part of the reflections that were forced on me by the conduct of this research in the foreword to part 2 of Travailet travailleurs en Algerie)?* The very meaning of the observation and interview is in question, more than ever, for the interviewees themselves (are these people perhaps police or spies?). Suspicion was generalized: several times, agents of the French intelligence services came on the tracks of the interviewers, asking their own questions about the nature of the questioning (for quite some time, every morning, when I set off in my car to go and pursue my inquiries in the hidonville [shanty-town] of Le Clos Salembier, I was followed by a police car, and, one day, I was called in by the young S AS39 officer responsible for the sector, who wanted to know what I was doing). One cannot survive, in the literal sense, in such a situation (also experienced by other ethnologists, who have 38

With A. Darbel, J.-R Rivet and C. Seibel, Travail et travailleurs en Algerie (Paris and The Hague, 1963), pp. 260—7. 39 Sections Administrates Specialises - government agents working to 'integrate' the native population (trans.).

— 50 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

worked on crack dealers, like Philippe Bourgois,40 or on the gangs of Los Angeles, Boston and New York, like Martin Sanchez-Jankowski)41 unless one exercises a permanent practical reflexivity which is indispensable, in conditions of extreme urgency and risk, to interpret and assess the situation instantaneously and to mobilize, more or less consciously, the knowledge and know-how acquired in one's earliest social experience. (The critical vigilance that I engaged in my later works no doubt originates from these first experiences of research in situations where nothing is ever self-evident and everything is constantly called into question. Hence, once again, the irritation I cannot help feeling when specialists of opinion polls - surveys conducted vicariously, at a distance - vexed by my (purely scientific) objections to their practices, make arrogant and puerile critiques of investigations which, like those in La Misere du monde*1 draw on all the acquired experience.) I remember very clearly, for example, the day when, on the Collo peninsula, in a centre where the population was being 'regrouped', the fate of the interview, and perhaps of the interviewers, hung momentarily on the answer I was to give to the question put to me by the people among whom we wanted to conduct our study. It all started in Algiers, at 40

P. Bourgois, En Quite de respect. Le crack a New York (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001). 41 M. Sanchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs in Urban American Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 42 P. Bourdieu et al., La Misere du monde (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), trans, as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

—

51 —

Sketchfara Self-Analysis

the Institut de Statistiques in the Rue Bab Azoun, where Alain Darbel, the IN SEE administrator responsible for 'drawing a sample' of the population of the regrouping centres - which, given the lack of information on the parent population, was virtually meaningless - chose, as if at random (he was more favourable than not to 'Algerie fra^aise' and very hostile to the intrusion of sociologists into the holy of holies of INSEE), two particularly 'difficult' regions: Matmatas, near Orleansville, and the Collo peninsula, the region most fully under the control of the ALN, which at one point had considered setting up a provisional government there. It was one of the main targets of the major military operations (called 'operations Challe9), in which armoured vehicles, helicopters and paratroopers were deployed in devastating but futile attempts at 'pacification'. Although I was aware of the danger and, more vaguely, of the arbitrariness of the choice (as I told Darbel on the eve of our departure), I decided to go to Collo, with a small team: two 'liberal' pied-noir^ students ('liberal' in the sense of that place and time, that is to say, roughly, in favour of Algerian independence) - though one of them, unable to bear the tension, opted to leave before the investigation started; a young Arab, who told us he was a law student, although he had no qualifications, and who proved to be an extraordinary interviewer; and Adbelmalek Sayad, who was a student of mine at the 43

Pied-noir (literally 'black feet*) is the ethnic self-designation of French colonists born in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia during the colonial era, and their descendants (trans.). — 52 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Faculty and himself also involved in the 'liberal student' movement. After a long car journey in my Renault Dauphine, we arrived in Constantine, which had the air of a besieged city. The doors of all the cafes were covered with wire mesh, to protect against grenade attacks, and at four in the afternoon there was no one on the streets. Our plan to go on to Collo by road terrified the sous-prefet, a young enarque who hardly dared cross the street to join his mother. He insisted that we go by boat, via Philippeville.44 The voyage from Philippeville to the small harbour of Collo seemed to me exhilarating: at last I would see things close up for myself. Along the whole shoreline, the mountains were in flames. The sous-prefet of Collo, whose previous post had been at Romorantin,45 had a message conveyed to me that I should take care, and that 'a fake terrorist attack (organized by the French army) can come out of the blue*. Colonel Vaudrey (I think it was he), the former commander in chief in Algiers, knew that we were there and who we were (I was on the 'red list', no doubt since the end of my military service. I had learned this on the morning of 13 May 1958, from one of my pied-noir students. Although well aware of my views on Algeria - I had given a lecture the title of 44

An enarque is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or EN A, France's top grande ecole for the training of upper civil servants. The city of Philippeville was renamed Skikda in 1962, after the proclamation of Algerian independence (trans.). 45 A small town in rural France, a hundred miles from Paris (trans.).

— 53 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

which, 'On Algerian culture', was perfectly transparent in the context of the time, and which the Algerian students had suspended their strike to attend en masse - and, although they entirely disagreed with what 1 told them, without provocation but also without concessions, about the difference between the effects of the colonial situation and those of the acculturation linked to the 'contact of civilizations', a very fashionable theme in American ethnology at the time, they had wanted to warn me that I would be well advised to go into hiding. To convince me that they were well informed, they asked me if I knew Gerard Lebrun, who was indeed a friend of mine, at that time a philosophy teacher at the khdgne in Algiers and himself on the list of people to be 'neutralized', perhaps in the way that Maurice Audin46 had been). I had also been made aware of the ill-will of the military authorities by a young student from the Ecole Centrale [another leading grande ecole in Paris], who was against the war and who, in order to be able to go and judge for himself, had asked to take pan in one of the field trips organized by the army to convert young people to the cause of 'Algerie fran^aise': he had been sent to Collo, and he accompanied us in our fieldwork. I chose to go to Ain Aghbel, about twenty kilometres from Collo. The SAS captain, who could not quite understand (or understood too well) what we had come for, wanted to accommodate us in the army post. I refused the offer and we went and set ourselves up in the former school, 46

Maurice Audin, lecturer at the University of Algiers, abducted and murdered by the French army in 1957 (trans.).

— 54 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

outside the protected zone but in neutral territory (this seemed to me to be very important in order to carry out the fieldwork). As Sayad and I worked late into the night, writing out the day's observations, shadows would roam around. Every morning we would drive ten or so kilometres in my Dauphine, along a gorge that was an ideal place for real or fake ambushes (the SAS captain was attacked there by the ALN shortly after we left - 1 do not remember how I learned of this, perhaps from Salah Bouhedja, whom I first met there and who later came to work in our research centre in Paris). On the day we first arrived at the regrouping centre, a cluster of men were sitting under some big olive trees (I still have a whole series of photographs taken a few days later). We left the car and walked towards them. Two or three of them had weapons bulging under their djellabas. One of them, very dark-skinned, with a round head and a small beard, wearing a grey astrakhan hat which set him apart from the others (he was one of the Bouafer sons, who would turn out to be an amahbul^ a visionary and unpredictable character, but nonetheless one who commanded attention and respect; one of his brothers was a harki*7 and the other was in the ALN), stood up and addressed me (although nothing, in my appearance at least, distinguished me from the others). He asked me with some excitement what we had come to do there. I replied that we had come to see and hear what they had to say and to report it, that the French army was several kilometres away and that we were at their mercy, or words to that effect. He invited us to sit 47

An Algerian siding with the French in the war of independence.

— 55 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

down and offered us coffee. (I was often helped in my fieldwork, in Algiers and elsewhere, by such characters, often highly intelligent autodidacts who, because of their ambiguous location between two social conditions and two civilizations, and sometimes between two religions - the most educated of them sometimes professed syncretic beliefs, which they explained by invoking Rene Guenon showed clear signs of oddity, even 'madness* (as suggested by the term amahbul that was applied to them, from which the French maboul [slang for 'crazy'] is derived), but were nonetheless very highly regarded. One of them, who often served as my safe-conduct and guarantor in my visits to the kasbah (in the tensest moments of the Battle of Algiers, he would introduce me with the words 'you can talk1, which instandy dispelled mistrust), contrived things one day so that we would walk arm in arm down the whole street in front of the Faculty of Letters, at a time when the cafes were full oipied-noir students in favour of 'Algerie fran^aise '.No doubt to give the show its full force as a test and a challenge, he had dressed in ostentatiously oriental style, with silk sirwal trousers and an embroidered doublet, which, together with his elegantly trimmed black beard, ensured that he would not pass unnoticed. As for the Bouafer of Ain Aghbel, he liked to accompany us in our fieldwork, and often, after interviews which he had attended (I will not easily forget the old man, said to be over a hundred years old, who, when he uttered the names of the neighbouring tribes, would get exhilarated in his enthusiasm for battle before slumping back on his side in exhaustion), he would give us his thoughts, each more typical than the last of what — 56 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

I have called the cultural sabir, and of which I will give just one example: 'The Beni Toufout (the name of a tribe) . . . what's that, what does that mean?' he would ask. 'Beni Toufout? Tu votes [you vote, pronounced with an Algerian accent, to sound like Toufout]. You see, we invented democracy. . .') Rather as empirical study of the working classes has sometimes been seen by the prophets of the proletariat as a manifestation of scepticism, the common-sense step of going into thefieldto see what the situation was really like could, in those days of political certainties, seem strange and even suspect, especially when it concerned military operations such as the 'regrouping' of populations. And it sometimes happened, in 1960s Paris, that people would call me to account for myfieldwork,almost as if the fact that I had come back unharmed had somethingfishyabout it (my only safe-conduct - I remember one day when I was driving alone in my car towards a Kabyle village and, having come upon a long column of military vehicles, was stopped and forced to turn back - was a letter from the INSEE in Algiers, saying that I was authorized to carry out research, which I would show to the military authorities, who were always surprised to encounter me in such dubious places). Hence all the situations of disconnection, by excess or by default, or, better, of being 'out of phase' or 'out of place', in which I have constantly found myself in my relations with the intellectual world. For example, observation of the 'regroupings' made it possible to anticipate and announce, in a quite counterintuitive - and untimely - way — 57 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

that these sites, hastily described by some as being in the mould of concentration camps, would for the most part live on after independence (in some places, ironically, the old original villages became almost 'holiday homes' for the villagers 'regrouped* in the plains); or that the selfmanaged farms that fed the imagination of some 'pieds verts\A% carried away by revolutionary enthusiasm, would fall into the hands of an Algerian petite bourgeoisie of authoritarian technocrats or the army, or even the barons of a 'socialist neo-feudalism', as Mohammed Boukhobza was to say later of the great estates that some high officials of 'socialist* Algeria had carved out for themselves in the south of the province of Constantine. (I must acknowledge here the immense support that my realistic, and often rather disenchanted and therefore, in those times of collective utopianism, somewhat scandalous predictions received from Algerian friends - among many others, Leila Belhacene, Mouloud Feraoun, Rolande Garese, Moulah Hennine, Mimi Bensmaine, Ahmed Misraoui, Mahfoud Nechem and Abdelmalek Sayad. These Algerian friendships, no doubt born of affinities of habitus, helped me to arrive at a representation that was at once intimate and distant, attentive and, if I might say so, affectionate, warm, but without being naive or fatuous.) The transformation of my vision of the world that accompanied my transition from philosophy to sociology, in which my Algerian experience is no doubt the pivotal 48

Supporters of an agrarian route towards Algerian socialism (trans.).

—

58

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

moment, is, as I have said, not easy to describe, no doubt because it is made up of the imperceptible accumulation of the changes that were gradually imposed on me by the experiences of life and that I brought about through a work on myself that was inseparable from the work I was doing on the social world. To give an approximate idea of this apprenticeship, which I have often described as an initiation (I know that such terms will surprise those who harbour a harshly reductive vision of sociology, which is ritually described, especially in philosophy teaching, as reductive and banally positivist), I would like to turn back to the research project that I carried out, in parallel with the work I was doing in Algeria, on the bachelorhood of eldest sons in Beam. This gave rise to three articles, at intervals of ten or fifteen years.49 Indeed, it is perhaps not entirely misplaced to see a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman in the history of that research, which, taking as its object the sufferings and dramas linked to the relations between the sexes in peasant society — which is more or less the title I gave, long before the emergence of 'gender studies', to the article in Les Temps Modernes devoted to that object'0 - was the occasion and the operator of a veritable conversion. That word is, no doubt, not too strong to describe the transformation, at once intellectual and affective, that led me from the phenomenology of emotional life (springing perhaps also from the emotions 49

See The Bachelors* Ball(Cambridge: Polity, 2008) (trans.). 'Les relations entre les sexes dans la societe paysanne', Les Temps Modernes, 18, no. 195 (1962): 307-31.

— 59 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

and afflictions of life, which had to be consciously denied) to a scientific practice implying a vision of the social world that was both more distanced and more realistic. This intellectual reorientation was fraught with social implications: it was accomplished through the shift from philosophy to ethnology and, within this, to rural sociology, situated at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of specialities; and the deliberate renunciation implied in this negative displacement within the hierarchies would no doubt not have been so easy if it had not been accompanied by the confused dream of a reintegration into my native world. In my fieldwork in Kabylia, to defend myself against the spontaneous sociology of my informants, I would often think back to the peasants of Beam: did the social unit that the Kabyles called either adhrum or thakharrubth have any more 'reality* than the vaguely defined entity that in Beam is called lou besiat, the totality of neighbours, lous besis, to which some ethnologists of Europe, following a local scholar, had given a scientifically recognized status? It seemed necessary to conduct fieldwork directly in Beam in order to objectivate the experience that served, consciously or unconsciously, as my point of reference. Thanks to Raymond Aron, who had known him, I had just discovered the work of Alfred Schiitz, and it seemed to me useful to question, like the phenomenologist, the familiar relationship to the social world, but in a quasi-experimental way, by taking as the object of an objective, even objectivist analysis a world that was familiar to me, in which I was on first-name terms with all the — 60 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

agents, where the ways of speaking, thinking and behaving were entirely self-evident to me, and by the same token to objectivate my relationship of familiarity with that object, and the difference that separates it from the scientific relationship which one arrives at, as I did in Kabylia, through an effort armed with instruments of objectivation such as genealogy and statistics. In the first text, written in the early 1960s, when the ethnography of European societies hardly existed and when rural sociology kept a respectful distance from the 'field', I undertook to resolve the social enigma of the bachelorhood of eldest sons in a society renowned for its fierce attachment to the principle of primogeniture. Remaining very close to the naive vision from which I nonetheless intended to break away, I threw myself into a somewhat frantic total description of a social world that I knew without truly knowing it, as is always the case with a familiar universe. Nothing escapes the scientistic frenzy of someone who discovers with a kind of wonder the pleasure of objectivating, as taught in Marcel Maget's Guide d'etude directe des comportements culturels, a tremendous hyperempiricist antidote to the fascination then exerted by the structuralist constructions of Levi-Strauss (a fascination attested by my article on the Kabyle house, which I wrote at almost the same time51). The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze that is implied in adopting the posture of the observer was the intensive use I then made of photographs, maps, ground plans and statistics: everything was 51

See above, note 33. — 61 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

thrown into the pot - a sculptured door in front of which I had walked a thousand times on my way home from school or the games played in the village festivities, the age and make of the cars, the age pyramid of the population; and I offered the reader (without identifying it as such) the ground plan of a house familiar to me because I had played in it throughout my childhood. The immense work required for the statistical construction of many double- or triple-entry tables on relatively large populations without the aid of calculator or computer, or the many interviews accompanied by in-depth observations that I carried out then, had the character of the somewhat perverse trials of an initiatory ascesis. But, proving that the heuristic trajectory also has something of an initiatory journey about it, through total immersion and the happy reunions that accompany it, I experienced a reconciliation with things and people from which the entry into another life had imperceptibly distanced me and for which the ethnographic posture quite naturally imposed respect: childhood friends, relatives, their manners, their routines, their accent. A whole pan of myself was given back to me, the very part by which I was bound to them and which distanced me from them, because I could not deny it without renouncing them, ashamed of both them and myself. The return to my origins was accompanied by a return, but a controlled return, of the repressed. Of that, the text itself bears hardly any trace. While the few vague and essayistic final remarks on the gap between the primary vision and the scientific vision may give a glimpse of the intention of — 62 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

reflexivity that underpinned the whole undertaking (I wanted to do a 'Tristes Tropiques in reverse'), nothing, except perhaps the pent-up tenderness of the description of the ball, evokes the intensely emotional atmosphere in which my fieldwork was conducted. I think back, for example, to what was the starting point of my project, the school class photo that one of my fellow pupils, by then a low-ranking clerk in the neighbouring town, commented on, pitilessly intoning 'unmanageable!' with reference to almost half of those who appeared in it; I think of all the interviews, often very painful, that I conducted with old bachelors of the generation of my father, who often accompanied me in my work and, through his presence and his discreet intercession, helped me to elicit trust and confidence; I think of an old school friend, whose almost feminine tact and refinement endeared him to me, and who, having retired with his mother into a magnificendy maintained house, had chalked on the stable door the birthdates of his mares and the girls' names he had given them. And the objectivist restraint of my remarks is no doubt partly due to the fact that I felt the sense of committing something like a betrayal - which led me to refuse to this day any republication of texts whose appearance in scholarly journals with small circulation protected them against malicious or voyeuristic readings. No doubt because the progress it manifests lies in the order of reflexivity understood as the scientific objectivation of the subject of objectivation, the second text marks in a fairly clear manner the break with the structuralist paradigm, through the shift from rule to strategy, from -63 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

structure to habitus, and from the system to the socialized agent, himself inhabited by the structure of the social relations of which he is the product, that is to say the decisive moment of the conversion of the gaze that is accomplished when, underneath the rules of kinship, one discovers matrimonial strategies, thus recovering the practical relationship to the world. This reappropriation of the truth of the logic of practice is what, in return, made possible the discovery of the truth of the - at first sight so strange — ritual or matrimonial practices of the Kabyle stranger, thus constituted as an alter ego. The final text, which attains the most general, the most simple and also the most robust model, is also the one which makes it possible to understand most directly what was both presented and disguised in the initial scene: the small dance evening that I had observed and described, and which, with the pitiless necessity of the word 'unmarriageable', had given me the intuition that I was confronted with a highly significant social fact, was indeed a concrete and visible realization of the market in symbolic goods. In becoming unified at the national level (as it is, today, with homologous effects, on a world scale), the matrimonial market had condemned to a sudden, brutal devaluation those who were bound up with the protected market of the old-style matrimonial exchanges controlled by the families, the eldest sons, 'good catches' suddenly converted into 'empeasanted' peasants, savage hucous ('men of the woods'), repellent and graceless, forever excluded from the right to reproduce. Everything, in a sense, was present from the inception, in the initial description, but in a form — 64 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

such that, as the philosophers would say, the truth unveiled itself there only by veiling itself. (This kind of experimentation on the work of reflexivity that I carried out in work on Beam, which was also, and above all, an ethnography of ethnography and the ethnographer, shows that one of the rarest springs of the practical mastery that defines the sociologist's craft, a central component of which is what people call intuition, is perhaps, ultimately, the scientific use of a social experience which, so long as it is first subjected to sociological critique, can, however lacking in social value it may be in itself, and even when it is accompanied by crises (of conversion and reconversion), be converted from a handicap into a capital. As I have said elsewhere, it was no doubt a banal remark of my mother's, which I would not even have picked up if I had not been alerted to it ('they've become very "kith and kin" with the X's now that there's a Polytechnicien in the family') that, at the time of my study of bachelorhood, triggered the reflections that led me to abandon the model of the kinship rule for that of strategy. I shall not undertake here to try to understand and set out the profound transformations of this privileged relation of kinship that were necessary for a remark that could only be made in a 'natural setting', in a casual exchange of domestic familiarity, to be received as a piece of information capable of being integrated into an explanatory model. And I will simply indicate that, in a more general way, it is only at the cost of a veritable epistemological conversion, irreducible to what the phenomenologists call the epoche, that intrinsically nonpertinent lived experience can enter into scientific analysis.) -65 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

It has no doubt been the taste for 'living all lives' that Flaubert speaks of, and for seizing every opportunity to enter into the adventure that opens up each time with the discovery of new milieux (or simply the excitement of starting a new research project), that, together with the refusal of the scientistic definition of sociology, has led me to interest myself in the most diverse social worlds. I think that the reading I did in my interminable summer vacations gave me a desire to explore unknown social milieux that is perhaps felt less by those whose existence has confined them to a more or less perfectly homogeneous social world. In myfirstyear of khagne, as a young student still dazzled by a Paris that gave reality to literary reminiscences, I naively identified with Balzac (I remember a stupefying first encounter with his statue, at the Vavin crossroads!), so much so that more than once, when I was out walking on a Sunday, I would follow strangers so as to discover their quartier, their building, their surroundings, which I would endeavour to guess. There have been few times when I have not been working on several personal research projects in parallel, often very different in their objects, not to mention those that I pursued vicariously, through the research that I directed, often very closely, or that I proposed and coordinated within the framework of the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne. And so I have been able to participate in universes of thought, past or present, very distant from my own, such as those of the aristocracy or bankers, dancers at the Paris Opera or actors at the Theatre Fran9ais, auctioneers or notaries, and work myself into them, through a — 66 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

'sample' of the category that I met, and drawing on analogy with positions or experiences that I knew well (those of the scholastic nobility, for example, in order to understand those of the social nobility). I went through great periods of passion for inquiry, when I conducted the research that led to Distinction*1 (I would sometimes regret that people did not display their occupation on a lapel badge, as at conferences, to assist my observations), or when I spent hours listening to conversations, in cafes, on petanque or football pitches, in post offices, but also at society receptions, cocktail parties or concerts. Quite often I could hold back no longer and would find a pretext to strike up a conversation (it is much easier than one thinks) with someone I wanted to know better and to inquire, without seeming to do so, into some problem that interested me. I wondered whether I liked people, as I had long supposed, or whether I had simply come to take a professional interest in them which may imply a form of affection (Abdelmalek Sayad, for example, had become the close friend of a doctor who was a specialist in the very rare disease of which he was one the bearers . . .). But this dispersion was also a perhaps somewhat strange way of working to reunify a social science that had been fictitiously fragmented and of refusing in practice the specialization imposed by the model of the more advanced sciences, which appeared to me entirely premature in the case ,2

La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979), trans, as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

— 67 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

of a science still in its infancy (I remember in particular the sense of scandal I felt, at the World Congress of Sociology in Varna, when I saw the division of working parties between the sociology of education, the sociology of culture and the sociology of intellectuals, which led each of these 'specialisms' to abandon to one of the others the true explanatory principles of its objects). And the 'butterfly' temperament (to use Fourier's term) that constantly led me towards new research, new objects - or which, more precisely, led me to grasp every opportunity to take hold of new areas of research - perhaps explains why, without ever having consciously willed it and above all without the slightest 'imperialist' intention, I have found myself present in the totality of the field of the social sciences. I am well aware that my undertaking may appear as a way of pursing the inflated ambitions of the total intellectual, though in another mode, more demanding and also more hazardous: I did indeed run the risk of losing on both counts and appearing too theoreticist to pure empiricists and too empiricist to pure theoreticians and of sometimes leaving behind me research programmes rather than completed research (as in the case of socio-linguistics). In fact, everything combined in such a way that the space of possibles that offered itself to me could not be reduced to the one that was put forward by the constituted positions in the space of sociology. Indeed, I cannot avoid connecting the breadth of my intellectual undertakings, indifferent to the frontiers between sociological specialisms, with my move from philosophy, a prestigious discipline in which some of my peers had remained - a fact which is no doubt — 68 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

very important subjectively — and with the loss of symbolic capital that resulted from it 'objectively'. (The fact that I am here both subject and object of the analysis compounds a very common difficulty of sociological analysis - the danger that the 'objective intentions', which are brought out by analysis, will appear as express intentions, intentional strategies, explicit projects, in the particular case the conscious or quasi-cynical intention of safeguarding a threatened symbolic capital.) So it was that litde by little an eclectic yet highly selective disposition asserted itself, leading me to refuse options that were likely to restrict the universe of theoretical resources (like the exclusions performed by the Marxists) and of empirical possibilities (like all methodological monisms), a disposition of which it can be said at one and the same time that it is, in some ways, 'anti-everything', and, from another angle, 'catch-all', like some political parties. But all these causes and reasons are not enough truly to explain my total, slighdy crazed, investment in research. No doubt this compulsion found its principle in the very logic of research, which endlessly generates new questions, and also in the extraordinary pleasure and joys derived from the enchanted, perfect world of science. The group that I set up, based on affective affinity as much as intellectual convergence, played a decisive role in this enormous investment, with my own belief producing in others the belief capable of reinforcing and confirming my belief. Everything thus combined to favour an individual and collective self-certainty that induced a profound detachment from the external world, its judgements and its - 6 9 -

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

sanctions. (I have had the good fortune to be able to live for a long time in fairly great indifference to social success. And I remember often having thought that, to the extent that I strove to bring together competences and intentions that are rarely combined, especially theoretical and technical ones, it was probable and natural that I should long remain misunderstood and unknown; so I was entirely prepared for it, to the point of seeing with some astonishment the relative recognition that my work obtained, no doubt partly on the basis of misconceptions. I saw myself rather in the image of the medieval sculptor in the church at La Souterraine,53 who, high up in the obscurity of a dark vault, where it was destined to pass unnoticed, carved a capital representing a human coupling. The recognition I was granted by a small 'invisible college* was sufficient for me and I did not suffer at all from my relative obscurity, which was to a large extent elective. All the more so since 1 was greatly supported and encouraged by the testimonies I received, in chance encounters or in letters, from people who told me they had been profoundly touched, sometimes transformed or 'liberated', by what I wrote (especially in Distinction). Many a time I had to reassure or console young foreign researchers, from New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Denmark. . . who told me of their disappointment or sense of grievance that my work remained litde known in their country, despite all their efforts to get it better recognized, especially by the imiversity authorities. I came to be worried by these things only belatedly, perhaps as an effect 53

In the departement of La Creuse, in the Limousin region (trans.)

— 70 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

of age, and especially through the affectionate concern that they provoked in persons who were dear to me and in whose eyes I wanted to cut a good figure.) This self-certainty was also based — how to say this without pose or pathos? — on the inner conviction that my task as a sociologist, which did not appear to me as either a gift or an entitlement, nor as some grandiose 'mission', was without any doubt a privilege implying a duty in return. But I cannot not say it here — all these reasons are in part only the relay and rationalization of a deeper reason or cause: a very cruel unhappiness which brought the irremediable into the childhood paradise of my life and which, since the 1950s, has weighed on every moment of my existence, converting for example my initial dissension with the Ecole Normale and the impostures of intellectual arrogance into a resolute break with the vanity of academic things. This means to say that, without ever being mendacious, the descriptions and explanations that I have so far given remain inaccurate and partial inasmuch as all my behaviours (for example, my choice of Moulins as much as my momentary investment in a musical career or my initial interest in emotional life and medicine, which had led me to Canguilhem) were overdetermined (or subtended) by the inner desolation of solitary grief: frenetic work was also a way of filling an immense void and pulling myself out of despair by interesting myself in others; abandoning the heights of philosophy for the wretchedness of the bidonville was also a kind of sacrificial expiation of my adolescent avoidances of reality; the laborious return to a style stripped of the tricks and tics of scholastic rhetoric also

71

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

marked the purification of a new birth. And what I have said here of the causes or reasons of each of the experiences described, such as my Algerian adventures or my scientific enthusiasm, also masks the subterranean impulse and the secret intention that were the hidden face of a double life. The disappointment mingled with revolt that the state of intellectual things inspired in me mainly crystallized, in the initial phase of my undertaking, around the then dominant American sociology, and also, but on another terrain, around philosophy, which, whether in its traditional definition or in its most ostentatiously innovating form, seemed to me to represent a major obstacle to the progress of the social sciences. I have often had occasion to describe myself, with some irony, as the leader of a liberation movement of the social sciences against the imperialism o f philosophy. I had as little indulgence for the sociologists who saw a visit to America as a kind of initiatory voyage as for the apprentice philosophers who, ten or fifteen years earlier, rushed to the archives of a Husserl whose major works were still largely unpublished in French. American sociology, through the Capitoline triad o f Parsons, Merton and Lazarsfeld, subjected social science t o a whole series of reductions and impoverishments, from which, it seemed to me, it had to be freed, in particular by a return to the texts of Durkheim and Max Weber, both o f whom had been annexed and distorted by Parsons (Weber's work also had to be rethought, to free it from the neoKantian coating with which Aron, who introduced it into — 72 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

France, had shrouded it). But to combat this global orthodoxy, it was above all necessary to engage in theoretically grounded empirical research, by refusing both pure and simple submission to the dominant definition of science and the obscurantist refusal of everything that might be or seem associated with the United States, starting with statistical methods. If, in the early 1960s, despite weekly reminders from the authorized representatives of the master in a missionary land, I had stubbornly refused to attend the lectures that Paul Lazarsfeld gave at the Sorbonne, before the assembled world of French sociology, it was because it had all seemed to me more like a collective ceremony of submission than a simple technical enterprise of scientific training and updating. This did not prevent me, far from it, from working, as my collaboration with statisticians from INSEE had encouraged me and prepared me, to master the whole panoply of techniques - multivariate analysis or latent classes - that could be offered by the former Austrian socialist who had turned into the spokesman of a scientific imperialism acting under the banner of the Ford Foundation or the Congress for Cultural Freedom; but to do so without taking on, at the same time, the scientistic baggage designed to legitimate it. This strategy was probably too realist, without being in the least cynical, to be easily understood, in times when scientific positions were hardly differentiated from political positions. For, aiming among other things to take hold of the instruments of the adversary and use them in the service of other scientific ends, it was as much opposed to the eager or resigned — 73 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

submission of mere camp-followers still marvelling at having 'discovered America* as to the fictitious and defeated revolt of those who sought to resist the grip of the dominant concepts and methods without providing themselves with the weapons that could combat them effectively on the very terrain of empirical research, such as the theorists of the Frankfurt school and their French acolytes. (In parenthesis I should mention another, entirely complementary scientific strategy, which, in the context of the time, when any association with state statistics was suspected of conservative compromise, was just as much misunderstood, the strategy of working with statisticians from IN SEE to try - as I briefly thought I had succeeded in doing, when the state institute adopted the classifications of Distinction - to bring state science back into the scientific field or, more modestly, to introduce into the minds of state scientists a certain number of preoccupations and dispositions specific to the most advanced scientific research, such as reflexivity with regard to the tacit presuppositions of the problematics and systems of classification routinely implemented by the institution.) The history of my (atfirstsight hopeless) confrontation with Paul Lazarsfeld, who at that time exercised a social and scientific hegemony over world sociology that is difficult to imagine, found, for me, something like a satisfying conclusion, one day in the late 1960s, when, being then at the height of his renown, he had literally 'summoned' Alain Darbel and me to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, where he habitually stayed when visiting on behalf of the Ford Foundation, to tell us his criticisms of the mathematical — 74 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

model of gallery visiting that we had published in VAmour de lart.SA He arrived with a copy of the book on which he had scrawled in blue ink and, with a big cigar in his mouth, he pointed out, with some brutality, what he regarded as unforgivable errors. They were in fact in each case, as any reader less persuaded of the backwardness of French science would have realized, crude misprints introduced by a typesetter less accustomed to such refinements, which the publisher would not let us rectify until the second edition. When these corrections were granted, Lazarsfeld declared with some solemnity that 'nothing so good had ever been done in the United States'. But he took care never to put it in writing, and continued to give his spiritual investiture to Raymond Boudon, the accredited agent of his scientific multinational. In the struggle against the theoretical and methodological orthodoxy which dominated sociology worldwide and in the effort to escape the obligatory choice presented by the opposition between the Marxists, stuck in their refusal of Weber and of empirical sociology, and the simple importers of unlabelled American methods and concepts, one could scarcely look for support from philosophy, even the seemingly very subversive kind which was beginning to assert itself in Paris. Paradoxically, this contestatory movement no doubt owed its particular vigour to the very privileged situation of philosophy in France, in large part a consequence of the quite unique existence of philosophy S4

See above, note 16.

— 75 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

teaching in the final years of secondary education, and of the dominant position of that discipline in the scholastic hierarchies (I am thinking here of the model I invoked to explain the exceptional force of the movement of subversion which appeared in France, with Manet and the impressionists, in reaction against an all-powerful academic institution, and its contrasting absence in Britain, which did not have a similar concentration of symbolic powers in the field of art). Because the university institution, which was in very deep crisis, could not fulfil the promises implied in their exceptional scholastic trajectories, relegating almost all of them to marginal positions, these philosophers were animated by an especially critical disposition against an institution that was particularly well armed to impose a representation of philosophical activity that was both exalted and narrow (with the agregation and its very French exercises and syllabuses . . .). They therefore responded in a manner that was miraculously adapted (without of course in any way having sought it) to the expectations aroused, in France and perhaps especially in the United States, by the 'revolution' of 1968, a specific revolution, which had introduced politico-intellectual contestation into the universityfield(Feyerabend in Berlin and Kuhn in the United States being also used to give a language to a spontaneous contestation of science). But despite these airs of radicalism, this movement remained profoundly ambiguous, both politically and philosophically, because the revolt against the university institution was also a conservative reaction to the threat that the rise — 76 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

of the social sciences, especially through linguistics and 'structuralist' anthropology, represented for the philosophers, who were both fascinated and worried. And it was no doubt again the concern to maintain their hegemony with respect to the social sciences that led them, paradoxically, to take over, while radicalizing it, the historicist critique of truth (and of the sciences), in a strategy very close to that of Heidegger's ontologizing of historicism. They thus offered an unexpected comeback for what the hitherto dominant logicist tradition had condemned as the 'genetic fallacy', by inducing a view of attachment to formal and universal truths as old-fashioned and even somewhat reactionary, compared to the analysis of particular historical and cultural situations. The refusal, which had long oriented my intellectual choices, of what Merleau-Ponty called, in a very different sense from the common usage, 'intellectualism' was rooted in dispositions that inclined me to stand aside from the great fashionable intellectual 'movements', such as the exoteric form of 'structuralism' or its journalistic liquidation - of which one of the centres was, in both cases, the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. (My only participation in the structuralist debate, apart from critical analyses intended for learned journals, such as the article entitled 'Structuralism and theory of sociological knowledge',55 was a fairly clearly anti-structuralist text on the intellectual field, published in the issue of Les Temps Modernes " 'Structuralism and theory of sociological knowledge', Social Research, 35, no. 4 (winter 1968): 681-706.

— 77 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

edited by Jean Pouillon on structuralism'6 - so that one has to be very ill-intentioned, or simply ill-informed, to count me among the 'structuralists'.) I very consciously excluded the double-game and double-profit strategies of all those who liked to call themselves 'sociologist and philosopher' or 'philosopher and historian', which, I must confess, were fairly antipathetic to me, among other reasons because they seemed to declare a lack of ethical and scientific rigour. Nor did I take part in the semiologico-literary fads that prevailed for a moment in the university field and in the camp of Tel Quel, and I was not much better disposed towards those who, combining the prestige of philosophy, Nietzschean or Heideggerian, and that of literature, with obligatory references to Artaud, Bataille or Blanchot (not to mention Sade, a compulsory dissertation topic for every intellectual), helped to blur the frontiers between philosophy (or science) and literature. That is why, even if I might have had some points of agreement with them that can be called political and which are no doubt explained in part by the fact that we had in common the anti-institutional dispositions linked to a similar position in a profoundly transformed academic space, I am not a little surprised to see myself sometimes counted today, by virtue of the allodoxia*1 that

56

'Champ intellectuel et projet createur', Les Temps Modernes (Problemes du structuralisme), 246 (Nov. 1966): 865-906; trans, as 'Intellectual field and creative project', Social Science Information^ 8, no. 2 (1968): 89-119. ,7 See below, p. 82 (trans.).

— 78 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

accompanies transmission across the Adantic, among the 'postmodernists', whom the reactivation of the old prejudices of the philosophers against the social sciences has often led to the verge of nihilism. (I hesitate to undertake to say here - but I cannot avoid doing so, for the sake of the clarity of the analysis and also for the truth that I owe to younger readers, who are liable to be misled, especially abroad, by the apparent resemblances - how I situated myself objectively and subjectively in relation to Michel Foucault. As was brought home to me very clearly, when, after his death, I undertook to write for a foreign journal an evocation of his life and work58 that would avoid obituary rhetoric, I had almost all the pertinent properties in common with him: a normalien and an agrege de philosophic a few years before me (I had attended his courses at the Ecole Normale), he held philosophical positions very akin to my own, and in particular very close to Canguilhem and the Clermont-Ferrand group (he had been recruited by Vuillemin), with whom I associated myself. Almost all - except two, but these, in my view, had very great weight in the constitution of his intellectual project: he came from a well-to-do provincial bourgeois family, and he was homosexual (one could add a third, although in my view it is only an effect of the first two, at the same time as being an explanatory factor, namely the fact that he was and declared himself to be a 58

'Non chiedetemi chi sono. Un profilo de Michel Foucault', L'indice (Rome), no. i (Oct. 1984): 4-5 (cf. 'A free thinker: "Do not ask me who I am" \ Paragraph (London), no. f (1985): 80-7).

— 79 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

philosopher). It follows that one can, almost at will, almost efface the differences or, on the contrary, accentuate them, by noting that, as the 'last difference', they are particularly significant and powerful. The resemblances, on which I shall not dwell for long, are visible in terms both of research and of action. Ignoring the established hierarchy of objects and the sacred frontier between philosophy and the historic sciences, Michel Foucault never ceased to expand the traditional definition of philosophy to bring into it the world as it is, and consequently all kinds of objects, unknown or excluded - madness, imprisonment, power, etc. - apprehended each time through precise cases, situated and dated, and detailed dossiers. He also strove to combine autonomy vis-a-vis the social world, and especially politics, with the scientifically armed engagement in the social world that defines what he calls 'the specific intellectual*. To go onto the terrain of politics, as he did, especially in his battle over the prisons, was to put himself in the situation of extreme vulnerability of the self-declared homosexual, who, according to David Halperin, 'opens himself up to accusations of pathology and partiality, and gives others an absolute epistemologicalprivilege over him (and it is known that some campaigns that were conducted against him, especially in the United States, took advantage of the particularities of his sexual orientation to weaken and discredit - by making it appear as relative and relativizable - a thinking which profoundly questions the moral order and the political order). In short, no one has more or better managed than Foucault to realize this 80

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

reconciliation of scholarship and commitment59 that confers its immense power of attraction on his life and work, especially in traditions which, like the German or the American ones, and quite wrongly in my view, set these two dimensions of the intellectual worthy of the name against each other. The fact remains that, in spite of the very great proximity, which appeared particularly in the action we took together over Poland, and the solidarity that united us, from the early 1980s, as much in public life as in university life, I was separated from Michel Foucault by a whole series of differences of style, visible especially in the areas of politics, art and research, some of which I have mentioned, and which seem to me to flow from profound differences in our dispositions and our respective positions. Whereas, in engaging myself resolutely in thefieldof the social sciences, initially ethnology, then sociology, I was in fact breaking with the expectations and demands of the philosophical world in order to submit myself to the constraints of a scientific discipline, endowed with its specific capital of problems, theories and methods, Michel Foucault, however great his distance, sanctioned by his remoteness, first geographic, then social, from the heart of the university institution, always remained present in the philosophical field and attentive to the expectations of the Paris intellectual world. These differences in the objective situations are, quite clearly, in a relationship of circular causality with our dispositions: on my side, they pushed me to engage in 59

The two terms are in English in the original (trans.).

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

sociology, and of a kind particularly antithetical to the expectations of the French intellectual field, such as the analysis of artistic practices and intellectual worlds, and to invest myself primordially in the collect ive undertakings of a research group engaged in tasks and p reoccupations very remote from the intellectual world, such as ethnographic fieldwork and statistics; on Foucault's side, they inclined him to singular commitments which, as such, better conformed to the expectations of the world s of art and literature and to scientific practices less different from those of the traditional scholar, such as assiduous use of the great libraries (it was only at the very end of his life that he thought of creating a research group - and I helped him do so). The difference between the two sets of subversive dispositions and the position-takings that th ey favour, both in research and in political intervention, is reinforced by the effect of the expectations objectively inscribed in the two fields and is also amplified by the fact that, depending on whether it comes from a sociologist or a philosopher, the same action, in art for example (but also in politics), may appear as the grossness of a Philistine or the audacious and refined transgression of an aesthete. I shall stop here this evocation of the resemblances and differences which, as much in reality as in representations, bring together and separate two intellectual styles, hoping that it will suffice to avoid that particular form of allodoxia which, by leading readers to recognize the similar in the different and the different in the similar, can only do harm to the circulation and adequate understanding of the two bodies of thought concerned.) — 82

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

One should also, as a point of method, analyse here the present state of the field of sociology and the field of the social sciences in order to give oneself the means of understanding individual and collective trajectories (especially that of the research group that I led, the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne) in relation to the changes in the symbolic power relations within each of the twofieldsand between them; and consider in particular my individual trajectory, taking into account the specific character of the position of the College de France, which, as I showed in Homo academicus® was (above all) a site of consecration of heretics, situated outside all temporal powers over the academic institution. The revolution that was accomplished, while it succeeded at the symbolic level (at least abroad) met with a relative failure that is clearly seen in the fate of the group: it would not have been so continuously subject to pressures and reactions of collective defence aimed at preventing its 'normal' reproduction if, by the logic of its functioning as much as by the content of its scientific productions, it had not threatened the order and the routines of the field.

60

Homo academicus (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), trans, as Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).

— 83 —

T

his sketch for a self-analysis cannot avoid giving some space to the formation of the dispositions associated with the position of origin, dispositions which we know play a part, in relation with the social spaces within which they are actualized, in determining practices. I shall not dwell at length on the properties of my family of origin. My father, a peasant sharecropper's son, who, when he was about thirty, in other words roughly when I was born, became first a postman and then clerk of the village post office, continued this white-collar occupation for the rest of his working life, in a particularly remote little village in Beam (although only twenty kilometres from Pau, it was unknown to my lycee classmates, who would make jokes about it). I think that my childhood experience as a 'renegade' who was the son of a renegade (which I seemed to recognize in the Paul Nizan whom Sartre evokes in his preface to Aden Arable6*) no doubt weighed heavily in the formation of my dispositions towards the social world: I was very close to my primary school classmates, the sons of small peasants, craftsmen or shopkeepers, with whom I had almost everything in common, except the scholastic success that distinguished 61

J.-P. Sartre, Preface to P. Nizan, Aden Arable (Paris: Maspero, i960), trans, as Aden, Arable (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968).

— 84

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

me somewhat, but I was separated from them by a kind of invisible barrier that was sometimes expressed in various ritual insults against lous emplegats, clerks 'with white hands', rather as my father was separated from these peasants and manual workers in the midst of whom he lived the life of a poorly paid low-ranking civil servant. Housed with his family in an apartment that came with the job but lacking the most basic comforts (for a long time, water had to be fetched from the public fountain), he was tied to a gruelling schedule, from Monday morning to Saturday evening and from six in the morning when the post van came and the mail was collected, until the accounts were balanced, often late at night, especially when the end-of-month accounts had to be finalized; he kept his own garden, bought and sawed his firewood, and the slightest purchase - a Levitan-style bedroom suite that my mother and he had had made for them in Nay, when I must have been aged eight or nine, the little twenty-franc bicycle they gave me and which a girl friend of mine to whom I had lent it had badly damaged by crashing into the church wall, before I had even had a chance to try it - was a major decision, discussed for days on end. He was also separated from his father, of whom he was very fond, and his brother: they had stayed on the farm, and he would go and lend a hand when they were most busy and he had some leave. He showed some signs that it pained him. He was never happier, I think, than when he could assist the most helpless, with whom he felt at ease and who trusted him totally, and he expended a wealth of kindness and patience, for which, when I was older, I sometimes reproached him a — 85 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

little, helping the neediest to make sense of the paperwork they entrusted to him ('Aquets papes!', 'These papers!', they would say) - war pensions or invalidity benefits, bonds, postal orders, etc. - and I remember having wept several times when I thought of the fact that his name, despite his many merits, would not be commemorated in any reference book. I cannot say how much I was pained at the clear signs of the guilt he felt, even towards peasants who were often better-off than he and in which I shared through the wounding insults and aggressive jokes of some of my schoolmates. He taught me very simply, by his whole attitude, to respect 'humble folk', among whom he counted himself, and also, although he never spoke in such terms, their struggles (he made me listen to the guns of the last batdes of the Spanish Civil War and 1 often saw him talking, in an indecisive mixture of Bearnais, Spanish and French, with the /rente popular, as they were called, the defeated Republican fighters who came fleeing over the border). He voted far on the left, was a member of the union, which caused some problems in that fairly conservative rural world, especially during the strikes, and he had some great political admirations, for Robespierre, Jean Jaures, Leon Blum, Edouard Herriot, embodiments of the ideal of the Republic and its schools, which he wanted me to share. My mother came, on her mother's side, from a 'great family' of peasants and had had to defy her parents to make a marriage that was seen as far beneath her (my father never spoke without some fury about his experience of social differences as they asserted themselves in the village 86

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

microcosm, and he was always fairly truculent and mistrustful towards the local notables — doctors, gendarme sergeants, the priest or even primary school teachers—who had scarcely encouraged his efforts to push me to the lycee). She lived with her parents in a small one-storey house, detached from the great family house, which her mother had received for her dowry as the youngest daughter, and there I was born. My maternal grandfather had been, successively or simultaneously, a pit sawyer and timber transporter, a fabric retailer and a smallholder - he always had a few cows and some pasture, and a few hundred square metres of marshy woodland; as the poor relation of a 'great family', he had a great concern for respectability, and I discovered later, when I helped my parents to renovate it (destroying all traces of the past, in a kind of gleeful fury that was somewhat hurtful to my grandmother — the pigsty and the henhouse, the wooden shed that had served as a privy, lean-tos crammed with old jumble and absurd bric-a-brac collected from every corner), the wealth of improvisation and salvaging that he had deployed to give to what was only a small single-storey tenant farmer's or sharecropper's house, consisting essentially of a large room with a mud floor and a 'salon' reserved for great occasions, the appearances of a 'great' house with two storeys, the sign by which 'great families' used to be recognized. (At the Ecole Normale, among the young men who served as waiters at the tables of the students who made up the hard core of the communist cell in which Louis Althusser liked to exercise his talents as a political strategist, especially in blocking the initiatives — 87 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

of non-communist students, I found a whole group of Bearnais emigrants, from the village of Lanneplaa; my grandfather was from there, and also his father, who was in Paris during the Commune, employed as a waiter at the College Sainte-Barbe, and therefore no doubt at the origin of the tradition of emigration that had brought us our 'justins', as the waiters were called, from thefirstname of one of them.) My grandfather had passed on his concern for respectability and his respect for conventions and proprieties to my mother, who was totally devoted to him. She clashed with my father, who was of a more rebellious temperament and somewhat anarchist, when she tried without much conviction to impose a modicum of external compliance with the local customs, especially the religious ones, which I refused (mainly because I felt real panic at the idea of walking the whole length of the church on Sundays to reach the boys' pews), or cosmetic or sartorial particularities, a white smock on one occasion, or long trousers another time (not to mention the impeccable parting she would struggle to make in my hair, which I would ruffle as soon as I was out of the house), which repelled me because they set me apart from the others and exposed me to their taunts. It was again her veneration for everything associated with the memory of her father that led her to rush, without regard for the danger, to warn a friend of her father's when she learned from my father, himself alerted by his contacts in the Resistance, that the Germans were about to come looking for a maquisard leader hidden in his farm. (During the War of Liberation in Algeria I often saw similar 'political' actions that also sprang from quite other — 88 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

motivations.) She told me, not so long ago, with much laughter ('A medal, for me? What a joke!'), that the maquisard whom she had saved had, after the Liberation, wanted her to be awarded a commemorative medal. I discovered little by little, mainly through the gaze of others, the particularities of my habitus which, like a certain propensity to masculine pride and ostentation, a marked taste for disputation, most often somewhat put on, or the propensity to indignation over trifles', now appear to me to be linked to the cultural particularities of my region of origin, which I perceived and understood more clearly by analogy with what I read about the 'temperament' of cultural or linguistic minorities such as the Irish. Only slowly did I understand that if some of my most banal reactions were often misinterpreted, it was often because the manner - tone, voice, gestures, facial expressions, etc. — in which I sometimes manifested them, a mixture of aggressive shyness and a growling, even furious, bluntness, might be taken at face value, in other words, in a sense too seriously, and that it contrasted so much with the distant assurance of well-born Parisians that it always threatened to give the appearance of uncontrolled, querulous violence to reflex and sometimes purely ritual transgressions of the conventions and commonplaces of academic or intellectual routine. Rediscovering a photograph in which I was walking alongside my father in a street in Pau (in the days when photographers offered instant snapshots to passers-by), probably on a prize day, I remembered what he once said to me when, coming out of the lycee, I related one of my - 8

9

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

latest clashes with the school administration (it was only thanks to the affectionate complicity of the headmaster, Bernard Lamicq, one of the few Bearnais normaliens, if not the only one, who decisively oriented my 'career', that I escaped exclusion, just a few months before the baccalaureate after a dispute with the director of studies): 'Maynat, qu'as cachaou!', 'My boy, you've got guts!' (the cachaou is the 'big tooth', the molar, and by extension something like the capacity to bite and not let go, to hold firm). He no doubt wanted to praise the quality of stubbornness that the whole local tradition glorifies, to the point of seeing a good sign, whether in a thing or a person, in being difficult to approach or having an aggressively defensive exterior: 'Arissou arissat, castgane lusente', 'Prickly husk, shiny chestnut'. (In the course of my research on the grandes ecoles, I accidentally discovered that Lamicq, a contemporary of Sartre and Aron at the Ecole Normale, had been mocked, together with Pierre Vilar, the Marxist historian, who also came from a remote corner of the province of Languedoc, in a particularly cruel passage in one of the ritual songs of the initiation rites of the Ecole, 'La complainte du khagneux'. I recall that the same Pierre Vilar, when I met him shortly after the publication of Les Heritiers, publicly rebuked me for that book, which he saw - thereby proving the power of the system - as an unjustifiable assault on 'the School as a liberating force'.) The experience of boarding school no doubt played a decisive part in the formation of my dispositions - in particular, by inclining me to a realistic (Flaubertian) vision of —

90 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

social relations, which had already been present from my childhood upbringing and which contrasted with the irenic, moralizing and neutralizing vision that is encouraged, it seems to me, by the protected experience of bourgeois existences (especially if they are tinctured with Christian religiosity and moralism). This came in particular through the discovery of a social difference, inverted this time, from 'bourgeois' urbanites, and also the disjuncture between the violent and abrasive world of the boarding school - a terrible education in social realism, in which everything is already present, through the necessities of the struggle for survival: opportunism, servility, sneaking, treachery, etc. — and the world of the classroom, where systematically opposite values reigned, and those teachers who, especially the women, offered a world of intellectual discoveries and human relationships that can be called enchanted. The old seventeenth-century building, vast and rebarbative, with its immense corridors, the walls white above and dark green below, or the monumental stone staircases, worn down in the middle, that we would take in the evenings, walking two by two, up to the dormitory, offered nothing on our own scale and left no secret corner for our solitude, no refuge, no respite. This feeling was never more intense than in the dormitory, a disciplinary alignment of three rows of beds with uniform bed linen, all visible at a glance from the doorway, or from the cabin of the pion,a installed in the middle. In winter, we would pile all our 62

Student paid to supervise in a lycee (trans).

91 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

clothes on our beds in the evening to be a little less cold. The washroom contained a kind of grey trough, several metres long, where we jostled for space in the morning and where I secretly rinsed my crackling handkerchiefs in the season of headcolds. This was one of the little daily obsessions, the preoccupations of every moment, which, though they are no doubt common to everyone, remain perfectly incommunicable, locking one into the lonely, shameful fear of accidents, and which haunt the minds of children, unarmed fake tough guys, stubborn and always scrapping, yet often desperate to the point of tears, without anyone to complain to or even talk to. Another was the block of Turkish-style lavatories, right in the middle of the courtyard, or at least positioned to be observed from all directions, with their wooden doors that could not be bolted, no doubt to prevent the boys from locking themselves in for a clandestine cigarette, and offering no protection against jokers who would ignore the scarf placed outside as a signal and throw them abrupdy open. This universe devoted to routine and repetition, which was more or less my whole life from 1941 to 1947? c o n " tained no significant events, apart from those that it engendered by its own logic such as the collective classroom disorders [chahuts] that some like to call 'memorable'. It enveloped all our existences in its monotonous regularities which leave no trace beyond shafts of disconnected memories, and in the routine of everyday anxieties and struggles, all the calculations and ruses that had to be deployed, at every instant, to secure one's due, keep one's place, defend one's share (especially at mealtimes, when we ate at —

92 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

tables of eight), arrive on time, win respect, always ready to exchange blows, in a word, to survive. The reader may think I am darkening the picture. In reality, the adult man who writes this does not know how, has never known how, to do justice to the child who lived through these experiences, his times of despair and rage, his longing for vengeance. To give an idea, I could invoke Goffman's Asylums^ and point out that, in the set of 'total institutions', only a difference of degree separates the boarding school from milieux such as the prison or the psychiatric hospital, or closer, the penal colony as evoked by Jean Genet's Miracle of the Rose.64 But I shall perhaps be more convincing if I simply say that I well remember confiding to a friend in khagne, in one of those somewhat literary confidences that can be exchanged between aspiring intellectuals, that I would never have children, because I did not want to be responsible for casting them into miseries like those I had suffered (I was then a boarder at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, which was infinitely more liberal than what I had known in Pau, but where, no doubt because of the refractory dispositions of a hardened boarder, I had again managed to make trouble for myself - among the new arrivals from the provinces, those who had already been boarders could be recognized by the kind of disenchantment that is also observed in the army, in soldiers approaching the end of their stint, who have been through and seen through everything). 63 64

E. GofFman, Asylums (Chicago: Aldine, 1961). J. Genet, The Miracle of the Rose (London: Blond, 1965).

— 93 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

But this experience appeared to me as incommunicable also at the very time when I was going through it. I remember that my father, during my (rare) weekends at home (I accumulated 'detentions' and 'gatings', and I think I received over three hundred in my school career), would often ask my mother, who was firing questions at me, to leave me in peace while I 'readjusted* to home. For I was paradoxically so well adapted to the boarding school world which I so profoundly detested that I came to love the Sundays spent in tranquillity (in spite of thepions who persisted in expelling me from the study rooms to which I would retreat to read) in the almost totally deserted lycee. The summer holidays brought me little joy, because the social distancing that access to the lycee had brought upon me earned me the boredom and solitude of an existence without any tasks or pastimes that could be shared with my former classmates from primary school (except for a few football matches on Sundays, in a neighbouring village). The account of my clashes with school discipline remained incomprehensible to my parents, who thought me so privileged (my father had left school at fourteen and my mother, lodging for a while with an aunt in Pau, had been at high school until she was sixteen) that they could only hold me responsible for my torments, in other words for the misbehaviour that threatened to jeopardize my vital and unhoped-for enterprise of salvation through the school. I have often wondered whether my difficulties stemmed from myself, from what was very early on called my 'difficult character'. I still remember the incidents that were — 94 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

probably responsible for my being placed once and for all on the list, passed between the tutors andpions, of troublemakers who have to be punished at the first sign of disorder. One was thus caught in a kind of cycle: preventive punishment, individual or collective, generated revolt and revenge - chahuts organized several days in advance, tricks played on xhepions, which gave rise to more punishments, organized as reprisals, and disappointment at the treachery of those who, after having often encouraged rebellion, fled before the threat of collective sanctions and summoned the 'leader', locked in his pride, to own up. Never was solitude greater than in those moments. (I rediscovered this feeling on the ship which took us to Algeria, when I lectured the other second-class soldiers, illiterates from the whole of western France, about the need to revolt against the absurd 'pacification' which we were being sent to assist, and they replied, more out of fear and docility than malevolence: 'You'll get us all killed' or "They'll shoot you for that.') I was eleven or twelve years old, and had no one to confide in or who would even understand. I would often spend part of the night preparing my defence for the morning. The disciplinary staffof that small provincial lycee very commonly resorted to collective punishments, threatening, in order to stop a chahut, to take 'hostages', apparently picked out at random but in reality chosen on account of their 'record', or promising the worst sanctions if the perpetrators of some outstanding misdeed did not come forward or were not 'denounced' by their classmates. 'Denounce yourself!' - a terrible injunction, especially when it comes from an accomplice who, in the face of a — 95 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

threat and the fear it inspires, abandons all loyalty. And they knew so well how to induce a collective fear - as in the army, when a parade is announced and someone starts the rumour that boot soles must also be polished - with the complicity of the most submissive and most fearful, who pass on rumours and threats intended to force the most mutinous back into line or who endlessly relate quasimythic experiences aimed at inspiring terror: such as, for example, the apparition of the head supervisor, who materialized unexpectedly and inaudibly in the dormitory doorway, with one of those banal but proverbial and endlessly mimicked remarks ('Well, well, what fun we are having!*), uttered in a gentle, seemingly astonished tone, instandy sending back to bed all the boarders who a moment before had been shrieking and running riot through the dormitory, bolster in hand. One can imagine the satisfaction that the sadism of these would-be galleyslave-drivers could find in exercising the absolute power that the institution granted them and in the eager servilities that their position secured for them. At once terrified and refractory, unarmed and uncompromising, always in a state of revolt close to a kind of delinquency, which lacked only the possibilities and the opportunities, and yet always ready to trust and abandon the struggle, and to quit the retrenchments of the point of honour, in order to have peace at last, I lived my life as a boarder in a kind of stubborn fury (it is no doubt this experience that enabled me to communicate, in spite of differences of every order, and without having the least need to force myself, forgetting my age and my status - far — 96 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

too much, no doubt, and to the extent (as has been pointed out to me) of approving behaviour normally regarded as entirely reprehensible - with the young Beur65 and his friend in La Misere du monde,66 in whom I immediately perceived what was disarmed in them, beyond the appearance of uncompromising closure, which they might well have maintained with another interlocutor). I think that Flaubert was not entirely wrong in thinking, as he wrote in Memoires dun fou, 'Someone who has known boarding school has learned, by the age of twelve, almost everything about life/ The immense contrast between the world of the boarding school and the normal, sometimes even exhilarating, world of the classroom made no small contribution to my revolt against the punishments and persecutions imposed by the petty officials whom the very norms of scholastic life led one to despise. On one side, the boarders' study, with the boarders from the countryside or the small surrounding villages who, apart from a few eccentrics - who were readily suspected of homosexuality, in that universe of strong masculinity - read Miroir-Sprint, Midi Olympique or firai cracker sur vos tombesf who liked to talk about girls or rugby, who copied their French essays from older pupils or collections of model answers and prepared 'fake 65

A young 'North-African' born in France of immigrant parents (trans.). M 'L'ordre des choses', in Bourdieu et al., La Misere du monde, pp. 81-99. 67 Magazines devoted to cycling and rugby; and a novel by Boris Vian (1946) (trans.).

— 97 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

scripts' for the termly history tests. On the other, the classroom, with the teachers, of course, whose most gruelling trials - being 'called up to the blackboard', for example, in mathematics - still had, especially on the part of the women teachers, a kind of affectionate gentleness, alien to the boarding school; and also the day pupils, strangers who seemed somewhat unreal in their affected attire, rather oldfashioned short trousers or well-cut plus-fours, contrasting with our grey overalls, and also in their manners and their preoccupations, which evoked all the self-evidence of an inaccessible world. I remember one of them, a 'refugee' with a 'refined' accent who always sat in the front row, indifferent to everything around him, writing poems. Another, the son of a primary teacher, suffered persecution but it was never clear whether this was because he was recognized as homosexual or because he regularly disappeared in break times to play the violin. The violence of the interactions often took the form of a kind of class racism based on physical appearance or surname. A boy who became my main rival in the last years of that lycee, whose mother had a clerical job in a suburb of Pau but whose scouting activities brought him into contact with the sons of teachers or doctors from the town, whose manners and polished accent he imitated, often tormented me by pronouncing my name in the manner of the peasants of the region and joking about the name of my village, which symbolized all peasant backwardness. (Much later, in khdgne at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, I encountered the same boundary, between the boarders, bearded provincials in grey overalls with a string belt, and the Parisian day

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

pupils, who greatly impressed one teacher of French, himself of humble provincial origin and eager for intellectual recognition, by the bourgeois elegance of their dress as much as by the literary pretensions of their scholastic productions, which were then conceived as artistic creations. I am struck, thinking back to it, by the role that physical appearances or dress played both for my fellow pupils and for the teachers, as purported indices of intellectual or moral properties, as much in everyday life as in oral examinations.) I understood recently that my very deep ambivalence towards the scholastic world was perhaps rooted in the discovery that the exaltation of the diurnal and supremely respectable face of the school had as its negative counterpart the degradation of its nocturnal reverse side, manifested in the contempt of the day pupils for the culture of the boarding school and of the boys from the small rural communes - which included some of my closest friendships, forged in brawling and chahuts - the sons of craftsmen and small shopkeepers, with whom I lost touch more or less quickly as the years of schooling went by, but with whom I shared, among other things, bemusement and helplessness in the face of certain 'cultural features' (in all senses) unknown in our milieux. Caught between two worlds and their irreconcilable values, and somewhat disgusted by the anti-intellectualism combined with coarse, loud-mouthed machismo in which my boarding companions revelled, I often read during the breaks, when I was not playing pelota, and especially on Sundays, during detentions. And I think that I probably started to play — 99 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

rugby, alongside my fellow boarders, only so that my academic success and the suspect docility that it is assumed to imply would not lead me to be excluded from the 'manly' community of the sports team, the only site (in contrast to the classroom, which divides by hierarchizing, and the boarding school, which isolates by atomizing) of a genuine solidarity, in the common struggle for victory, in mutual support when there was afight,or in the unreserved admiration given to exploits, which was much more solid and direct than that of the scholastic world. This dual experience could only compound the durable effect of a very strong discrepancy between high academic consecration and low social origin, in other words a cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions. This kind of 'coincidence of contraries' no doubt helped to institute in a lasting way, an ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the academic institution, combining rebellion and submission, rupture and expectation, which is perhaps at the root of a relation to myself that is also ambivalent and contradictory - as if the self-certainty linked to the feeling of being consecrated were undermined in its very principle by the most radical uncertainty towards the consecrating institution, a kind of bad mother, vain and deceiving. On the one hand, the docility, even eagerness and submissiveness of the 'good pupil', thirsting for knowledge and recognition, that had led me to comply with the rules of the game and not only the most cynical and facile techniques of academic rhetoric: at Louis-le-Grand, for example, I excelled in the philosophy 'mock examinations' in which Etienne ioo

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Borne, one of the accredited representatives of Christian personalism (with which I had many subsequent clashes), regularly gave top place to my dissertations; on the other hand, a recalcitrant disposition, especially towards the educational system. Perhaps because I loved it too much, the ambiguous alma mater provoked a violent and constant revolt, springing from debt and disappointment, which manifested itself in a whole series of crises, particularly at the time of examinations or in situations of academic solemnity, prize-day speeches, inaugural lectures, thesis juries, academic references, which, by triggering the unease provoked by the tacitly imperative expectation of the signs of submission (what Spinoza called ohszquium, the pure respect for institutional forms that institutions demand above all else, of which people say, in reproachful tones, that 'it costs nothing' and which costs me an infinite amount), bring out my hankering for dissidence, the temptation to spoil the game. And how can I not include in that series the refusal to submit to the unthinkable rite of the submission of a thesis, which I justified to myself with Kafka's axiom: 'Do not present yourself before a court whose verdict you do not recognize'? On the one hand, the modesty, linked among other things to insecurity, of the self-made parvenu, who, as they say in the world of rugby, does not have to force himself to 'get stuck in' and to invest the same interest and attention in drawing up a coding schedule or conducting an interview as in constructing a theoretical model (I would have thought this self-evident had I not seen so many sociologists of high social or academic origin invent every possible way of 101

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

avoiding the tasks to my mind most imperatively required of a researcher, but often regarded as inferior, and heard a young beginner, garlanded with national and international honours, publicly declare that there was no question of his personally administering a questionnaire and who has kept up that refusal, without ceasing to teach 'methodology* to general satisfaction, in the highest academic institutions); on the other, the lofty self-assurance of the miracule® who comes to see himself as 'miraculous' and is inclined to challenge the dominant on their own ground (I see a paradigmatic example of this in the challenge that Heidegger throws at the Kantians when he tears down one of the pillars of rationalism by disclosing the existential finitude at the heart of the Transcendental Aesthetic): I have to confess that many of my choices have been determined, from the Ecole Normale on, by a form of aristocratism, not so much arrogant as desperate, because based on retrospective shame at having been caught up in the game of competitive examinations, combined with the reaction against the 'good students' in which I must have indulged at some point, and on the form of self-hatred inspired in me by my horror of the petit-bourgeois arrivisme of some of my fellow students who subsequently became eminent members of the university hierarchy and accomplished incarnations of homo academicus. (How could I fail to recognize myself in Nietzsche when he says, roughly, in Ecce Homo, that he has only ever attacked things that he knew well, that he had himself experienced, and that, up to a point, he had himself been?) 68

See above, p. 5 m.

102

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

But this cleft habitus, the product of a 'conciliation of contraries' which then inclines one to the 'conciliation of contraries', is perhaps most clearly manifested in the particular style of my research, the type of objects that interest me, and the way in which I approach them. I am thinking of the way I have invested great theoretical ambitions in often atfirstsight trivial empirical objects (the question of the temporal structures of consciousness through the relation to time of subproletarians, or the major problems of aesthetics, Kantian aesthetics in particular, apropos of photography), or, more generally, in a simultaneously ambitious and 'modest' way of doing science. Perhaps the fact of coming from what some like to call 'modest' origins gives in this case virtues that are not taught in manuals of methodology, such as the lack of any disdain for patient, painstaking empirical work; attention to commonplace objects; the refusal of dazzling ruptures and spectacular outbursts; the aristocratism of discretion which induces contempt for the brio and brilliance rewarded by the academic institution and nowadays by the media. So, for example, seeking the opposite of the rhetoric of importance through which philosophical elevation distinguishes itself (and which I analysed in vivo in the limiting case of the Althusserians69 - not so different, for a sociological pragmatics, from the cases of Heidegger or Habermas), I have striven to leave the most important theoretical 69

'Le discours d'importance. Quelques reflexions sociologiques sur "Quelques remarques critiques a propos At Lire le CapitaF* \ in Ce queparler veut dire (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 207-26.

—

103 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

contributions in parentheses or notes or to engage my most abstract preoccupations in hyperempirical analyses of objects that were socially secondary, politically insignificant and intellectually disdained. The first sketch of the whole subsequent theory - the supersession of the forced choice between objectivism and subjectivism and the recourse to mediating concepts, such as disposition - is set out in a short preface to a collective work on a minor subject, photography;70 the notion of habitus is present, together with its critical implications for structuralism, in an afterword to a J)ook in which I translated two texts by Erwin Panofsky71 that had been published separately in English and where the word habitus is never used; one of my most extensive critiques of Foucault is put forward in the last note of the article entitled 'Reproduction interdite'72 which no philosopher worthy of the name would ever think of reading; the critique of Derrida's style of philosophy is consigned to a Postscript to Distinction and an elliptical passage in Pascalian Meditations.™ Sometimes only the subtitle gives an idea of 70

With L. Boltanski, R. Castel and J.-C. Chamboredon, Un Art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociales de la photographie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1965), trans, as Photography: The Social Uses of an Ordinary Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 71 See above, note 32. 72 Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la domination economique', Etudes Rurales (Paris), 113-14 (Jan.—June 1989): 15-36. English translation in The Bachelors*Ball (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 73 Meditations pascaiiennes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997). Trans, as Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

104

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

the theoretical stake of my books. Such a strategy of discretion no doubt also has something to do with the dual (and contradictory) vision that I have of my intellectual project: sometimes lofty and even a litde cavalier (on the principle: 'those who can will understand') and ascetic (truth is something to be won, and khalepa ta kala, 'beautiful things are hard'), it is also prudent and modest (I put forward my conclusions - and also my ambitions - only under the cover of precise and detailed research) and, while it sometimes shrinks from the positivistic exhibition of data and even proof (I have little indulgence for the interminable experimental protocols that freight so much uninspired research), it refuses the 'seigneuriaP poses or, more simply, the theoretical brashness that leads so many philosophers and even sociologists (those who win the favour of philosophers) to think beyond their philosophical means. Similarly, from the outset I took the decision, in my teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, to exclude all the forms of 'happening'74 which, in accordance with some people's model of politics, and others' of literature, were much practised in some elevated circles of the academic world. I remember having learned with some satisfaction that two young Germans, who had come a long way to anend the seminars that I had just begun to give at the £cole des Hautes Etudes, which, owing to a major misunderstanding, attracted a high proportion of the aspiring intelligentsia - including some of the future leaders and thinkers of May 1968 - went away thoroughly disappointed 74

In English in the text (trans.).

—

105 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

by the dull and somewhat pedestrian character of the objects of analysis - accounts of social workers, primary school teachers and office workers - and by what I had to say about them, which gave hardly any place to authors or concepts of importance, such as praxis, hermeneutics or 'communicative action*. And even quite recently, by adopting a deliberately Socratic approach which, significantly, they did not recognize, I managed to disappoint the naturally 'philosophical' expectations of a group of normaliens who had invited me to inaugurate a series of lectures on 'the political* and whom I wanted to send back, by means of a methodical comparison with the relations to politics of past generations of normaliens, to a reflection on what their vision of politics owed to their position as normaliens in a particular state of the intellectual and political fields. The intellectual world, which thinks itself so profoundly liberated from custom and convention, has always seemed to me inhabited by profound conformisms which have acted on me as repulsive forces. The same recalcitrant dispositions towards enrolment and conformisms - and therefore also towards those who, following the inclinations of habitus different from mine, changed in accordance with the rhythm of the transformations that have led that inconstant world from the enchantments of a fake revolution to the disenchantments of a real conservative revolution - have meant that I have almost always found myself on the opposite side from the models and modes dominant in the field, whether in my research or in my political position-takings, conspicuously Weberian or Durkheimian for example when it was imperative to be — 106 —

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Marxist. I was not a communist when most intellectuals were but I never indulged in the anti-communism into which they moved on ceasing to be so. This has often led to my being branded a 'neo-Stalinist' by people who, for the most part, have passed through the Communist Party or Maoism, and who, in so doing, continue to illustrate the stalinoid modes of thought and expression that led me to oppose them as much then as now. The sense of ambivalence towards the intellectual world that is rooted in these dispositions is the generative principle of a double distance of which I could give countless examples: a distance from the great game of French-style intellectual life, with its fashionable petitions, its demonstrations dujour or its prefaces for artists' catalogues, but also from the great role of professor, engaged in the circular circulation of thesis juries and examination boards, the games and stakes of power over reproduction; a distance, in politics and culture, from both elitism and populism. The tension between contraries, never resolved into a harmonious synthesis, is particularly visible in my relation to art, the combination of a real and never qualified passion for real avant-gardes (rather than the scholastically programmed transgressions of academic anti-academicism) and an analytical coldness that was intensified as I built up the method of interpretation presented in Les Regies de Vart^ and which is inspired by the conviction that while it 7:>

Les Regies de Van. Genese et structure du champ litteraire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), trans, as The Rules of Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).

— 107 —

may bruise the Holderlinian-Heideggerian-Blanchotian cult of the sacred in literature and art, the 'impious dismantling of thefiction*of which Mallarme speaks can only intensify the pleasure of the love of art. This tension perhaps never appeared to me in more dramatic fashion than when I gave my inaugural lecture at the College de France, in other words at a moment of entry into a role that I found hard to integrate into my own idea of myself. I had several times refused to be a candidate and I had explained this, to Fran£ois Jacob in particular, and then to my friends, in particular Andre Miquel, who insisted that I should be a candidate and whom I had even tried to convince that my eventual competitor, a grandiloquent and propheticfigure,would fit the part very well, in a sense better than me. This reluctance (the word is too weak, but 'repugnance' is too strong), springing from deep inside me, led me to a whole series of acts designed to burn the bridges, such as lending my name in support of the candidature of Coluche76 for the presidential election of 1981, or an article in Actes de la Recherche on haute couture77 in which, killing two birds with one stone, I quoted an article by Roland Barthes in Elle about Chanel and an essay by Andre Chastel78 in Le Monde which amounted to an advertorial for a brand of perfume. Preparing that inaugural

76

An anarchic comedian (trans.). With Yvette Delsaut, 'Le couturier et sa griffe. Contribution a une theorie de la magie', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 1 (Jan. 1975): 7-36. 78 Art historian and professor at the College de France (trans.). 77

—

108

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

lecture brought home to me all my contradictions, in a concentrated form; the sense of being perfectly unworthy, of having nothing to say that was worth saying before such a court, probably the only one whose verdict I recognized, was intensified by a sense of guilt towards my father, who had just died in a particularly tragic and wretched way and whom, in the folly of the moments of despair of the early 1950s, I had helped to make more attached to his house, absurdly situated beside a main road, by encouraging and helping him to renovate it. Although I knew he would have been very proud and happy, I made a magical connection between his death and a success that I conceived as a transgression and a treachery. There were many sleepless nights. Finally, I thought I saw a way out of the contradiction into which I was thrown by the very fact of a social consecration which assaulted my self-image: to take as the object of my lecture the idea of delivering an inaugural lecture, of performing a rite of institution, thus setting up a distance from the role in the very exercise of the role. But I had underestimated the violence of what, in place of a simple ritual address, became a kind of 'intervention' in the artists' sense. To describe the rite while performing the rite is to commit the supreme social barbarism, that of wilfully suspending belief or, worse, calling it into question and threatening it in the very time and place where it is supposed to be celebrated and strengthened. I thus discovered, in the moment of doing this, that what had become for me a psychological solution constituted a challenge to the symbolic order, an affront to the dignity of the institution —

109

—

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

which demands that one keep silent about the arbitrariness of the institutional rite that is being performed. The public reading of that text which, written outside the situation, still had to be read as it stood, without modification, before the assembled body of masters, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Michel Foucault and others, was a terrible ordeal. People told me later that my voice was toneless. I was on the point of breaking off and leaving the rostrum. Jean-Pierre Vernant gave me a severe look, or so it seemed: I read on to the end, for better or worse. Afterwards, I felt a terrible unease, a sense of having blundered rather more than transgressed. I remained alone with two fellow pupils from Pau, whom I had not seen since our schooldays, and have not seen again. I spoke wildly, in the relief that follows enormous tension, with the sense of still having to pay very dearly for it. Why, in order tofinda way out, did I have to practise that kind of semi-controlled schizophrenia in which, just as a patient describes what he says or does while saying that he is doing or saying something else, I give the commentary on my message, the giving of a lecture, through another message which contradicts its essential features by giving away everything that is signified and presupposed by giving a lecture? It is not the only time in my life when I have had the sense of being constrained by a greater force to do something that cost me dearly and the need for which was felt only by me.

no

W

hy have I written and, above all, for whom? Perhaps to discourage biographies and biographers, while providing, as a kind of professional point of honour, the information that I would have liked tofindwhen I tried to understand the writers or artists of the past, and while seeking to extend reflexive analysis beyond the generic discoveries obtained from scientific analysis itself - and to do this without giving way to the (very strong) temptation to deny or refute distortions or defamations, to undeceive or to surprise. I could not be unaware of the more or less wild attempts at objectivation that my analyses have provoked in response, with no other justification than the malicious aim of objectivating the objectivator, along the childish lines of 'if you say it, you must be it': he denounces glory and honours, but he is avid for glory and honours; he excoriates the media but he is a media figure; he attacks the educational system but is enslaved to academic honours, and so on ad infinitum. What is certain, in any case, is that if I am not impossible to situate as an empirical agent, I have always sought to be so, as much as possible, in my role as a researcher, in particular by taking account of my position and its evolution over time, as I have done here, so as to try to control the effects they could have on my scientific position-takings. And I have done so not to escape the reduction of my works to their social conditions, in accordance with the

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

aspiration to absolute knowledge of a quasi-divine researcher ('Bourdivine', as some have said), but to practise a supremely difficult craft as well as I could, the one that consists in organizing the return of the repressed and in saying out loud to everyone what no one wants to know. But I have also and perhaps especially written for the youngest of my readers, who, I hope, will be able to feel, through this evocation of the historical conditions in which my work was developed, and which are no doubt very remote, in various respects, from the ones in which they find themselves, what I felt each time that I succeeded to any degree, in my work, in 'adopting the point of view of the author', as Flaubert put it, that is, in putting myself, in thought, in the place that he or she - whether writer or painter, or factory worker or clerk - occupies in the social world: the sense of apprehending an oeuvre and a life in the necessary movement of its realization and, in so doing, being able fo give myself an active appropriation of it, a sympraxis more than a sympathy, itself turned towards creation and action. It is indeed the case that, paradoxically, historicization, although it sets at a distance, also gives the means of bringing closer an author embalmed and imprisoned in layers of academic commentary and converting him or her into a real alter ego, or, rather, a 'companion' in the sense of the old guilds, someone who, like everyone else, has problems that are both trivial and vital (where to place a manuscript, how to convince a publisher, etc.). I have never thought that I was committing an act of sacrilegious arrogance when I posited, without taking myself for the artist, like so many inspired critics, that Flaubert or 112

Sketch for a Self-Analysis

Manet was a person like me. And nothing would make me happier than having made it possible for some of my readers to recognize their own experiences, difficulties, questionings, sufferings, and so on, in mine, and to draw from that realistic identification, which is quite the opposite of an exalted projection, some means of doing what they do, and living what they live, a little bit better.

Indei

Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 2, 108 Alain (£mile-Auguste Chartier) 6 Alexandre, Michel 6 Algeria 31,46-62 fieldwork 46-59,60,61 military service 37-40,95 War of Liberation 88-9 White Fathers 48-9 ALN (Algerian National Liberation Army) 48-9,52, 55 Althusserians 36,103 Althusser, Louis 8, 11, 87-8 American sociology 72-5 Archives Europeenes de Sociologie Aron, Raymond 10,18, 29, 30,31, 32-4,44,45,60,90 Introduction to the Philosophy of History 14 and Sartre 23-4, 34 and Weber 72-3 Artaud, Antonin 16, 78 Audin, Maurice 54 Bachelard, Gaston 10,11,12, 26 Bachelard, Suzanne 11 Balandier, Georges 31

Balzac, Honore 66 Barthes, Roland 108 Bataille, Georges 2,12, 78 Baudelaire, Charles 25 Beam research study 46,59-60, 61-5 Beaufret, Jean 5,6 Beauvoir, Simone de 25 Belhaccne, Leila 58 Bensmaine, Mimi 58 biographical illusion x, 1 Blanchot, Maurice 78 Blum, Leon 86 Borne, fetienne 100-1 Boudon, Raymond 31,75 Bouhedja, Salah 55 Boukhobza, Mohammed 58 Bourdieu, Pierre boarding school 90-100 family of origin 84-90 father 84-6, 89-90,109 fieldwork in Algeria 46-59,60, 61 inaugural lecture at the College de France 108-10 khdgne at Lycee Louis-le-Grand 98-9, IOO-I

military service 37-40,95

Index

mother 84—9 philosophy student at the Ecole Normale Superieure 4-9 primary school 84-5 teaching at Ecole des Hautes Etudes 105-6 Bourgois, Philippe 51 Braudel, Fernand 31,44,45 Cakiers Internationaux de Sociologie 31 Canguilhem, Georges 10-11, KMo* 33,4i, 45>7i,79 Cannon, Annie Jump 28 Catholicism 17 Centre de Sociologie Europeenne 20,30,31,66,83 Chardin, Teilhard de 45 Chastel, Andre 108—9 Chombard de Lauwe, Paul-Henri 3i

Cicourel, Aaron 3,18 clarity, principle of 1-2 CNRS (French national science research council) 30, 35 College de France ix, 10,12, 33, 42,43,44,83 inaugural lecture 108-10 Coluche 108 Communist Party 35,42,107 critical reflexivity 23 Critique 12 cultural studies 9

Darnton, Robert 3 deconstniction 8 Deleuze, Gilles 7 Delsaut, Yvette 35 Derrida, Jacques 3,8,104 Distinction 67, 70, 74, 104 Dreyfus Affair 3 Dumazedier, JofTre 31 Dumezil, Georges n o Durkheim, femile 6, 72 Durkheimianism 14, 18-19, 106—7 fecole des Hautes fetudes 10,45, 105—6 Ecole Normale Superieure 4-9, 10,28-9,32,36,38,39,43, 71,79,9° Newsletter of the Alumni 43 fecole Pratique des Hautes ktudes 3i,32,44 Elle 108 EOR (£cole des Officiers de Reserve) 37 Esprit 14 Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique {Outline of a Theory of Practice) 33, 44 ethnology 34-5,37,40,41-5,82 fieldwork in Algeria 46-59, 60, 61 Etudes Rurales 31 existentialism 9,11-12 Feranoun, Mouloud 58

Dagonet, Francois 11 Dampierre, Eric de 31 Darbel, Alain 52, 74-5

Ferry, Luc 14 Feyerabend, Paul 76

—

115

—

Index

Homo Academicus 83 humanist culture 17,18 Husserl, E. 11,20,40,41,72

Flaubert, Gustave 66,112-13 Memoires d'unfou 97 Ford Foundation 73, 74-5 Foucault, Michel 3,7,11,15, 79—82,104,110 Fourier, Francois 68 Frankfurt School 74 Freud, Sigmund 17,42 Friedman, Georges 31 Furet, Francois 14

IFOP (French Institute of Public Opinion) 30 Isambert, Viviane 31

Garese, Rolande 58 Gauchet, Marcel 14 Genet, Jean, Miracle of the Rose 93 GofFman, E., Asylums 93 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (translation) 42 Guenon, Rene 56 Gueroult, Martial, Dynamique et metaphysique leibnifiennes 10 Gurvitch, Georges 30,31 Habermas, Jiirgen 3, 103 habitus 22, 27,45, 64, 89,104 Halperin, David 80 Hegel, G.W.F. 10 Heidegger, Martin 6,17, 77,102, 103 Letter on Humanism 5 Heller, Clemens 31 Hennine, Moulah 58 Herriot, Edouard 86 Hippolyte, Jean 27,41 historical epistemology 26 historicism 77

Jacob, Francois 108 Jaures, Jean 86 Joly, Henri 30 journals, sociological 31 Kafka, F. 101 Kant, Immanuel 28 Anthropologic 40 Klossowski, Pierre 2 Koyre, Alexandre 10, 26 Kraus, Karl 23 Kuhn, Thomas 26,76 Labov, William 3 Lacan, Jacques 17 La Depeche de Toulouse 29 Lagneau 6 Lamicq, Bernard 90 La Misere du monde 51, 97 L'Amour de Tart 15-16,75 La Nouvelle Critique 36 La Souterraine church 70 Lazarsfeld, Paul 72, 73, 74-5 Lebrun, Gerard 54 'Lecture on the Lecture' ix LeDebat 14 Le Deracinement 33 Leibniz, Gottfried, Animadversiones 41

— n6 —

Index

Leiris, Michel 44 Le Metier de socwlogue 8 Le Monde 42, 108 Le Nouvel Observateur 14, 77 Les He'ritiers 33,90 Les Regies de I art 107—8

Nechem, Mahfoud 58 Nietzsche, F. 15 Ecce Homo 102 nihilism 79 Nizan, Paul, Aden Arabie 84 Nora, Pierre 14

Les Temps Modernes 10, 59, 77-8 Levi-Strauss, Claude 14, 35,40, 42,44-5,61,110 Tristes Tropiques 44 The View from Afar 45 LExpress 38 VHomme 34-5 Liberation 19 linguistics 14, 77 The Logic of Practice 44 Maget, Marcel, Guide d'e'tude directe des comportements culturels 61 Malebrache, Nicholas 28 Mallarme, Stephane 17,108 Manet, £douard 76, 113 Maoism 9,107 Marin, Louis 30 Marxism 36,45, 69, 75, 107 mathematics 41 Matonti, Frederique 36 Mauss, Marcel 12 Mendras, Henri 31 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 43, 77 Merton, Robert K. 72 Metraux, Alfred 44 Miquel, Andre 108 Misraoui, Ahmed 58

Outline of a Theory of Practice 33>34 Panofsky, Erwin 42,104 Pariente, Jean-Claude 30 Parsons, Talcott 72 Pascalian Meditations 104 Passeron, Jean-Claude 14 philosophy 7 , 4 0 - 1 , 6 8 , 7 5 - 6 , 78-9,80 'philosophy without subject* 14 Pinto, Louis 15 postmodernism 79 Pouillon, Jean 78 psychoanalysis 16—17 Rabinow, Paul 3 Ramnoux, Clemence 32 reflexivity ix-x, 51,63-5, 74 Renaut, Alain 14 'return of the subject* 15 Revue Francaise de Sociologie 31 Reynaud, Jean-Daniel 31 Ricceur, Paul 11,14 Robespierre, M. 86 Rodinson, Maxime 45 Roussel, Raymond 16 rural sociology 60-1

117

—

Index

Sade, cult of 2,78 Sanchez-Jankowski, Martin 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 10,14, 22-5, 28,32,34,84 L'Etre et le Ne'ant 9, 23 and Levi-Strauss 45 Saussure, Ferdinand de 12 Sayad, Abdelmalek 47,52-3,55,

Stoetzel, Jean 30, 31 structural anthropology 14,77 structuralism 77-8,104 Tilly, Charles 3 Touraine, Alain 31 Travail et travailleurs en Algerie

33,50 Treanton, Jean-Rene 31 5M7 Schiitz, Alfred 60 Science of Science and Reflexivity ix Varna, World Congress of Sociology 68 Sociologie de VAlgerie 40 Vaudrey, Colonel 53 Sociologiedu Travail 31 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 110 sociology 15-16,17, 23,30-1, Vilar, Pierre 90 34-7,41,66-9 American 72-5 Vuillemin, Jules 27, 30,79 and ethnology 34-5,37,40, Physique et mttaphysiqut kantiennes 10 4i-5 andFoucault 81-3 rural 60-1 Sophocles 17 theSorbonne 30 Spanish Civil War 86 Spinoza, B. 101 Stalinism 9

Weberianism 106-7 Weber, Max 12,72,75 Weil, Eric 10,12 White Fathers missionaries, Algeria 48-9 Winter, Sarah 16

—

Il8

—