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| ISBN-13: | 9781783085637 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 08/05/2016 |
| Series: | Anthem Companions to Sociology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu
By Derek Robbins
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Derek Robbins editorial matter and selectionAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-563-7
CHAPTER 1
READING BOURDIEU PHENOMENOLOGICALLY
Derek Robbins
I believe that Pierre Bourdieu is best understood as a phenomenological sociologist and that, equally, responses to his work in the spirit of its production have also to be understood phenomenologically. I first offer a brief justification of that view. I then seek to clarify what I take to be the nature of Bourdieu's phenomenological orientation before proceeding to an elaboration of its implications both for our understanding of Bourdieu's work and for an assessment of the range of responses to his work presented in this volume. In the light of these preliminary remarks, I then offer reflections on each of the contributions as well as some concluding comments.
Bourdieu's Explicit References to Phenomenology
Bourdieu never wrote explicitly about the influence of the work of Edmund Husserl on his thinking. However, he did offer a few suggestive hints. Asked by Axel Honneth and others in an interview of 1985 what the intellectual situation was like when he was a student, Bourdieu replied,
When I was a student in the fifties, phenomenology, in its existentialist variety, was at its peak, and I had read Being and Nothingness very early on, and then Merleau-Ponty and Husserl; Marxism didn't really exist as an intellectual position, even if people like Tran-Duc-Thao managed to give it a certain profile by raising the question of its relation with phenomenology. ([1987], 1990a, 3)
Notice here that Bourdieu deliberately distinguishes between phenomenology and what he calls phenomenology 'in its existentialist variety'. His comment also suggests that he was led back towards the work of Husserl by first reading Jean-Paul Sartre and then Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Asked by his questioners whether he had ever been interested in existentialism, Bourdieu replied later in the same interview,
I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history and so on, which, together with Husserl's analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal – as was later the case with Schütz – in my efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social. But I never really got into the existentialist mood. Merleau-Ponty was something different, at least in my view. He was interested in the human sciences and in biology, and he gave you an idea of what thinking about immediate present-day concerns can be like when it doesn't fall into the sectarian over-simplifications of political discussion. ([1987], 1990a, 5)
Notice for the moment that Bourdieu specifically highlights Husserl's Ideen II, which was only first published in German in 1952, rather than Ideen I, which had been first published in German in 1913 and translated into French in 1950. (I emphasize this because the English translation of this passage published in In Other Words wrongly footnotes the English translation of Ideen I.) In the same article, Bourdieu makes it clear that he was reading Husserlin the original and was not dependent on translations when he comments, '(and thanks also to my reading of Husserl, who was still little translated in those days)' ([1987], 1990a, 4).
These hints came in a retrospection, 30 years on, of influences on his thinking during his student days in the early 1950s. Bourdieu was more explicit, though brief, in a one-page response that he wrote at the close of 2001, shortly before his death, to C. J. Throop and K. M. Murphy's 'Bourdieu and Phenomenology', which was published at the end of their 'critical assessment' (2002). Responding to what he took to be the accusation that he was a 'quasi-plagiarist dissimulating his borrowings', Bourdieu insisted that he had 'often declared my indebtedness to phenomenology, which I practised for some time in my youth' (2002a, 209). He proceeded to assert that he had never sought either to 'rephrase' or to 'refute' 'Husserl, Schutz and a few more' and that, rather, 'It is my aim to integrate phenomenological analysis into a global approach of which it is one phase (the first, subjective phase), the second being the objectivist analysis. This integration is in no way an eclectic compilation since the effect is to pass beyond the limits (which I recall in my critique) inherent in each approach, while retaining their essential contributions' (2002, 209; italics in original). Note that, importantly, Bourdieu emphasizes that he had 'practised' phenomenology, not that he had been committed to it as philosophy. He claims that his phenomenological orientation was pragmatic and that it was one component of a methodology that always sought to do justice to the dialectical interrelationship between subjective perception and objective analysis. Husserl's phenomenology helped Bourdieu reconcile the opposites in the distinction made by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz between 'truths of reason' and 'truths of fact'. Notice that Bourdieu acknowledges an indebtedness to phenomenological analysis in terms that suggest that he regarded it as a subjectivist contribution to an approach that he had accommodated with objectivist structuralism, treating it, in other words, as synonymous with the ethnomethodological representation of primary experience (as he did in his article of 1973 entitled 'The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge' (1973)).
The Nature and Implications of Bourdieu's Phenomenological Orientation
The way in which Bourdieu 'aimed to integrate phenomenological analysis' was in accord with the way in which contemporary interpretations of Husserl began to emphasize the 'constitutive' dimension of his work. We have to distinguish between 'transcendental' and 'constitutive' phenomenology.
Whether or not Bourdieu used the interpretation of Husserl offered by Jean-François Lyotard in his La phénoménologie (Phenomenology), first published in 1954, it is a useful source in that it clearly articulated the middling epistemological position offered by Husserl as it was understood in France in the early 1950s. Lyotard began with an account of Husserl's 'psychologistic scepticism', his battle against the view that 'identifies the subject of knowledge with the psychological subject' ([1991], 37, 1999, 9). Lyotard showed that this scepticism extended to all empiricism. He summarized Husserl's position in the following way:
Basically, the assumption at the root of all empiricismis the claim that experience is the sole source of truth for all knowledge – but then this claim must rely, in turn, on the proof of experience. Yet experience, never furnishing more than the contingent and particular, cannot provide science with the universal and necessary principle of such an assumption. Thus, empiricism cannot be understood through empiricism. ([1991], 38, 1999, 11)
To avoid refuge in idealism or logical positivism as a consequence of this recognition of the limits of empiricism, Husserl pursued the essence or 'eidos' underlying experience. As Lyotard continued,
The proceedings of imaginational variation give us the essence itself, the being of the object. [...] The essence, or eidos, of the object is constituted by the invariant that remains identical throughout the variations. ([1991], 39, 1999, 12; italics in original)
In this 'transcendental' reading of Husserl that derives from an interpretation of his early work, the necessary function of multiple scientific disciplines is to provide variant understandings that will disclose universal invariants. Taking the explanations of the sciences at face value is a necessary prerequisite for understanding the assumptions of human experience on which they all depend. As Lyotard put it in explicating Husserl,
The empiricist interpretation of the formation of the number two presupposes the originary understanding of this number. This understanding is thus a precondition for all empirical science; while the eidos it yields us is only a pure possibility, there is a priority to this possibility with respect to the real which concerns science. ([1991], 40, 1999, 12; italics in original)
The empirical sciences are concerned with contingent facts, but, according to Husserl, as represented by Lyotard, 'the contingency of the fact is related to the necessary essence, since to think of its contingency is to think that it belongs to the essence of the fact that it could be otherwise' ([1991], 41, 1999, 14). The pursuit of the essential is not to be confused with that of the Platonic 'idea'
since it strives to present the knowledge of essences not as the end of all knowledge, but as the necessary introduction to knowledge of the material world. In this sense the truth of the eidetic is the empirical, and this is why the 'eidetic reduction', by which we are invited to pass from the contingent facticity of the object to its intelligible contents, can still be called 'mundane'. ([1991], 42, 1999, 14)
In his early work, Husserl pursued his reductive intention with respect to a series of 'logical investigations' ( [1913a], 1970). By the early 1950s, however, it was becoming accepted that, as Merleau-Ponty put it in 1951, 'the contrast is striking between some early and recent texts' of Husserl(1960, 136). There was a growing awareness that the phenomenological movement did not conceal a revised form of idealism, but instead was conducive to a new kind of empiricism. With the posthumous translation of Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and his Experience and Judgement, subtitled Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, published in German respectively in 1954 and 1948, the view was developing that Husserl's thought was an attempt to articulate the prelogical foundations of logical systems. There was some continuing uncertainty whether there had been a shift of emphasis in Husserl's own thinking, partly as the result of the influence of Martin Heidegger, or whether the apparent shift was attributable to the mediation of some of his late work published posthumously by his assistants – Ludwig Landgrebe and Eugen Fink – both of whom were attracted to the tradition of German Kulturgeschichte (cultural history).
Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur and Tran Duc Thao were pioneers in exploring the implications of the thinking of 'late' Husserl.
Wahl published two articles, in 1951 and 1952. The first offered some notes on Experience and Judgement, and the second went further in arguing that Experience and Judgement highlights a potentially empirical dimension to Husserl's late work. According to Wahl, Husserl argued in Experience and Judgement that 'intentionality' – the process of understanding reality logically – is grounded in a sphere that precedes judgement. Wahl saw this as a form of realism that can be exposed in a form of empirical enquiry.
Ricoeur's translation of Husserl's Ideas I (1913b), published in 1950, included a translator's introduction in which, following Fink, Ricoeur asserted that
Husserl's 'question' [...] is not Kant's; Kant poses the problem of validity for possible objective consciousness and that is why he stays within the framework of an attitude which remains natural. [...] Husserl's question [...] is the question of the origin of the world [...]; it is, if you like, the question implied in myths, religions, theologies and ontologies, which has not yet been elaborated scientifically. (Husserl, ed. Ricoeur 1950, xxvii–xxviii; italics in original)
Ricoeur also wrote two relevant articles in the early 1950s. The first, 'Analyses et problèmes dans Ideen II de Husserl' (Analyses and problems in Husserl's Ideas II, Ricoeur 1951), is important because it was a comparison between Ideen I and Ideen II undertaken on the basis of his reading Ideen II in manuscript before its subsequent publication in 1952, and because, as I have noted above, it was Ideen II rather than Ideen I to which Bourdieu referred in his 1985 interview. Ricoeur also wrote an article for Esprit, a Catholic journal, in 1953 (1953), which began as an attempt to define phenomenology by comparing the phenomenologies of Immanuel Kantand G. W. F. Hegel, but which moved into a detailed critique of Tran Duc Thao's Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (Phenomenology and dialectical materialism) of 1951 (1951).
Tran Duc Thao's book was important because it registered the transition in responses to Husserl, from the existentialist to the social historical or sociological. It was published in two parts in 1951. The first part, written between 1942 and 1950, is a sympathetic historical and critical account of Husserl's philosophical development. The second part is devoted to dialectical materialism and presents phenomenology as the last gasp of the tradition of philosophical idealism that had been attacked by Karl Marx. If, as I am suggesting was thought by Wahland others, Husserl's late work seemed to emphasize a quest for a genetic understanding of human thought, Tran Duc Thao argued that, as the editor of the English translation puts it, 'Genetic understanding entails materialist science, the investigation of the evolutionary biological foundation and historical development of consciousness, and especially of that practical consciousness which is language' (ed. Cohen1986, viii).
The responses of Wahl, Ricoeur and Tran Duc Thao all indicate that interest in Husserl in France in the early 1950s was shifting towards an interest in the sociohistorical production of forms of knowledge. Husserl's early work was thought to have been in pursuit of universal and ahistorical 'essences' of knowledge, but the interpretation of the 'new Husserl'or the 'other Husserl' was thought to open up the possibility that essences might be geographically and temporally contingent and, as such, susceptible to empirical investigation without sacrificing the fundamental scepticism about the status of the explanations of the discourses of the empirical sciences. Based on his extensive reading of the work of Husserl and of the contemporary secondary literature, Lyotard felt able to comment that
it is clear that the cultural sociological viewpoint already present in Ideas II, and largely dominating the last writings (the Crisis and the letter to Lévy-Bruhl), introduces, by Husserl's own admission, something like a historical relativism – the very thing which transcendental philosophy fought against. ([1991], 1999, 59; italics in original)
It was Aron Gurwitsch who articulated what was meant by constitutive phenomenology in an essay entitled 'The Perceptual World and the Rationalized Universe', probably written in 1953. Gurwitsch wrote,
In the final period of his life, Husserl did, more and more, call attention to the perceptual world, such as the latter plays a role in everyday, natural life. That is the world in which we find ourselves, in which we act, react, and work. It is in that world that we encounter our fellow human beings, to whom we are bound by the most diverse relationships. All our desires and hopes, all our apprehensions and fears, all our pleasures and sufferings (in short, all our affective and emotional life) are related to that world; all our intellectual activities, both practical and theoretical, also refer to it. In describing and analysing the perceptual world, one must take it such as it, in actual fact, offers itself to the natural consciousness of everyday life, such as it appears prior to the idealizations entailed by scientific interpretation and explanation.
The world is conceived by modern civilized human beings in the perspective of the physical sciences, such as they have been established since the seventeenth century. Even when we happen not to be physicists, or when we are not very familiar with the theories of physics and with the results arrived at by it, we conceive and interpret the world in relation to the very existence of physics. (ed. J. Garcia-Gomez 2009, 411–12)
Following the new interpretation, Gurwitsch attributed an emphasis on constitutive phenomenology to 'the final period' of Husserl's life. Following late Husserl, Gurwitsch argued that we all go about our lives in a perceptual world and that the explanations of the sciences are rationalizations or idealizations that are superimposed on our everyday perceptions. Gurwitsch did not suppose, however, that our perceptions remain experiential in an unchanging way. The second paragraph in the quoted passage indicates that, historically, past rationalizations become incorporated into taken-for-granted present perceptions. This can be described as an acceptance that, transculturally and transhistorically, primary perception is susceptible to rational modification.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu by Derek Robbins. Copyright © 2016 Derek Robbins editorial matter and selection. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Introduction Derek Robbins,
PART I: ASPECTS OF BOURDIEU'S THOUGHT,
Chapter 1. Reading Bourdieu Phenomenologically Derek Robbins,
Chapter 2. The Sociological Challenge of Reflexivity in Bourdieusian Thought Simon Susen,
Chapter 3. Sociology at the Scale of the Individual: Arche and Lahire contra Bourdieur Frédéric Vandenberghe,
Chapter 4. Bourdieu and International Social Science Derek Robbins,
PART II: CASE STUDIES OF THE INTERNATIONAL DEPLOYMENT OF BOURDIEU'S THOUGHT,
Chapter 5. Bourdieu Inside Europe: The European Circulation of Bourdieu's Ideas Marco Santoro and Andrea Gallelli,
Chapter 6. The Principle of Differentiation in Japanese Society and International Knowledge Transfer between Bourdieu and Japan Shinichi Aizawa and Naoki Iso,
Chapter 7. Worlds within and beyond Words: Bourdieu and the Limits of Theory Sheena Jain,
Chapter 8. Social Transformation and Cultural Reproduction: A Bourdieusian Analysis of Post-Reform China Yang Yang and Xuanyang Gao,
Chapter 9. Bourdieu's Use and Reception: A Latin American Perspective on the Problems of Conceptual Transfer María-Luisa Méndez,
Notes on Contributors,
Index of Names,
Index of Subjects,
Index of Titles of Books by Bourdieu Cited in the Volume,