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 he Biographical Illusion
translation : Y. Winkin and W. Leeds-Hurwitz, 1987.
"Life history" is one of those
common-sense notions which has been smuggled into the learned universe, first with little
noise among anthropologists, then more recently, and with a lot of noise, among
sociologists. To speak of "life history" implies the not insignificant
presupposition that life is a history. As in Maupassant's title Une Vie (A Life), a
life is inseparably the sum of the events of an individual existence seen as a history and
the narrative of that history. That is precisely what common sense, or everyday language,
tells us: life is like a path, a road, a track, with crossroads (Hercules between vice and
virtue), pitfalls, even ambushes (Jules Romain speaks of successive ambushes of
competitions and examinations). Life can also be seen as a progression, that is, a way
that one is clearing and has yet to clear, a trip, a trajectory, a cursus, a
passage, a voyage, a directed journey, a unidirectional and linear move
("mobility"), consisting of a beginning ("entering into life"),
various stages, and an end, understood both as a termination and as a goal ("He will
make his way," meaning he will succeed, he will have a fine career). This way of
looking at a life implies tacit acceptance of the philosophy of history as a series of
historical events (Geschichte) which is implied in the philosophy of history as an
historical narrative (Historie), or briefly, implied in a theory of the narrative.
An historian's narrative is indiscernible from that of a novelist in this context,
especially if the narration is biographical or autobiographical.
Without pretending to exhaustiveness, we can try to
unravel some of the presuppositions of this theory.
 f Interest and the Relative Autonomy of Symbolic Power
trans. L.J.D. Wacquant with M. Lawson, 1988.
Most of the questions and objections which have
been put to me reveal a high degree of misapprehension, which can go as far as total
incomprehension. Some of the reasons for this are to be found on the consumption side,
others on the side of production. I shall begin with the latter.
I have said often enough that any cultural producer
is situated in a certain space of production and that, whether he wants it or not, his
productions always owe something to his position in this space. I have relentlessly tried
to protect myself, through a constant effort of self-analysis, from this effect of the
field. But one can be negatively "influenced," influenced a contrario, if
I may say, and bear the marks of what one fights against. Thus certain features of my work
can no doubt be explained by the desire to "twist the stick in the other
direction," to react against the dominant vision in the intellectual field, to break,
in a somewhat provocative manner, with the professional ideology of intellectuals. This is
the case for instance with the use I make of the notion of interest, which can call forth
the accusation of economism against a work which, from the very beginning (I can refer
here to my anthropological studies), was conceived in opposition to economism. The notion
of interest — I always speak of specific interest — was conceived as an
instrument of rupture intended to bring the materialist mode of questioning to bear on
realms from which it was absent and [to bear] on the sphere of cultural production in
particular. It is the means of a deliberate (and provisional) reductionism which is which
is used to take down the claims of the prophets of the universal, to question the ideology
of the freischwebende Intelligenz [free-floating intellectual]. On this score, I
feel very close to Max Weber who utilized the economic model to extend materialist
critique into the realm of religion and to uncover the specific interests of the great
protagonists of the religious game, priests, prophets, sorcerers, in the competition which
opposes them to one another. This rupture is more necessary and more difficult in the
sphere of culture than in any other, because we are all both judge and judged. Culture is
our specific capital and, even in the most radical probing, we tend to forget the true
foundation of our specific power, of the particular form of domination we exercise. This
is why it seemed to me essential to recall that the thinkers of the universal have an
interest in universality (which, incidentally, implies no condemnation whatsoever).
But there are grounds for misunderstanding that
stand on the side of consumption: my critics rely most often on only one book, Distinction,
which they read in a "theoretical" or theoreticist vein (an inclination
reinforced by the fact that a number of concrete analyses are less "telling" to
a foreign reader) and ignore the empirical work published by myself or others in Actes
de la recherche en sciences sociales (not to mention the ethnographic works which are
at the origin of most of my concepts); they criticize out of their context of use open
concepts designed to guide empirical work; they criticize not my analyses, but an already
simplified, if not maimed, representation of my analyses. This is because they invariably
apply to them the very modes of thought, and especially distinctions, alternatives and
oppositions, which my analyses are aimed at destroying and overcoming. I think here of all
the antinomies that the notion of habitus aims at eliminating: finalism/mechanism,
explanation by reasons/explanation by causes, conscious/unconscious, rational and
strategic calculation/mechanical submission to mechanical constraints, etc. In so doing,
one can choose either to reduce my analyses to one of the positions they seek to
transcend, or, as with Elster, to act as if I simultaneously or successively
retained both of these contradictory positions. These are so many ways of ignoring what
seems to me to be the anthropological foundation of a theory of action, or of practice,
and which is condensed in the notion of habitus: the relation which obtains between
habitus and the field to which it is objectively adjusted (because it was constituted in
regard to the specific necessity which inhabits it) is a sort of ontological complicity, a
subconscious and prereflexive fit. This complicity manifests itself in what we call the
sense of the game or "feel" for the game (or sens pratique, practical
sense), an intentionality without intention which functions as the principle of strategies
devoid of strategic design, without rational computation and without the conscious
positing of ends. (By way of aside, habitus is one principle of production of practices
among others and, although it is undoubtedly more frequently at play than any other —
"We are empirical," said Leibniz, "in three quarters of our actions"
— one cannot rule out that it may be superseded, under certain circumstances —
certainly in situations of crisis which disrupt the immediate adjustment of habitus to
field — by other principles, such as rational and conscious computation. This being
granted, even if its theoretical possibility is universally allocated, the propensity or
the ability to have recourse to a rational principle of production of practices has its
own social and economic conditions of possibility: the paradox, indeed, is that those who
want to admit no principle of production of practices, and of economic practices
specifically, other than rational consciousness, fail to take into account the economic
preconditions for the development and the implementation of economic rationality.) |
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Deux documents de travail.