Bourdieu et al.

Pierre Bourdieu et l’art de l’invention scientifique: enquêter au Centre de sociologie européenne (1959-1969)
Julien Duval, Johan Heilbron & Pernelle Issenhuth (eds)
Classiques Garnier, 2022

Pierre Bourdieu was eager to distance himself from the label that many publishers have nevertheless successfully applied: “theorist”. He would not assume such a tag, with its haughty philosophical baggage, without irony. His own preferred designation was “sociologist”, whose empirical scientific–and Durkheimian–connotations he exploited. Bourdieu seemed to revel in its modest status, noting as a kind of humblebrag that sociology is “devalued with respect to philosophy by its air of scientistic, even positivistic, vulgarity” and asserting the existence of a “structural discredit that sociology and everything associated with it suffers” (Sketch for a self-analysis, pp.15-16).

Though a bipolar opposition between esteemed philosophy and lowly sociology is not automatically comprehensible to us today, this new collection depicts the toil of the 1960s sociologist, showing all the ignoble, non-theoretical work on which Bourdieu’s repackaged “Theory” rests. To paint this picture, the book’s authors draw on several archival deposits, but most notably on Bourdieu’s own archives, contained in the Fonds Pierre Bourdieu, which was opened in early 2022. The authors focus less on Bourdieu as the conceptual architect that he would become and more on Bourdieu as the manager, administrator, data collector, liaison, correspondent,* and editor that he was during this period. The chapters orbit the work undertaken at the Centre de sociologie européenne, founded by Raymond Aron in 1959, with Bourdieu as its secretary from 1961. In sketching the Centre, the authors paint a vibrant research environment that flourished briefly due to a convergence of happy conditions and its component individuals’ self-sacrifice for the overriding project of the research group (p.121).

Such happy conditions must be understood in a relative sense, however. The authors describe constant financial shortages in the Centre, resolved through foundation patronage and short-term research contracts. Bourdieu is a core actor in the effort to secure these contracts while remaining cognizant of the importance of preserving research autonomy in the face of funders’ demands. Heilbron summarises Bourdieu’s goal as the attempt to identify “strategies [that permit] the preservation of the greatest possible freedom” (p.411). Among the agents from whom Bourdieu sought to preserve freedom while obtaining resources, the authors note the colonial metropole, Kodak (surprisingly tolerant of the sociological approach), the now-defunct Compagnie Bancaire, Editions de Minuit, and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, among others. During this period, Bourdieu saw this kind of engagement as a necessity:

…the researcher must not shelter timidly behind the protection of scientific requirements to refrain from collaborating in applied research, which arises often unexpectedly and in a situation defined by urgency. [A note continues: “The caricatural attitude would consist effectively in agreeing to do only the studies that meet ideal standards of research in every respect, the surest way of never doing research”.] (p.306)

In conditions of material scarcity, the researchers channeled a “spirit of controlled improvisation” (p.415). This is evident in such moves as describing and recording interviewees’ home décor or posing as potential bank clients in something resembling an audit study avant la lettre (p.243). The very mention of such approaches gives reason enough for contributors to this collection to focus on the research practices, traces of which are preserved in the archives accessed. We encounter in this text the intermingling of research practices with tasks often derided as merely secondary or, at worst, as polluting pure research: correspondence necessary to secure an appropriate publisher, access to a punch-card sorter to process data,** and quotidian decisions concerning how to collect data in difficult circumstances (often answered by enlisting family members and students).

The editors make clear at the outset that the book’s chapters focus on these practices, for it is in the practices, rather than in any pre-existing set of theoretical premises, that the origins of what came later can be detected. As Heilbron puts it, “the book’s objective is to trace the genesis of a scientific oeuvre through analysis of the research practice of which it is the product” (p.13). This research practice is not to be understood as the practice of Bourdieu alone. Rather, arrayed around him and suspending him are members of a group. Along with practices, this group focus forms the second prong. In place of a fetishised, isolated theorist, then, we have a collective engaging in various research practices throughout the 1960s.

The first chapters detail Bourdieu’s approach to fieldwork and the development of his ethnographic techniques throughout Algeria (by Amín Pérez) and in Béarn (by Julien Duval and Pernelle Issenhuth). Inspired by the exhaustive ethnographic approach of Marcel Maget, whose writings Bourdieu describes as akin to a “microscope” on village life (p.78), the latter undertakes an almost indiscriminate collection of data. Enlisted in this practice of collection are some pivotal partners: in Algeria, Abdelmalek Sayad (Pérez has recently published a book on this relationship); and in France, his parents and his wife.

According to Pérez, Bourdieu finds in Sayad a figure analogous to himself: both come from rural backgrounds, attend relatively prestigious educational systems, and are anti-colonial in political orientation. Together, they sought to understand forms of violence that the anti-colonial war obscured and that existing journalistic forms of knowledge were not sensitive to. This endeavor, which aimed to escape orientalist abstraction, was nevertheless jeopardized by the war. The danger was real enough that student-researchers abandoned the group due to the risks. In such circumstances and with their naiveté, Bourdieu and Sayad opted for an expansive set of tools: from questionnaires and interviews to Rorschach tests and photography (p.51). Bourdieu intermittently returns to his home village in Béarn during this period, relating in writing to Sayad just how many parallels he–and Bourdieu’s father–observe between the lives and worldviews of the rural French and Algerians.

Bourdieu’s father was invaluable in the data collection process, as Duval and Issenhuth describe. This manifested itself not just by offering his connections to access informants and interviewees, but by participating, along with Bourdieu’s mother, in interviews (e.g., on photography in the peasant family). The authors reproduce Bourdieu’s written directions to his parents, which encourage them to suspend their customary habits of interaction during interviews and to remain vigilant in their observations (p.91). Marie-Claire (née Brizard), for her part, did tireless archival work in council halls on pre-Revolutionary Béarn legal proceedings. Much of this work appeared in Bourdieu’s work on unmarriagable men, but was geared towards a broader study of customary law. To aid in this, both Pierre and Marie-Claire uncovered, transcribed, and finally translated parchment records that predated the Napoleonic Code. Amidst this surfeit of data (Bourdieu complained at one point that he “knows too many things!” about this particular site [p.82]), there are hints of later developments: annotations convey observations about the dominance of (implicit) “ethos” over (explicit, Napoleonic) “ethics” and the increasing power of the legal specialist (the “scribe”), who begins the process of hoarding legal knowledge and produces a situation in which “there is an inequality before culture” (p.112).

The notion of culture was the cornerstone in the research conducted by those at the Centre de sociologie européenne. A number of central chapters concern this very topic (particularly those by Issenhuth on photography and education, but also one by Duval on museum attendance). The Centre was established after the founder of the VIth Section of the École pratique des hautes études, Fernand Braudel, sought American foundation money (Rockefeller and Ford especially). Aron provided impeccable anti-communist credentials and Rockefeller representatives esteemed him (p.133). So he was selected to found his own research centre, focused on Europe amidst a swell in Cold War-era “area studies”. After a slow start for his Centre, Aron elected Bourdieu as secretary (probably not Aron’s first choice, who was Pierre Hassner [p.137]), a position he retained until 1964 (when Chamboredon and Schnapper took over jointly). Bourdieu led an “équipe”, a research group within the Centre, something he acquired less at this point for his scientific aptitude than for his ability, demonstrated in Algeria, to lead research projects (p.148). Nevertheless, a kind of “Bourdieusian” research spirit or style does filter into the various projects the group carried out. This is evident in a few hallmark features: the reconciliation of sociology and ethnology; the identification of objects as “concrete totalities”, made up of relations; and an emphasis on scientific work as bound up with civic engagement (p.154). These features are familiar to those who have encountered the canonical Métier (or Craft) book that Bourdieu published in 1968 with Chamboredon and Passeron.

Issenhuth’s chapters on the studies concerning photography (whose products are published most notably in Un art moyen) and education (Les hériters and La reproduction) show the “cultural” interests of the Centre in the greatest detail. This is the case whether it is a matter of observing the back-and-forth between a contracting company (Kodak) and a research group, or following the unfolding of a research project (on education) as it increases in sample size and theoretical aspiration, with drafts and correspondence beginning to show signs of Bourdieu’s later intellectual framework. Despite the strict adherence of the authors of this book to a non-anachronistic account of this period (i.e., one that does not point out precursors to field, habitus, or capital at every turn), antecedents are difficult to avoid. For instance, Issenhuth describes a 1964 seminar in which Bourdieu and Passeron sketch the intertwined strands of class ethos, aesthetic values, scholastic ethos, and relation to the system of scholarly values as a composite set of variables responsible for explaining scholarly descisions and outcomes that contradicts “the myth of innate taste and the cult of the gift” (p.310). This foreshadowing of habitus is redoubled by an express intention, described here, to reconcile objective regularities with lived experience, something to be resolved through the notion of “taste”, which permits the spontaneity of experience without sacrificing determinism (in the form of social determinants of taste). This argument would be echoed and explicated fifteen years later in Distinction.

Though the person of Bourdieu is expressly absent in this book, it manifests itself at times, as in the sociologist’s anxious interest to impress Lazarsfeld with a large sample size and a mastery of statistical techniques (p.334).*** Like another recent work, Schultheis’ account of Bourdieu in the 1990s, this attempt to turn our focus away from the person inescapably reveals his unexpected facets. The reader departs having been disabused not only of their image of “Bourdieu the theorist”, but even perhaps of their image of “Bourdieu the empirical worker”, favored by many partial to him. The laborious research contained in these chapters (which, taken together, likely double as an excellent roadmap to the Fonds Pierre Bourdieu archives) brings to the fore an image of Bourdieu as administrator, entrepreneur, negotiator, and contractor (p.406). From this point of view, his esteem for intellectual autonomy comes less from the philosopher afraid of dirty hands and pollution by lowly tasks, and more from the worker sensitive to the precariousness of this privilege.

* Attention to the footnotes in this book is especially rewarding. The list of some of Bourdieu’s notable correspondents includes Emile Benveniste, Fernand Braudel, Raymond Boudon, Louis Dumont, Lucien Goldmann, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Piaget, Alain Touraine, and Paul Veyne, among other (overwhelmingly male) figures.

** This laborious process of disaggregating the sample by repeatedly–and often fruitlessly–feeding punch cards through the sorting machine, described by Salah Bouhedja and Francine Muel-Dreyfus in interviews quoted, is salutary reading for all those who take for granted an act of coding like filter().

*** Bourdieu would triumphantly recount meeting Lazarsfeld in the late 1960s, where the latter “literally ‘summoned’ Alain Darbel and me to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs…to tell us his criticisms of the mathematical model of gallery visiting that we had published in L’Amour de l’art. 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…crude misprints…. 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” (Sketch for a self-analysis, pp.74-75).

Bourdieu and “objective probability”

An upcoming Theory and Society article, written by Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo, urges renewed and revised attention to probability in sociology. This is probability not as we are intellectually most familiar with it (i.e., explicitly calculated as resting somewhere between 0 and 1), but as we–i.e., as people generally–are practically familiar with it. They suggest that probability is often considered to reside solely in the relation between models and the world, leading to the neglect of its presence in the world that these models are build to understand.

Since, they assert, “probability is objective as part of the world”, all sociologists need to concern themselves with it. Not only should it concern so-called “quantitative” sociologists, but it should also concern “qualitative” sociologists, for whom “probability can be qualitatively understood as part of social action and experience”. The latter are charged with explaining how objective probabilities become realized and rendered into actuality.

Strand and Lizardo anticipate resistance to this redrawing of the ordinary separation of methodological labor, and so attempt to smuggle it in under the aegis of a couple of familiar folks: Bourdieu and, by the imprint made on Bourdieu, Weber. Since “sociologists have already been making (perhaps good, perhaps ritualistic) use of Bourdieu’s core concepts, then they are already probabilists in practice”. The bulk of the article concentrates, then, on a reconstruction of the idea of probability in Bourdieu’s oeuvre, focusing on what the authors contend is something of a rupture occurring in 1973, upon Bourdieu’s deployment of Weber’s ideas about probability as they present themselves in a 1913 methodological essay. In this post I am going to show that this is no such rupture, since the notion (of a looping interaction between “objective chances” and “subjective hopes”) they fix upon was already established some years before 1973, with no reference to Weber. Strand and Lizardo’s recommendation that we consider probability as objective, in the world, is a good one, but it stands even in the absence of the intellectual reconstruction they attempt.

Strand and Lizardo argue, basically, that Bourdieu’s useful idea about probability–that, as “objective probability”, it inheres in the world rather than only in representations of the world–is not the idea we usually have about probability, and that he came to it through an encounter with Max Weber. Not only have many missed this current running through Bourdieu’s work (beginning in the early 1970s, when he started writing on Weber), but us Anglophone readers have not even been able to identify its source in Weber, since we have only the methodological work as presented by Shils and Finch (which excluded the crucial essay, “Some categories of interpretive sociology”–originally published in Logos in 1913 as “Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie”). The French, on the other hand, had available to them a 1965 volume, Max Weber: essais sur la théorie de la science (edited by Raymond Aron’s doctoral student, Julien Freund), which contained the essay. By the time this was published in English in 1981, the die had long been cast and this “heterodox” form of probability remained latent.

For Weber, in this essay, social action is ordinarily oriented outward toward the expectations of others’ behavior and inward toward the subjective probability that, given expectations of others’ behavior, one’s own action has more or less chance of success. This chance functions “objectively” as a probability of success. So Weber suggests, as does Bourdieu, that probability is immanent to social action and not just a means of explaining it through statistical procedures. It becomes realized through social action, brought about by subjective anticipation. For Bourdieu, “it’s a fundamental anthropological law that social agents have expectations that are broadly adjusted to their objective chances” (Anthropologie économique: 102). This is made possible because social actors “internalize”, as Bourdieu says, these objective chances through their prolonged engagement with the world and learn what to expect and when, giving subjectivity its content and quality. In Strand and Lizardo’s telling, “probability becomes a qualitatively retrievable part of social action and experience, rather than located only in (or learnable through) an analyst’s calculation”.

They “trace Bourdieu’s adoption of probabilism, [in] a story that hinges as far as we can tell on Bourdieu’s reading of Weber’s 1913 Logos essay sometime in the early 1970s”. In the rest of this post, I want to suggest that Weber’s essay was not a particularly potent source for Bourdieu’s adoption of objective probability, especially since he came to the idea in the 1960s.

First, it should be mentioned that Bourdieu seems to have happened upon this 1913 essay years before the 1970s. While it’s certainly a good idea not to take Bourdieu’s later word for contemporaneous truth, as he later describes it (in 1999) Bourdieu had some difficulty with this “methodological” Weber, on which Strand and Lizardo place so much emphasis: “I learned German and translated entire sections [of The Protestant ethic]. I did not find the French translations, which were published later, particularly helpful; it seemed to me that the German text was much richer, more precise; the first available translations, especially the one of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, conveyed a rather distorted view of Weber’s work” (“With Weber Against Weber: In Conversation With Pierre Bourdieu” [Schutheis & Pfeuffer: 112]).

According to his later telling, Bourdieu appears to be familiar already in around 1961 with the collection in which Weber’s 1913 essay was published, since he “began to deal with Weber’s writings on science at the Sorbonne [as Aron’s assistant]”. This suggests he didn’t happen upon the article at some point between its translation in 1965 and his 1974 article explicitly citing it. But this is itself not any evidence that the concept of objective probability had a different source. So, if it did not come from Weber, where did it come from?

Though it is improbable that this concept arrived through Bourdieu reading Weber’s 1913 article, this is not to say that Weber exerted no influence. We can trace it through his Algerian writings, beginning with the notion ethos (related to probability as I will show below!), which is linked etymologically with Weber’s Ethik and shares with the latter an emphasis on moral duty. These are morally binding instructions for living–a demand for capital accumulation in Weber’s case–that are opposed to a neutral and technical mode of living that privileges means-end efficiency [Lebenstechnik]). As Bourdieu writes in L’Esquisse, in words likely written in the early 1960s and which he will not include in the 1977 English translation:

Just as ethos and taste (or if you prefer aisthesis) are ethics and aesthetics realized, likewise exis is myth realized, incorporated, rendered into a permanent disposition, a durable way of holding oneself, of speaking, of walking, and, hence, of feeling and thinking

L’Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972: 193)

This suggests an ethical force that is then incorporated and enacted. But how? The notion of ethos–an antecedent of habitus–runs through Bourdieu’s works in the first half of the 1960s. It is essentially a system of values–durable and internalized–that one more-or-less shares with one’s community. He employs it at this time to explain variations in fertility rates, financial behavior and school completion (independent variables are refracted through this moral mediator, permitting him to explain how uniform objective social conditions can result in different outcomes). In Bourdieu and Passeron’s educational sociology, it is most prominent, and this is where we get the idea of objective probability. Essentially, a group’s ethos is linked very closely to what it deems probable. Once again, we return to the idea of the future:

Can that fundamental dimension of class ethos, the attitude to the objective future, be in fact anything but the internalization of the objective future course of events which is gradually brought home to and imposed on every member of a given class by means of the experience of successes and failures?

“The school as a conservative force” (1974 [1966]: 34)

The attitude toward the objective future, then, is fundamental to the class ethos, and this attitude is brought about by the internalization of a course of events (which have not yet occurred, but which it will assist in bringing about…). It imposes itself with moral authority, moreover:

To say, in relation to classical studies in a lycée, for example, that “it’s not for us”, is to say more than “we don’t have the means”. An expression of internalized necessity, this formula is, you could say, in the imperative-indicative, since it simultaneously expresses an impossibility and a prohibition

“L’Ecole conservatrice” (1966: 331)

This “it’s not for us” is the qualitative, categorical form of an objective future, otherwise defined by the continuous probability of succeeding in a given outcome. The very ideas of success and failure–which Bourdieu asserts people and groups experience over time, giving them the feeling for the objective probability of a given outcome–Bourdieu most overtly expresses by drawing on the social psychology of Kurt Lewin. Lewin’s “Time perspective and morale”, as Bourdieu quotes it, declares that individuals will marginally raise their aspiration in proportion to their successes. Likewise, they will lower their aspiration in proportion to their failures. For Bourdieu, “It is quite clear that a circular process occurs”, wherein a group’s aspirations will set the standard for the individual: low group aspirations result in low individual aspirations, in turn resulting in low individual achievements, giving rise in their turn to low group aspirations. Ultimately, “everything conspires to bring back those who, as we say, ‘have no future’ to ‘reasonable’ hopes (or ‘realistic ones’, as Lewin calls them)” (1974 [1966]: 35). Regardless of the soundness of this argument, Bourdieu maintains that these aspiration levels are the result of actual successes and failures, such that there is a correspondence between objective chances or objective probability and their internalized form: aspiration, or “subjective” probability.

A 1968 article (“L’examen d’une illusion”, with the relevant section translated below) makes explicit reference to objective probability and identifies its link to its internalized form, subjective probability. The date of the article is the surest evidence against the claim that Bourdieu happened upon this notion in the early 1970s, under the influence of Weber. In this article, first, we find a proximate term like “objective future”, which is also used in works from the early 1960s.

The fact that “objective future” is found in this earlier period leads Strand and Lizardo to declare it a Husserlian hangover and thus not continuous with the Weberian “objective probability” notion. Yet it is unclear how how an objective future in the sense Bourdieu means it could be an intentional object (in fact, the terminology used in Travail et travailleurs en Algèrie suggests phenomenological “consciousness” in opposition to the “objective”: for example, “unemployment can exist ‘in itself’ without being apprehended by individual or collective consciousness as such” [1963: 304]). Rather, objective future first refers to the future made possible by economic and cultural developments, like the emergence of a capitalist “cosmos”, permitting a particular attitude to the future to arise. In his 1958 Sociologie de l’Algérie, Bourdieu compares the “traditionalist spirit” of rural Algerians to the capitalist one bound up with a complex modern economy, “where the path between the beginning and the end of a production process is extremely long and can only be followed thanks to precise calculations”, making an “abstract and symbolic future” realizable and desirable (1958: 104). In this Weberian contrast, we have the later distinction between the “à-venir” and the “futur”, which would recur throughout Bourdieu’s oeuvre.

Pivotally, this 1968 article treats this “objective future” as almost equivalent to the phrase “objective probability”–with no mention of Weber at all. Bourdieu and Passeron expound upon their idea of objective probability in a long tortuous footnote here, identifying it with the statistical regularities observed by social scientists. Here, the reference is to Henri Poincaré, who distinguished “subjective probability” from objective probability as one distinguishes estimation based on past knowledge from a declaration of the regularities given close and protracted observation of the course of events.

This footnote is mostly reproduced–with Poincaré’s own terminology and his example of a gambler entertaining probabilities–in L’Esquisse (p.177), part of which is translated in a 1973 article that Strand and Lizardo again assign a Weberian influence to. In this latter article, however, the explicit reference is to Cournot, who also used “objective probability” in a proximate enough way to Poincaré. (Cournot is deployed again to illustrate this idea in Bourdieu’s April 26 1984 lecture [2016: 307] and is assigned a similar role, as a flag-bearer of probablism, in Bourdieu’s 1967 “Postface” to his translation of Panofsky’s Gothic architecture and Scholasticism.)

Though the provenance of “objective probability” is unlikely to be found in the influence of Weber alone, in the latter’s work along with that of Poincaré and Cournot, we nevertheless find Strand and Lizardo’s same point that objective probabilities exist in the world.

The question we are left with is if the source of this specific concept of “objective probability” is in Poincaré or Cournot or Lewin rather than Weber–and there is more evidence to suggest at least one of these–then must we choose a different progenitor from among them? I don’t think so. Mostly because the concept has no one origin. Such concepts are almost as flexible in their definitions as they are present in various research projects. This means that Bourdieu draws upon different thinkers at different times to provide terminology through which to express some fledgling notion, which the terminology functions to refine and reconstitute. In this process, the concept becomes progressively layered and heterogeneous, resulting in a polysemous “definition”. Thus the concept resembles at once a Weberian notion, a Lewinian notion, and so on. We could say then that a notion like objective probability in Bourdieu is overdetermined, and it is pointless to search for punctual moments of independent influence. It might have achieved its thematic expression by borrowing a formulation of Poincaré, but this was only possible because of the elective affinity between this notion and Weber’s “spirit”, which Bourdieu had imbibed some time earlier.

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I wanted to reproduce a crucial part of this article (“L’examen d’une illusion” [1968: 240-242]), because it contains a thorough working out of the “loop” Strand and Lizardo refer to

…when it comes to explaining that the fraction of the scholarly population that is eliminated before entering secondary school or during this time is not distributed by chance among the different social classes, one is condemned to an explanation by characteristics that remain individual, even if one imputes them equally to all individuals of a category, as long as one does not perceive that they happen to the social class as such only in and by its relationship to the school. Even when it appears as if imposed by the force of the “vocation” or by the observation of unfitness, every single act of choice by which a child is excluded from access to the next grade or resigns himself to relegation into a course of devalorized study, takes into account the whole ensemble of objective relations (which pre-existed this choice and which will survive it) between his social class and the scholarly system, since a scholarly future is more or less probable for a given individual only insofar as it is the objective and collective future of his category. This is why the distribution between the different social classes of objective chances for social ascension and, more precisely, of chances for ascension through the school, conditions attitudes to the school and to ascension through the school, attitudes which contribute in their turn to defining the chances of acceding to the school, of adhering to its norms, and of succeeding there–therefore, the chances of social ascension.¹

Thus, the objective probability of acceding to such and such a level of education that is attached to a class constitutes more than a retranslation of the unequal representation of the different classes in a given level of education, a simple mathematical artefact which will permit only to grasp more clearly the real order of magnititude of inequalities. It’s a theoretical construction furnishing one of the most powerful principles of the explanation of these inequalities: the subjective hope of chances of success, which leads a subject to exclude himself, rests on an estimation of the objective probabilities of his category,² so that it counts among the mechanisms which contribute to the realization of objective probabilities. In other words, the objective effectiveness of objective class probabilities–which are exercised according to the logic of the self-fulfilling prophecy–manifests itself in the objective consequences of the subjective relation to objective probabilities. The notion of subjective hope as objective chance internalized according to a process of internalization regulated by the system of objective relations in which it takes place owes its explanatory force to the fact that, in its very definition, this notion seizes on a node of relations, those which unite the education system and the class system, both apprehended as ensembles of relations among relations and those which are established between the system of these objective relations and each social agent, individual or group, insofar as the latter always takes into account, even without knowing it, when it determines itself, the system of objective relations which determine it. This is because the explanation by the relation between subjective hope and (mathematically calculable) objective probability is in reality an explanation by a system of relations among relations that it can explain facts that are very different at first glance, which generally elicit so many ad hoc explanations, often inspired, in the same author, by contradictory principles as, for example, the scholarly attrition of the working classes (self-elimination being only the anticipated choice of an objective destiny) or the survival of a fraction of these social classes, with the particular modality of the survivors’ attitude in regard to the system, or still the different attitudes of the students from different classes regarding labor and scholarly results according to the degree of probability and improbability of their continuing a given cycle of studies.

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1. In the language employed here, subjective probability and objective probability are distinguished as the point of view of the subject and the point of view of the scholar [savant], who constructs the objective regularities through equipped observation. From the point of view of sociological explanation, this distinction is more pertinent than that which certain statisticians make between a posteriori (or ex post) probability, formulated on the past and beginning from the experience of the past, and a priori (or ex ante) probability, which is anyway better labelled a priori – a posteriori, since it involves the estimation of the probability of a future event founded on the knowledge of the past, but which can be verified, invalidated or corrected in its turn, and therefore becomes an ex post probability, that is to say, observed and observable. The traditional definition of notions of objective probability and subjective probability as well as the notions of a priori probabilities and a posteriori probability can be found in Poincaré, La science et l’hypothèse (1902, p.229 and pp.247-250). Like objective (or scientific) probability, subjective probability (or lived expectation/aspiration/hope [espérance vécue]) is at once turned towards the past (since it rests on a global appreciation of past events) and towards the future (since it constitutes an estimation of chances of events to come). We wanted to show here that objective regularities are internalized in the form of subjective expectations [espérances] and that the latter are expressed in objective behaviors which contribute to the realization of objective probabilities. Consequently, depending on whether one adopts the point of view of the explanation of behaviors beginning from probabilities or the point of view that forecasts the probable by beginning from behaviors, one is led to privilege in this dialectic the first relation or the second.↩︎
2. For an analysis of the logic of the process of internalization, which culminates in objective chances transmuted into subjective hopes or despair and, more generally of the mechanisms evoked above, see “L’Ecole conservatrice” (1966)

This author’s work

Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ?
Gisèle Sapiro
Seuil, 2020

It is noteworthy, sociologically at least, that we tie the author so closely to what she produces. In contrast to members of other occupations, like those in medicine or the law, the author’s words seem to originate in herself, compelled by no formal institution. It is obvious to us that the doctor acts in the name of a corporate body (“medicine”), giving advice whose value derives from its collective authority rather than its singularity. It is likewise obvious to us that the certified lawyer acts in the name of a formal institution (“the legal profession”). We might cast occasional suspicion toward defence lawyers, concerned that they personally side with an accused despite heinous accusations, but we don’t assume arguments presented in the courtroom are simply the expression of their personal convictions. In contrast to such workers, the author seems to manifest herself in her product, a fact confirmed by the proper name she attaches to claim the work. It follows from this, we feel, that she bears moral responsibility for this product.

Our association of author and work is so thorough that we wonder whether we can separate the two. In her recent book addressing that very question, Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ?, Gisèle Sapiro approaches the increasingly fraught space this question occupies, bringing sociological, philosophical, and historical knowledge to an area otherwise littered with polemic and partial truths (and where accusations of “cancel culture” are hurled and repelled). With this approach, Sapiro is interested in elucidating the conditions under which such a question can be asked, offering observers and participants alike some sense of what is at stake in the debates that take place here, where authors and their works suffer or bask in the light of public opinion. She declares it important “to try to clarify the stakes of an often confused debate, where the pamphleteering style, which privileges conflation and bad faith to disqualify an opponent, often takes over rational argumentation” (p.10).

Above all, the debates Sapiro focuses on derive from instances in which authors act in morally reprehensible ways or from works that are deemed in some way immoral. The consequent moral questions we deem necessary are that of what responsibility the author bears for the immoral work and whether that work should continue to be consumed in the light of immoral actions. Yet what these routine questions conceal in plain sight is our tendency to readily identify the author and the work. Sapiro notes that while we tend to identify the two, treating the work as the product of an “an individual expressing herself with her own proper name” (p.11), the relationship is actually highly contingent. Her book is an attempt both to understand the social and historical determinants of author-work identification and to observe how this contingent relationship plays out in significant literary controversies.

The first part of the book sketches a constellation of different ways that authors and their works are alternatively identified and dissociated. The second part of the book approaches the recent literary controversies mentioned above and examines them through the framework set out in the first part. As this is an intervention into a morally-charged area, a normative question hangs over it. This is the question of what to do with the works of those who are guilty of reprehensible acts. Sapiro provides numerous rich analyses of specific cases, but as we will see, she does not hesitate to present a uniform normative position for the justification of censorship.

Our debates that take authors and ask about their relation to “their” work usually take these two units for granted. The close relation between them is, however, a relatively recent creation, owing in large part to the acquisition of intellectual property rights by the author after the seventeenth century (p.47). The fact that the work belongs to the author, then, is maintained by an institutional structure identifying them with their product (entailing the accrual of economic and symbolic benefits as well as penalties upon transgression). Fixing all of this is the proper name, of undeniable importance in literature, where pen-names are hardly shocking to see. Writers can attempt to avoid sanction by adopting pen names (a strategy that only makes sense in a world that assumes the author and their work are closely identified). In the first part of the book, Sapiro identifies three axes along which author and work are linked. In these various ways, we see how authors come to be alternately identified and differentiated from their works.

Along the first axis, the relationship between the author and his work manifests itself in metonymy, where the author’s name is so closely associated with his works that they can be taken to stand in for him (p.29). This association gives coherence to the body of work. But the coherence isn’t final, since the body of work shows itself to be malleable, changing in response to the author’s decisions (not to publish or republish) or to publisher’s interests (“unpublished manuscript discovered”). These shifting wishes are often occasioned by conditions in the relevant “field”. So, as Sapiro (p.30) writes, Louis-Ferdinand Céline opted to restrict his body of work by refusing after WWII to republish his earlier antisemitic pamphlets. However, in light of transformations in the field long after his death, they would come to be collected and republished (at least in Canada––the initiative was abandoned in France [p.43]). In the end, the metonymic identification between author and work is a contingent relationship that has to be maintained with the assistance or complicity of publishers, reviewers, and readers.

The second relationship between author and work that Sapiro stipulates is that of resemblance, where it assumed that the author exists to some extent in their works, which are an “emanation of the person of the author” (p.50). Evident moral positions – whether voiced by a protagonist or deemed to be the underlying “thesis” of the work – are presumed to be shared by the author. This one is starkly modern, for works prior to the eighteenth century were not securely possessed by those we would now consider their makers. Rather, royals granted publishers copyright “privileges” to works that did not even belong to the publishers. With this shift in conceptions of property, there followed novel aesthetic criteria: originality, authenticity, specificity of style––all deemed to be manifestations of internal “talent”. Literary controversies demonstrate yet again how the line between author and work is a stake in a struggle rather than a given. Literary trials, for instance, force certain authors to dissociate themselves from their works and the characters therein (p.54). These controversies bring to light the complex relation between work and author in various other cultural forms: ranging from intimate journal (clear identification) to autofiction (swinging between identification and distanciation) in literature, to clearly fictional accounts in film and to accounts that are ambiguous, as in sexist song lyrics disavowed by those who write and perform them (p.84). In any case, Sapiro suggests that there are sociological conditions underlying the proximity between work and author here. For instance, the more autonomous the cultural form, the more likely it is that the author can dissimulate herself (p.68). In certain strands of twentieth-century poetry, for example, it is hard to trace back the “meaning” of a phrase to a feeling internal to the poet. Nevertheless, as Sapiro shows, continuing Bourdieu’s explanation of Heidegger’s conservative philosophy, this does not prevent “ethico-political dispositions” from leaking through in sublimated ways that obey the norms of the more autonomous field.

The third relationship treats works as the product of the author’s internal will and intention, with the author bearing responsibility for the words produced. Once again, in literary trials we see how this seemingly simple identification between author and work can be made unstable. Sapiro notes that while judges attend to the intentions of the author, it is not merely to attribute blame, but to inspect whether there was intention to harm. In the absence of this intention, they locate the harm in the work itself, the means “erroneously” chosen by the author to realize some other intention. Thus intention remains on the side of the author, while the consequence appears on the side of the work, permitting the author to escape punishment for transgressive writing.

Along these axes, then, instability always haunts the settled pairing: the author can be metamorphosed and adopt new names, the body of work can shift its boundaries in response to the demands of the field, and the relation between them is subject to all kinds of strategising. What appeared earlier as a given – the tight association between author and work – becomes extremely hard to pin down: “Although profoundly anchored in the…foundational belief of fields of cultural production since the Romantic movement, the identification between the work and the author is therefore never complete” (p.84).

The second half of the book treats specific cases of author-work relationships, with variable deployment of the theoretical structure applied above. Ultimately, what we see are various forms of public struggles over this contingent relationship between author and work. With Roman Polanski, for instance (somebody who does not direct films under a pseudonym), defenders are eager to separate his work from his personal acts, insisting on the contingency of the relation. His detractors, on the other hand, note that the same “Polanski” who directed J’accuse is the one who raped a teenage girl (p.101). With Sapiro’s identification of the dimensions and potential forms this relationship can take, we gain a clearer understanding of the grammar of these public struggles. Her framework does recede at times, however, and this is not necessarily for the worse. With the case of Gabriel Matzneff, for example, Sapiro probes deeper into the specific case, taking issue with the popular claim that it was due to a post-68 libertinism that Matzneff was treated with impunity regarding his pedophilic acts (which were integrated into his works). Instead, he escaped punishment due to the social networks in which he was enmeshed (p.118). Ultimately, what Polanski and Matzneff hold in common is the “impunity of dominant males abusing their position and authority – or the ‘charisma’ of the director or writer – to satisfy their pathological impulses, with the complicity of the field of power” (p.128).

The book proceeds to examine those who have expressed, through act or cultural work, disdainful attitudes towards ethnic minorities. These figures are notable for the political diversity among them and for their changing attitudes and actions. For instance, what is one to make of a figure like Günter Grass, who revealed late in life that he had been a Waffen-SS member over six decades earlier, but whose public political positions, stated while he was a published author, seemed to militate against this? With the assumption of a coherent identity on the part of the author, and a secure link to the work, we assume continuity between personal opinion, public pronouncements, and artistic work. But, as in the case of Grass, or with Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and others, there appears to be a dissonance that remains difficult for their defenders to reconcile (p.135). As for those for whom there is little dissonance – Martin Heidegger, Céline, Charles Maurras – but in whom defenders seek to create some, strategies abound. From defending Heidegger’s antisemitism as a “contamination” and a wayward “error”, to defending the inclusion of Maurras in a book of national commemorations as necessary merely for scholarly reasons, interested parties have sought to sever the author from the work. Or, in an alternative interpretation of Sapiro’s argument, those with a professional interest in Heidegger or Maurras need to preserve their persons – rather than the work alone – as worthy of study. Yet, as Sapiro notes, scholars with an interest in despicable characters risk lending their credibility and rehabilitating them. Sapiro concludes with a discussion of the likes of Renaud Camus and Richard Millet, who seem to arrive at xenophobic beliefs in later life. She sees this partly as a strategy on their part to forestall the loss of more symbolic capital. But more importantly, paying attention to how they express themselves, Sapiro detects in them a properly aesthetic disposition that they use to conceal or sublimate a brute racism, which predated any career decline. Thus, Millet, for instance, fetishizes a purified literary style, claiming to find in the horrors of Anders Breivik’s massacre a “formal perfection”. In evidence here is a deployment of aesthetic autonomy (“art for art’s sake”) to carry out heteronomous and specifically political speech acts.

Sapiro’s concluding normative position attempts to strike a balance, refusing to resolve the irresolvable: aesthetic works, she claims, are entitled to be judged according to aesthetic criteria. Since the “fields” of cultural production have developed specific norms and barriers to entry, it would be, in Bourdieu’s use of the term, “tyrannical” to impose external principles. However, this tyranny appears justified in special instances: when the works incite hatred towards people for certain “ascribed” features (ethnic or gender identity, sexual orientation [p.18]) or, in light of Matzneff and Polanski, when the works affirms pedophilia or defend rape (p.232).

Vanessa Springora, who recently brought unavoidable exposure to Matzneff’s actions, succeeded by taking her experience of his grooming and predatory relationship with her teenage self, and putting it into memoir form (recently translated as Consent). Interestingly, the personal nature of the topic notwithstanding, she appeals to aesthetic criteria: “I try to remind people that this is first and foremost a piece of literature.” Her attempt to assert such literary autonomy must nevertheless overcome ingrained attitudes about the close relation between the author’s experience and its articulation in work. Some reviewers evidently found the author-work pairing too reliable to refuse, declaring of the book that whatever its deficiencies as literature, “as testimony its status is unequivocal.”

Bourdieu and artisanal dataviz

While preparing for a class on cultural capital, I returned to Bourdieu’s depiction of the spaces of social positions and lifestyles. I approached it in the hope that it would illustrate his “homology hypothesis” (that differences in taste are significantly related to — “overlap” with — differences in social position). Only, most of the texts in which the diagram appears do a poor job of presenting this notion, owing in part to the two-dimensional limits of conventional data visualization. As I describe below, the diagram, despite its appearance, doesn’t abide by the demands of correspondence analysis and thus exists almost exclusively to illustrate a “hunch” about the relationship between social position and lifestyle. Its efficacy as an illustration is primary then. By reproducing the diagrams and making use of a slider tool, I was able to get closer to the intuition underlying this diagram, something that has been progressively lost since it first appeared in 1976.

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Find a high-resolution version here

This diagram and others like it collect reputations that vacillate between the inexact and the overly severe. With respect to the former, the recently-departed Stanley Lieberson once referred to such figures in Distinction as “incomprehensible”. At the other pole, Andrew Abbott, seeming to comprehend them with unclouded lucidity, suggested that in Bourdieu’s diagrams, you can see the same kind of (peculiarly French?) commitment to social order evident in ancien régime jurist Charles Loyseau, who detailed the ranks and orders of pre-revolutionary France.

Such conflicting reputations circulate for good reason: the geometrical rigidity of these diagrams coexists with an artisanal thrust — evident in the archetypal figure reproduced above and perhaps implicit in the statistical technique that inspired it. This technique, correspondence analysis, which Bourdieu and his collaborators gradually came to favor, is positioned between the exploratory dimension of much interpretive social science and the confirmatory dimension of methods like multiple regression. It makes extensive use of graphics — as means to explore data and to test hypotheses — and therefore implies a spatial feature not inherent in the quantitative approach. As Brigitte Le Roux describes it, “between the qualitative and the quantitative, there is geometry, the objects of which (points, lines, planes, geometrical figures) can be described by numbers but cannot be reduced to them”. Furthermore, the visual emphasis of this approach means that the same vehicle (the diagram or plane) is used at once to interpret results and to convey them to readers.

In contrast to the use of tables to display information, requiring readers to calculate and compare the data before them and then perhaps visualize a graphic display in their minds, the clouds of points deployed in the geometric method permit a rapid summary of information. This is particularly pertinent in Bourdieu’s view since distance on the page enables a clear recognition of distance in social space, his main concern. In fact, this concern is overwhelming in the diagram that we’re considering. As we’ll see shortly, it was produced in a manual, artisanal fashion — integrating different data sources — in an attempt to present to and persuade readers of the very notion of social distance and proximity.

The article in which the diagram first appeared clearly attempts to use visual resources to express a theoretical point about a purported homology. This article, co-authored by Bourdieu and Monique de Saint-Martin, entitled “Anatomie du goût” [Anatomy of taste], included a transparent page (showing a handwritten space of lifestyles) that the reader could superimpose on the space of social positions to examine the homology between the two spaces.

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A tracing paper copy of the space of lifestyles placed above the space of social positions enabled the reader of “Anatomie du goût” to grasp the logic of homology hypothesis.

Crucially, in later versions, the ability to lay tastes on top of positions was sacrificed as this map made its way out of Bourdieu’s own journal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, and became encrusted in Distinction. From this point on, tastes and cultural practices would be placed in close proximity to positions, rather than on top. Readers of the French publication of Distinction at least got a distinct colour for the lifestyle map (which took the orange of the Editions de Minuit “Sens Commun” palette). The English translation — printed in black, gray, and white — flattened everything into clusters of difficult-to-discern properties, and included numerous obvious errors (like treating frozen food as an indicator of social position on the same plane as income rather than an element of a lifestyle or translating “campagne” as “champagne”, making the latter the drink of choice for both wealthy industrialists and aspirational high-school teachers).

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How the diagram appears in La distinction (Minuit, 1979)

Still, even in its clearest form, the figure is really only useful as an illustration of the underlying intuition about the homology between the two spaces. As an example of correspondence analysis, it does little to aid the reader. There are neither axes nor eigenvalues indicating the contribution of each factor to the overall “inertia” or variation. As Bourdieu himself notes in Distinction, analyses of correspondence were only drawn on in the construction of the figure. In a recent recollection, Monique de Saint-Martin reflected on the ad hoc composition of this diagram, which was completed manually and only in its last stages drew inspiration from correspondence analysis:

At the time that “Anatomie du goût” was being prepared, we designed, sketched, and re-sketched numerous graphs, figures, diagrams, histograms. They would have to be located and studied if we are to understand how the spaces of social positions and lifestyles were progressively and tentatively constructed

This ad hoc formation and its artful final form should encourage us to think of the diagram alongside other pre-mechanical attempts, like those of W.E.B. DuBois for The Philadelphia Negro and “The Georgia Negro” (even if the latter surpass it in terms of precision and aesthetic appeal). Yet to this similarity we should add the caveat that Bourdieu and Saint-Martin were seeking out novel ways to illustrate a space they presumed was comprised of multiple dimensions.

Correspondence analysis affords particular sensitivity to the multidimensional, but the diagram’s creators hoped to press even further, incorporating a temporal dimension. This attempt, manifest in the addition of arrows indicating the trajectories of various occupational groups, was nevertheless judged insufficient in this regard. These arrows, stuck on the flat page, give only the most primitive indication of change over time. As Saint-Martin writes, other theoretical possibilities existed:

To grasp better the dynamics of the different groups we would have hoped to provide a volumetric representation of these spaces in three dimensions, a little like mobiles floating in the air

This intuition of how the social world operates again makes recourse to the arts. Bourdieu himself would describe his vision of society by analogy to Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures. The social world, for him, is a space in which “there are kinds of small universes that drift in relation to each other through a space of several dimensions”. If the limitations of visual representation hamper the depiction of certain social phenomena, they nevertheless give a concrete image to envision these processes not yet realized in publication.

Though given the debt that the Actes de la recherche journal owed to its comic book or “bande dessinée” aesthetic, it is not improbable that it could have somehow integrated something like a flip-book. Jean-Louis Fabiani considers the aesthetic of Actes de la recherche and Distinction in particular as parts of an attempt to trouble linearity and unidimensionality, especially with their prodigious use of visual aids and heterodox statistical techniques. So, for Fabiani, rather than being driven by technical concerns for the best way of making sense of data collected, correspondence analysis and its visual expressions represent part of a broader approach to thinking the social world anew:

Unilinearity mutilates part of the object and shrinks social space down to one of its dimensions. To restore the whole picture, it is appropriate to use all the resources of the printed page. Thus, the partial recourse to multiple correspondence analysis is one instrument among others of a strategy of exposition, rather than the expression of a methodological choice

Without going as far as Fabiani does here — to diminish the theoretical significance of correspondence analysis to the Bourdieusian approach — we can see that the formal properties afforded by the geometric method grant weight to a particular way of thinking about the social world. So Boltanski would write that the journal’s particular aesthetic offered “in the visual another way [for abstract concepts] to manifest themselves and take on flesh”. This implies it is not as easy as Fabiani imagines it to distinguish the “technical” from the aesthetic in this instance. Therefore, to describe Bourdieu’s scientific enterprise as taking place in something like an “atelier” is not as figurative as it first sounds.

Foucault: words and images

“Les mots et les images” [“Words and images”]
by Michel Foucault
in Le Nouvel Observateur, n.154, 25 October 1967, pp.49-50.

This brief piece, nowhere available in English, that Michel Foucault wrote in 1967 for Le Nouvel Observateur, is worth reading for a few reasons: first, for Foucault’s refreshingly enthusiastic approach to review; second, for its display of an early convergence between Foucault and Bourdieu (who translated Panofsky’s Gothic architecture and scholasticism and appended a postface to it in which he famously justified his “habitus” concept); third, and finally, for his nice recapitulation of the difficulties of treating the image as a text.

May I be pardoned for my lack of competence. I am not an art historian. Until last month, I had read nothing of Panofsky. Two translations have appeared simultaneously: the famous Essays on iconology, which appeared thirty years ago (five studies on the Renaissance, preceded and integrated by an important methodological reflection; Bernard Teyssèdre presents the French edition) and two studies on the Gothic Middle Ages, brought together with a commentary by Pierre Bourdieu.

After such long delays, this simultaneity is striking. I am poorly placed to proclaim what benefits specialists could draw from this publication that has been desired for so long. Being a neophyte Panofskian, however enthusiastic, I will explicate the master’s destiny by the master’s words, and I will proclaim that the benefit will be great: these translations will transform the distant and strange iconology into a habitus for us; for apprentice historians, these concepts and methods will cease to be what one is forced to learn and will become the basis from which to see, to read, to decipher, to know.

But I will not get ahead of myself. I would like to speak alone of what was for me a new discovery in this texts which, for others, are already classics: the trip they invite us to take which, I hope, disorients us [nous dépayser].

A first example: the analysis of relations between discourse and the visible.

We are convinced, we know, that everything in a culture speaks: linguistic structures give form to the order of things. This is another version (a very fertile version, as we know) of the postulate of the sovereignty of discourse that classical iconography already assumed. For Émile Mâle, plastic forms were texts invested in stone, in lines or colors; to analyze the capital of a column or the illumination of a manuscript was to bring to light what “it wanted to say”: to restore speech there where, to put it bluntly, it had been stripped of words. Panofsky takes away the privilege of discourse. Not to claim some kind of autonomy for the realm of the plastic, but to describe the complexity of their relations: intertwining, isomorphism, transformation, translation—briefly, the whole festoon of the visible and sayable that characterizes a culture in a moment of its history.

Here, elements of discourse pervade the text as themes, recopied manuscripts, works translated, imitated, commented upon; but they take bodily form in plastic motifs which are submitted to changes (from the same Ovid text, the abduction of Europa is bathing in a Quattrocento miniature, violent kidnapping in Dürer); here, the plastic form rests, but receives a succession of diverse themes (the female nude that is a vice in the Middle Ages becomes a despoiled and therefore pure, true, and sacred Love in the sixteenth century). Discourse and form arrange themselves in relation to each other. But they are not independent: what the Nativity is no longer represented by a women giving birth, but by a kneeling Virgin, it is the accent is put on the theme of the Mother the living God, but it is also the substitution of a triangular and vertical schema for a rectangular organization. There finally arrives the moment in which discourse and form are both submitted, as if by a unique movement, to a single arrangement. Scholastic discourse, in the twelfth century, broke with the long continuous flow of proofs and discussions: the “summae” give up their architectural logic, by spatializing writing as much as thought: divisions into paragraphs, visible subordination of parts, homogeneity of elements on the same level; visibility, therefore, of the entirety of the argument. At the same time, in architecture, the vault ceiling makes the ribs of the edifice perceptible; this substitutes for a hitherto great continuity; it gives the same structure to all elements that have an identical function. Here and there, a single and same principle of manifestation.

Discourse is not, therefore, the interpretative background common to all cultural phenomena. To make a form appear is not a distorted way (more subtle or more naive, whatever one lines) of saying something. Not everything contained in human activity is, ultimately, a decipherable whirring. Discourse and depictions each have their own mode of being; but they maintain complex and intricate relations. The task is to describe their reciprocal functioning.

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Another example: the analysis, in the Essays on iconology, of the representative function of painting.

Until the turn of the twentieth century, Western painting “represented”: by its formal arrangement, a painting always related to a certain object. A problem that is tirelessly taken up is to know which, whether form or meaning, determines what is essential about a work. Panofsky himself substitutes for this simple opposition the analysis of a complex representative function that traverses, with different values, the whole formal density of the picture.

What a picture of the sixteenth century represents manifests in Panofsky in four modes. The lines and colors produce objects – people, animals, things, gods – but always according to the formal rules of a style. In the pictures of one time there are ritual sites that permit one to know if one is dealing with a man or angel, a specter or a reality. They also indicate expressive values – the anger of a face, the sadness of a forest – but according to the formal rules of a convention (the passions in Le Brun do not have the same features as in Dürer). In their turn, these characters, scenes, faces, and gestures incarnate themes, episodes, concepts (the fall of Vulcan, the origin of the Earth, the fickle nature of Love), but according to the rules of a typology (in the sixteenth century, Judith rather than Salome carried the sword). Finally, these themes give a place (in the strict sense of the term) to a sensibility, to a system of values, but according to rules of a sort of cultural symptomology.

Representation is neither external nor indifferent to form. It is linked to it by a functioning that we can describe, on the condition that we discern its levels and that we specify for each of them the mode of analysis that must be specific to it. Then, the work appears in its articulated unity.

The reflection on forms, whose importance we know today, is, after all, the art history that the nineteenth century begat. For a good forty years, it emigrated toward the regions of language and linguistic structures. Then multiple problems – very difficult to solve – present themselves as try to cross the limits of language, as soon as try to handle real discourses. It could be that Panofsky’s work is valuable as an indication, perhaps as a model: it teaches us to analyze not only the elements and the laws of their combination, but the reciprocal functioning of systems in the reality of a culture.

For the sake of appearance

Social appearances: a philosophy of display and prestige

Barbara Carnevali

Columbia University Press

2020

I had not perceived how much I had changed but how did the people who laughed at me know? I had not a grey hair, my moustache was black. I should have liked to ask them how this awful fact revealed itself.

Marcel Proust, Time regained

We form appearances whether or not we like to – and quite often we don’t like to, as Proust’s aged protagonist discovers. Condemned to engage with the world through our senses, social interaction cannot take place without our appearing to one another. Proust, who declared that our “social personality” is created by others, assumed this in the early twentieth century. Making recourse to neglected philosophical anthropology of Proust’s time, Barbara Carnevali asserts in her Social appearances that such appearing through images is an inescapable human phenomenon. Not only can “no society…rid itself of images” (p.95), but they are increasingly characteristic of social interaction in our time, dominated as it is by various forms of media.

By appearances and images we should not understand phenomena subordinate to reality, “inessential and ephemeral” (p.xiv). Rather, since appearances are reality insofar as we can access it, they ought to be accorded the same ontological status. This entails the rejection of a cultural tendency to degrade images, surfaces, and appearances. In the book, Carnevali aims to provide the intellectual co-ordinates for an accurate interpretation and evaluation of “appearing in human life” (p.xii), something that such degradation of appearance precludes, committed as it is to derision. This latter approach adopts a “pathological” attitude, casting appearances as deviant phenomena demanding clinical attention in the form of moral castigation. Carnevali on the other hand takes a “physiological” approach, outlining and then detailing the role that appearances actually play, without assuming we know the role they should play.

This book aims to preserve the specific, autonomous, and irreducible character of appearance, treating it as an object worthy of respect in its right, not as the debased or reflected form of a more profound or meaningful reality. So the philosophical characters cast in the text are divided according to the respect they grant appearance itself. For the “pathological” approach, “meaning lies beyond the appearance: either as an essence concealed by the mask…or as the revelation of an interiority that precedes and is superior to the appearance” (p.71). This “pathological” approach fits within a hybrid Platonic-Christian tradition, traveling through Pascal and Rousseau to Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu by way of Saint Augustine and Emile Durkheim. The opposing approach, which makes use of “perspicuous description”, finds its origin in Aristotle, reaching Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein, Simmel, Merleau-Ponty, Helmuth Plessner, and Hannah Arendt. For them, “there is no such thing as dualism: the face of things consumes their meaning in its entirety”. In the Italian version of the book (this is not just a translation but a reworking), Carnevali describes these thinkers as providing a “‘positive’ philosophy of vanity”.

The book does best in dissecting the “pathological” view, which for Carnevali is rooted in a moral conviction that appearance is tantamount to insincerity, that mediation – whether through rhetoric, advertising, public relations or makeup, clothes, and conversation – implies deception and mystification (p.29). While this conviction has its origin in Plato’s denunciation of rhetoric, the metaphysical assumptions on which it rests – that of “two worlds”: a transcendent, ideal sphere inaccessible to the senses and a temporal, fallen, “Vanity Fair” – have travelled through Western philosophy and everyday thought. Christian theology regenerated it and, through Augustine, intensified it, such that his seventeenth-century French moralist heirs could develop, out of the sheer horror of appearances, “a refined aesthetic sensibility” (p.70), attending closely to appearances and masks in order to better puncture them.

The romantic tradition, despite its secular premises, finds itself complicit here, replicating the narrative structure of the Christian tradition’s Fall story. But in place of the corruption of spirit we find the corruption of unmediated authenticity. If the victim is the authentic individual, the culprit is society, and particularly its tendency to give rise to a spectacle. As Rousseau tells it, early humans fell from their state of nature as they came to concern themselves with “public esteem”, hoping to secure others’ recognition through spectacle, by singing, dancing, or being the most attractive—in any case turning themselves into images for the pleasure of others. What Rousseau condemns above all in this is “the center of gravity of subjectivity shifted inevitably from inside to outside” (p.73). Not only was one dependent on others for one’s own esteem, but one’s experience of oneself was mediated by others. It is the intervention of society, insinuating itself within, that gives rise to this unhappy consciousness.

[The romantic’s] contempt focuses on a single target: society as a system of mediations, which are not only economic and political (the market, money, political representation) but also aesthetic. The romantic condemns all forms of exchange in which images intervene, as medial surfaces, in the contact between subjects of society (p.79)

For Carnevali, there are important correspondences between these eighteenth-century arguments and contemporary ones. Her main focus in this regard is Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle”. He remains trapped within the “two worlds” metaphysics, with images mediating or distorting presumably otherwise unmediated relations between people. For Debord, this occurs in a manner analogous to the commodity form. In fact, the commodity – understood as exchange value – is the first form the image takes, as the social worth of a use-value, “a surreptitious inversion between the authentic value of things and their apparent value” (p.87). For Carnevali, his particular mix of romanticism and Marxism, his drive to demystify and reduce, leads him to the same dead-end as his antecedents: “The pathos of demystification ends up dissolving the same aesthetic-social sphere that the eye of Debord, as observer, had observed so acutely” (p.83).

He refuses to see the spectacle as a spectacle, but only as a pretence or more-or-less reliable mediator of some otherwise inaccessible personal, individual truth. This is a common theme in Carnevali’s criticism, forming the basis that her positive intervention will set right. Similarly, Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu are prevented from tracing its specific logic by their apparent separation of the aesthetic, seen as gratuitous, from the social (in its economic and moral dimensions), seen as purposeful and necessary (p.99). While Durkheim is rebuked for his depiction of the aesthetic as a kind of individual libertine aestheticism, Bourdieu’s flaw, not unlike Debord’s, is his ostensible reduction of the aesthetic to social, “the subordination of aesthetic values to economic ones” (p.101), with aesthetic choices undertaken in an effort to accumulate social power. In both cases, what is missing, Carnevali argues, is an appreciation of the specificity of social aesthetics. What is of interest is not what the mask is potentially concealing, but the properties and character of the mask itself.

Even French moralists, like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, hostile to the mundane world of appearance, have much to offer, owing to their close attention to this world, which they approached in an aesthetic manner, not unlike an art critic. Carnevali continues this work, which engages in the “delicate task of translating from the sensible to the conceptual: thought tries to transpose what is communicated in the mode of appearance into the mode of discursive mediation” (p.32). This transposition is the beginning of her “positive” approach to appearance, seeking not to condemn appearance or to reduce it to something else, but to identify its specific logic. So for Carnevali the most aesthetically pleasing image is not necessarily the most expensive or the one commanding the most social power. It has its own hierarchy – of “prestige” – irreducible to these.

Unjustly separated, the worldly sciences of economics and aesthetics share a concern with material valuation and distribution. For Carnevali’s “social aesthetics”, this manifests itself in the distribution of prestige, something not perfectly correlated with distribution of financial wealth. Prestige is status “represented through the senses—it is status in image, social value in sensible form” (p.178). The status or social value sensed here operates according to its own logic, making the appearance that is sensed something other than a mere signifier of underlying wealth. Rejecting semiotic approaches, Carnevali asserts that adornments and other objects that comprise an appearance have certain “sensible qualities and forms” inherent to them that attract public attention and form the basis of their value (p.179). Rather than social position imbuing an object with value, Carnevali asserts, the appropriation of pleasing objects enables the creation of social value. Likewise, the aesthetic style characteristic of a group is not a superfluous and interchangeable addition to a pre-existing group, but is a symbol that actually “creates the unity of the group, enabling it to be represented in the public space and therefore to exist in a social form” (p.185). Carnevali argues that in such instances, contrary to sociological assumptions, a universal aesthetic sensibility undergirds social life.

Carnevali’s positive argument is underwritten by a paradoxical claim: social life is inescapably aesthetic, but concern for appearance does not derive from social life—it does not spring up in surprise from the other’s alienating gaze (as the romantic and sociological traditions have it). Rather, drawing from philosophical anthropology, Carnevali suggests that it is an innate feature of human life. The split between an I and a Me, the self perceiving itself and the self being perceived, “is located already inside the self, in its depths” (p.15). Carnevali derives this position from Helmuth Plessner, whose main work was translated into English in 2019, almost 90 years after its original German publication. For Plessner, our self-concern derives from our realization that not only are we a body, but that we have a body. We are thus thrust outside ourselves as spectators, something he calls “eccentric positionality”.

By making self-presentation an innate property, Carnevali shares with the romantics an antipathy towards social institutions and the variations they introduce. While there is some discussion of the disproportionate burden that women bear as guardians and carers of appearance (p.12; p.65), Carnevali is mostly concerned with the invariants and universals. This is especially clear when discussing the social correlates of appearance. Against Bourdieu, who observed a positive correlation between class status and concern for appearance, Carnevali maintains that “everyone, no matter what his or her position in the social field, possesses an interest and an expertise in the field of appearing” (pp.126-7). On the surface this is banal. But guided by Carnevali, we can assume it to be true and use it as a basis to think about variation: do men and women equally care about their appearance? Do they possess an equal expertise? But also how would different empirical findings affect the philosophical propositions of the book? These are the questions of the sociologist, but they are addressed in the book as if it were a problem amenable to simple a priori adjudication.

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Our lived appearances are fluid and inconstant, changing with the light that hits us or with the eyes (ears, nose, etc.) of the person perceiving us. We can give them some measure of stability, enabling their study and circulation beyond immediate physical co-presence, by considering snapshots of appearance, what Carnevali calls “social images” (p.34). These are not just photographs, but include among other images like social media profiles, sound recordings, and gossip. While we can cultivate these images, posing or editing photographs, we are – inasmuch as we are social beings – constantly vulnerable to their production and proliferation. These images are inescapably public and fears of intrusion into our private lives are better understood as fears of the circulation of our “image”, a static snapshot that appears to represent us, but from which we feel estranged: “the social image does not belong to whoever is represented in it and by it…which is why it appears alien or even threatening” (p.42). Yet despite its potentially alienating character, this image is the only way we can exist publicly: “in society, to exist is to be perceived and to perceive” (p.218). Proust’s narrator, quoted at the outset, was after all making an impression at a society party when this image of himself was thrust upon him.

Social being increases with the proliferation of images, something Carnevali sees as a development of the last decades of the twentieth century. Her guide in this is Andy Warhol, who articulates both the alienating and liberating tendencies of the image. He manages first to reconcile economics and aesthetics, by conflating art and advertising, not necessarily making advertising into an art, but art into publicity. Now, “the socialite, the adman, and the artist are melded into a single persona” (p.216). Since appearance is existence, he also manages to merge aesthetics “with ontology because the social reality grows proportionally with the number of images that represent it and that circulate in the public space” (p.218). Using mechanical means to reproduce images (“I want to be a machine”, he once said), Warhol sought this ontological increase for the objects of his depiction. His numerous silkscreen prints, far from diminishing the aura of the artwork, were able to “transfigure the most banal object into something magical and seductive” (p.224). As a practitioner of the “social arts”, a technician of “social-aesthetic labor”, Warhol held in his “hands the magic wand of prestige” (p.206), producing status and social being in the act of drawing attention to his objects. For Arthur Danto, this assists us in understanding

…his tendency to reproduce indefinitely the same image of the same personality—Marilyn, Liz, Jackie, Elvis—as if only the reiterated repetition of their image could increase the substance of people who are in actuality no more than the brand image of themselves. To be is to be famous, and to be famous means eliminating everything foreign to the familiar perception of one’s image and that consequently does not reach popular awareness, because it is foreign to one’s essence.

Arthur Danto, in Carnevali (pp.217-218)

In the present, where the means of image production are widely possessed, and the potential is there for each to be one’s own Warhol, we do well to follow Carnevali in taking the powers of appearance seriously and resisting the temptation to moralize.

The master’s voice

Last week, French radio channel France Culture republished on its website a short 1913 recording of Emile Durkheim, currently housed in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The site added a nice video reproducing the recording, complete with crucial subtitles.

The site also provided some interesting information about how this recording came about. In 1911, linguist Ferdinand Brunot had undertaken to create an audio archive (Archives de la parole) with the help of one of the Pathé brothers (behind the production company bearing this name). Emile Pathé provided the relatively new technology necessary to “make human speech eternal”, as Brunot is reputed to have said. With a recording studio at the Sorbonne, he made about 600 recordings of such speech. While it was driven by a popular impetus to create a kind of French “sound encyclopedia of languages”, his university colleagues were also enrolled as contributors. Among those who comprised this “living library” was Emile Durkheim, then a professor at the Sorbonne.

Durkheim’s 1913 audio is likely him reading from a manuscript which was published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1911. This manuscript, “Value judgments and judgments of reality”, is a version of a talk he gave some months earlier in Bologna at the International Congress of Philosophy.

In this video made a few months ago, I attempted to isolate Durkheim’s voice a little more amidst the surrounding noise. I also added some English subtitles, adapting the translation made by David Francis Pocock in Sociology and philosophy (1974). Unfortunately Durkheim’s rapid delivery and peculiar rhythm thwart any attempt at providing smooth and readable subtitles.

*But were afraid to ask

Dictionnaire international Bourdieu

Ed. Gisèle Sapiro

CNRS Editions

2020

At almost 1,000 pages, filled with around 600 individual entries, and written by exactly 126 authors, this dictionary seems to achieve the exhaustiveness its editor declares impossible. Under Gisèle Sapiro’s direction, it places entries on something as trivial as “posture” or as peripheral as sculptor Alexander Calder alongside central concepts or books of Bourdieu’s own. Whether focusing on the apparently trivial or the significant, the authors brought together accomplish the dictionary’s pedagogical aim of clearly and summarily relaying the elemental notions of Bourdieu’s thought. It splits these notions into several categories: concepts, works, methods, intellectual movements, disciplines, institutions and journals, relevant persons, countries and regions, and historical events and periods. Its authors are numerous and diverse in geographical and disciplinary terms, though over a third of the 600 entries are written by just a few: Gisèle Sapiro, Julien Duval, Franck Poupeau, and Johan Heilbron.

To its pedagogical intention, the dictionary adds a “reflexive” one, implying a study of the conditions in which the thought was produced. Thus is secured a tense undertaking: its cover emblazoned with Bourdieu’s face and its title culminating in his proper name, it nevertheless places itself within a “sociohistorical approach” interested less in the person and more in the “sociogenesis” of Bourdieu’s concepts and works. By placing them within their social and historical conditions of production, the dictionary hopes to avoid what Yves Gingras in one of his entries refers to as the “dangers of narcissistic reflexivity” (p.720).

So readers will be disappointed if they expect to find out about Bourdieu’s youthful taste for Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant comedies of remarriage, his mature taste for Vargas Llosa, or the story about the time Talcott Parsons, distracted by an idea, terrified Bourdieu by driving him erratically through New Jersey.

Against the tendency, driven by market imperatives, to make a fetish of the individual sociologist, this dictionary hopes to leave you with the impression of Bourdieu as a central node within a network of sociological production rather than as a museum exhibit, the singular inventor of concepts to be preserved and protected. The reader comes away with this impression through the relational thrust of the dictionary: it enumerates not only links to other sociologists and institutions throughout the world, but also the intellectual currents and figures from which Bourdieu sought to distinguish himself (e.g., Gary Becker, network analysis, Althusser, etc.).

The entries on institutions and journals specifically convey this relational attitude. Furthermore, the dictionary is at its most elucidating here, especially as it gives background on the material bases of the ideas that float through many of the other entries (comprising the personnel associated with institutions as much as their funding sources). Marcel Fournier and Hélène Seiler, for instance, give us an indication of what Bourdieu owed to the Maison des sciences de l’homme, which gave material and immaterial support to Bourdieu’s Centre de sociologie européenne. They draw on recent interviews to fill us in on how Bourdieu’s group (and Salah Bouhedja in particular) was able to access the computational power necessary to undertake analysis of the data that started stacking up in the 1970s. (Housed within the Maison des sciences de l’homme, they had access to the computer from the Laboratoire informatique pour les sciences de l’homme.) Other entries in this mode include those on the Collège de France, the EHESS, ENSAE, and the “Sens commun” series that Bourdieu directed with the Editions de Minuit publishing house. Pascale Casanova similarly offers an organizational account of Bourdieu’s Liber journal, especially enriched by her having played a part in the enterprise. (Recent work in this vein can be found in Franz Schultheis’ 2019 Unternehmen Bourdieu and Heilbron’s 2015 French Sociology.)

Though all entries adeptly convey the necessary information, something extra is present when the author is familiar not only with the topic in question but with the imponderable details that come from proximity to the Bourdieu group’s research practice. That is, when the author provides us with something more than an encapsulation of what the texts contain. Sapiro, for example, aside from being the dictionary’s editor, also produces numerous entries (on literature, publishing, philosophy), with particularly enlightening descriptions of the aforementioned “Sens commun” series, Flaubert, and Bourdieu’s relation to Sartre. Beyond information latent in Bourdieu’s own works, her entry on Sartre, for example, relays what she gleaned from quasi-formal discussions with Bourdieu, providing us with insight into the importance of emotion in Bourdieu’s distance from Sartre. It is also interesting when an author with practical knowledge of Bourdieu sketches a concept not central to their own expertise (e.g., Heilbron on “espérances”).

Many familiar names draw on their expertise and their understanding of Bourdieu to make visible the connections in this network of ideas: Marie France Garcia Parpet and Frédéric Lebaron provide insight into Bourdieu’s relation to the domains of work and economics, while somebody like Francine Muel-Dreyfus, with a psychoanalytic penchant, writes the entries for dénégation or denial and for psychoanalysis generally. Similarly, other figures supplement their textual knowledge with personal acquaintance: Christophe Charle on history, Yves Gingras on science, and Tassadit Yacine on Algeria.

Such personal relations contribute much to the production of this dictionary, which as part of its pedagogical aim hopes to operate as a tool (p.viii), making available to those with only impersonal relations, mediated by texts, a trace of the ethos that generated these texts. Personal relations also comprise much of the stuff of the dictionary. Marc Joly shows this when he writes about Bourdieu and Elias, drawing from his own archival research (see Devenir Elias). After Bourdieu attended celebrations of Elias’s 90th birthday in the Netherlands, Elias wrote him back: “[These ceremonies] would not have been the same without your presence, which is all the more touching as I know how busy you are” (p.288). Reciprocally, Elias’s presence in Bourdieu’s dictionary provides the rest of us with a crucial landmark in understanding the latter’s thought.