Passport to duke (Pierre Bourdieu)

© The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997. Published by
Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 28, No. 4, October 1997
0026–1068

PASSPORT TO DUKE
PIERRE BOURDIEU

Editor’s Introduction: The following text was prepared by Pierre Bourdieu for
delivery at a conference on his work held at Duke University, April 21–23, 1995.
Entitled “Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture,” the conference was sponsored
by the Duke Graduate Program in Literature and included such well-known literary scholars as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jonathan Culler, and Fredric Jameson.
Bourdieu, of course, was the invited guest of honor, but was uncertain as to
whether he should make the effort of attending, particularly since he was recovering from a short period of poor health. As I too had been invited (and seemed
more familiar with the American scene), Bourdieu discussed the question with me
in Paris.
He was rather concerned about wrongheaded, trendy applications of his theories by American literary scholars, who often misunderstand his work because
they simply do not know the intellectual landscape to which it relates. Reading
such conference paper titles as “Cross-Dressing for Success: The Scramble for
Symbolic Power in Tabitha Sweeney’s Female Quixotism,” Bourdieu confessed
his fear of being taken as simply the French intellectual flavor of the month, one
whose theory is used simply as grist for the American academy’s industrious mills
of literary interpretation.
He ultimately decided to send the following text to be read at the conference
in his absence. It treats, with polite frankness, his worries about being misinterpreted through importation into the American theoretical field with its peculiar conception of French philosophy; Bourdieu’s paper situates these
particular worries within a more general account of “allodoxic” distortions
caused by the international travel of theory; but it also tries to prevent further
misunderstanding by offering a brief contextualization of his theory and a brief
summary of his method of analysis through fields. The translation of

Bourdieu’s text was prepared by Loïc Wacquant, and is presented here with
only minor adjustments.


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“Ceci est de la poésie philosophique.
– Qu’est-ce la la poésie philosophique?
– Qu’est-ce que M. Edgard Quinet?
– Un philosophe?
– Euh! euh!
– Un poète?
– Oh! oh!”
Charles Baudelaire

I would have liked to be here, amongst you, with you, during this
conference. First to thank its organizers and all those who heeded their
invitation, but also to present myself to you en personne, in the flesh,
and thus give you an idea of who I am and of what I do at once more
lively and less abstract than the idea one may form solely from reading
texts.
I have the habit, in such circumstances, of recalling an intuition that
Marx has in passing in The Communist Manifesto, according to which
texts circulate without their context. It follows that texts such as mine,
produced in a definite position in a definite state of the French intellectual or academic field, have little chance of being grasped without distortion or deformation in the American field (as, for instance, is the case
here and now, in this university which occupies a determinate position in
the space of American universities) given the considerable gap that separates these two fields, notwithstanding their apparent growing interpenetration.
Now this gap is most often ignored. For instance, French authors such

as Foucault, Derrida, or Lyotard who have been “incorporated,” more or
less completely, and according to very different modalities, in this or that
subsector of the American academic field (in literary studies more often
than in philosophy, their originating point in France), were embedded in a
whole network of relations. These objective relations, irreducible to
personal interactions, which united them to each other as well as to a
whole series of institutions (for instance disciplines whose structure,
history, and hierarchy are not the same on the two sides of the Atlantic)
and to an entire galaxy of agents (philosophers, social scientists, writers,
artists, journalists, etc.), most of whom are unknown in the United States,
helped shape the creative project of which their work is the expression.
Transformed into isolated asteroids by international import which typically tears them from the constellation of which they are but elements,
such French authors (I fear I am about to enjoy, or suffer, from such a
strain of “French flu,” as my late friend E. P. Thompson used to say)
become available for all manners of interpretation as they may be freely
subjected to categories (such as the fadish opposition between modern and
postmodern, hardly ever invoked in France) and problematics specific to
the American field.
This is where being present in person can play an irreplaceable role.
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The questions, inevitably ambiguous, on the relations that the guest
speaker may entertain with other absent authors (“What do you think of
Derrida?” or, to be more precise, “I read that you recently led a series of
political interventions with Derrida. What are we to make of this?”), such

questions, and so many others you might have in mind, can trigger so
many explicit or implicit position-takings – as would no doubt be the case
if I were before you at this moment: an amused and somewhat ironic smile
for Lyotard, a loud silence concerning Baudrillard. Such position-takings
would at least allow you to see how the author invited situates himself,
consciously, in relation to other authors.
All of this is all and well, but would it suffice to overcome the structural
disjuncture to which I was referring at the outset? I do not believe so.
Having dealt, through a series of negative clarifications, with all of the
misunderstandings that result from the effect of allodoxia produced by the
distance (and not only geographical) that separates national intellectual
fields, and having cleared up interferences between the historical traditions
these have engendered, I would still have to effect two apparently contradictory operations in order to achieve better communication with you.
First, I would have to show the coherence and empirical adequacy
(that is, the scientificity) of the theory, or the system of relational
concepts I have developed and which can be engaged in the construction,
at once theoretical and empirical, of objects phenomenally very different
and typically assigned to different disciplines (history of literature,
history of sciences, history of philosophy, history of art, and so on). I
could enumerate here the diverse and manifold disciplines represented at
this conference (much to my satisfaction). Second, I would outline the
structure of the field, and the corresponding space of possible theoretical
stances (that is, the system of negative and positive determinations),
within which this conceptual framework has been constructed and to
which it owes its virtues but also its limitations, some of them unapparent to me in spite of all my efforts to shun national particularities and
particularisms through a deliberate (and early) commitment to scientific
internationalism.
On the second point, concerning the structure of the academic field and
the relations it entertains with the literary, artistic, and political fields in
France (relations that are profoundly different from their counterparts in

the United States), I can refer you to my book Homo Academicus and in
particular to the “Preface” to its English-language translation. In it, I try,
based on the diagrammatic mapping of a multifactorial correspondence
analysis, to uncover the characteristics of the position occupied by the
main contenders in the French academic field, which comprises those
authors best known in the United States: Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and
many others, including myself. I show how, taking into account variations
introduced by discrepancies in social and academic trajectories, this structural location is at the root of the critical, anti-institutional stances these
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authors took in their works. To gain a more thorough understanding of
commonalities and differences between them, you could read a paper entitled “An Aspiring Philosopher” (“Un aspirant philosophe: un point de vue
sur le champ universitaire dans les années 50,” in Les enjeux
philosophiques des années 50, Paris, Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1989,
15–24), where I try to specify, through a sort of retrospective self-analysis, the dispositions (or, more precisely, the intellectual ambitions and
pretentions) associated with being a philosophy student in a French elite
school, the École normale supérieure, around the time of its apogee. You
will also find in this paper instruments to understand one of the factors
which, along with my social origins, distinguish me most strongly from
the most illustrious of my contemporaries: namely, the choice I made to
leave the superior caste of the philosophers and turn first towards anthropology (with my field work in Kabylia) and later – an even more grievous
derogation – towards the sociology of work (see Travail et travailleurs en
Algérie, 1963) and the sociology of education (with The Inheritors and
Reproduction, published in 1964 and 1970 respectively), at that time two
of the most despised subsectors of a pariah discipline. I effected this

reconversion precisely during that period, the 1960s, when those who
would later discover, no doubt due partly to the sociology of education and
of science, the question of power in academic and scientific life, were
swimming with the structuralist tide.
It is an understatement to say that I did not partake of those semiologico-literary fads, exemplified in my eyes by Roland Barthes and, at
the intersection between the scientific and the literary fields, the fanatics
of Tel Quel: mixing Mao and Sade (in those years, virtually all French
intellectuals, Simone de Beauvoir included, wrote dissertations on the
author of Justine), Sollers, Kristeva, and their little coterie of minor writers with grandiose pretentions tried to institute, in the intellectual field,
the estheticist cult of gratuitous transgression, erotic or political (on this
point, see my “Sollers Tel Quel,” Liber, revue européenne des livres,
21–22, March 1995, 40). I was scarcely more indulgent towards those
who, cumulating the prestige of philosophy, preferably Nietzschean as
with Deleuze and Foucault, or Heideggerian in the case of Derrida, and
the aura of literature, with the compulsive and compulsory reference to
Artaud, Bataille or Blanchot, contributed to blurring the frontier
between science and literature, when they did not go so far as to breathe
life back into the dullest commonplaces that the arrogance of philosophers has produced against the social sciences and which periodically
take them to the brink of nihilism (for excellent demonstrations on this,
I can refer you here to two books by my companion in resistance,
Jacques Bouveresse: Le philosophe chez les autophages, Paris, Editions
de Minuit, 1984, and Rationalité et cynisme, Paris, Editions de Minuit,
1989).
This is why I am more than a little surprised when I see myself
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placed, through a typical effect of allodoxia, on the side of those socalled “post-modern” writers whom I have ceaselessly fought on intellectual grounds, even when I might have shared political grounds on
account of the fact that, as I noted earlier, we had similar subversive or
anti-institutional dispositions linked to the propinquity of our positions
in academic space.
This leads me to the second point of my intended demonstration,
namely the space of theoretical options in relation to which my own
specifically scientific project (founded upon a total social break with the
mundane games of literary philosophy and philosophical literature) was
constituted. It is clear that if I reacted forcefully against the authors most
directly engaged in the semiologico-literary fashion of the time and if I
quite consciously denied myself the benefits of the accelerated international circulation the latter have enjoyed, thanks to the prestige still
accorded to Parisian literary avant-gardes, in particular via the French
departments of select American universities, I was actively engaged in
confronting structuralism as incarnated by the Lévi-Strauss of The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, The Savage Mind, and
Mythologiques, and this in my research practice rather than solely at the
level of discourse (as with philosophers, save for Foucault). In the
prologue to my book Le sense pratique (The Logic of Practice,
1980/1990), I draw out the intellectual context of my research work
during the sixties and I try to show, in the first two chapters of that same
book, how I strove to overcome the opposition, still salient in all the
social sciences today (for a discussion with reference to history, see my
interview with the German historial Lutz Raphael in Actes de la
recherche en sciences sociales, 106–107, March 1995, 108–122),
between objectivism, represented in exemplary fashion by Lévi-Strauss,
and subjectivism, taken to its outer limits by Sartre. The concept of habitus is intended to give a stenographic expression to the overcoming of
this antinomy.
But to understand the other instruments I employ in my analyses of
cultural works, law, science, art, literature, and philosophy, one would

need to draw out the totality of the space of theoretical contributions to the
analysis of symbolic power that I have been led to cumulate and to synthesize, step by step, to resolve the problems posed, very concretely, by the
analysis of Kabyle ritual or religious practices or yet the literary and artistic productions of differentiated societies. I presented a sort of simplified
synopsis of these theories for the first time in 1972, at the University of
Chicago, before an audience of positivistically-inclined, and thoroughly
befuddled, sociologists. (See “On Symbolic Power,” reprinted in
Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. See also
my studies of literature, art, and philosophy in The Rules of Art,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996 and The Political Ontology of Martin
Heidegger, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.)
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The concept of literary field, as a space of objective positions to which
correspond a homologous space of stances or position-takings (which
operates as a space of possibles or options given to participants in the field
at any given moment), was itself constituted in relation to the space of the
various possible approaches to literary works to which it is opposed at the
same time as it annexes and integrates them in a non-eclectic manner (you
will find a map of this space of theories of literary or artistic products in
“Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works,” in The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York, Columbia
University Press, 1993, as well as in The Rules of Art).
If I had the time, I could show you how one can critique symbolic
structuralism, as conceived by Foucault and the Russian formalists, and
yet preserve its achievements (the idea of a space of strategic possibilities or intertextuality) within a framework that transcends the opposition between internal analysis (text) and external analysis (context) by

relating the literary (philosophical, juridical, scientific, etc.) field in
which producers evolve, and where they occupy dominant or dominated, central or marginal, positions, on the one hand, and the field of
works, defined relationally in terms of their form, style, and manner, on
the other. This is tantamount to saying that, instead of being one
approach among many, an analysis in terms of field allows us methodically to integrate the achievements of all the other approaches in
currency, approaches that the field of literary criticism itself causes us
to perceive as irreconcilable.
Lastly, I would need to show you how an analysis armed with knowledge of the general properties of fields produced by the theory of fields
can discover in each of the various fields (for instance, the literary field or
the field of painting) properties that the naive (and native) vision would
overlook. Such an analysis can bring to light, thanks to methodical
comparison made possible by the notion of field, properties that uniquely
characterize the functioning of each of the different fields, which leads in
particular to refuting the conflation between the scientific field and the
literary field fostered by a certain “post-modern” vision of literature and
science (I think of the nihilistic critiques of the social sciences that have
proliferated recently in the name of the “linguistic turn”).
As I tried to demonstrate in what would seem to be the most unlikely
case, that of sociology (see “La cause de la science,” Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales, 106–107, March 1995, 3–10), if science, even the
purest science, presents a number of structural and functional traits in
common with the political field, it remains that it has its own nomos, its
(relative) autonomy, which insulates it more or less completely from the
intrusion of external constraints. This explains that truths produced in this
relatively autonomous field can be historical through and through, as is the
field itself, without for that reason being either deducible from historical
conditions or reducible to the external conditionings they impose. This is
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because the field opposes to external forces the shield, or the prism, of its
own history, the warrant of its autonomy, that is, the history of the
“languages” (in the broadest possible sense of the word) specific to each
field or subfield.
These are some of the arguments I would have liked to make before
you, had I been able to travel to Duke University and to be there with you
on this day. I would have liked also to tell you how grateful I am for the
interest you have shown in my work, and this in the manner which pleases
me the most: by treating it in the manner of an intellectual machinery
capable of generating new products and thus by working together to
design whatever improvements are needed.
Paris, March 28, 1995
College de France
52, rue de Cardinal Lemoine
75231 Paris Cedex 05
France

© The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997