Scattered remarks (Pierre Bourdieu)

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European Journal of Social Theory 2(3): 334–340
Copyright © 1999 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

SYMPOSIUM

Scattered Remarks
Pierre Bourdieu
COLLÈGE DE FRANCE

On Double Truth and the Right Distance How to avoid seeming to be complicitous with the object analyzed (notably in the eyes of those who are foreign to it)
or, conversely, reductive and hostile (especially to those who are caught up in the
object and who are inclined to refuse the very principle of objectivation)? How
to reconcile the objectivation of belief (religious, literary, artistic, scientific, etc.)
and of its social conditions of production, and the sensible and faithful evocation of the experience of belief that is inherent to being inserted and involved in
a social game? Only at the cost of a very long and very difficult work – and one
that is the more invisible the more successful it is – to put oneself at a distance
from the object and then to surmount this very distance, a work that bears inseparably on the object and on the relationship to the object, thus on the subject of
the scientific work.
On Objectivation Those who rebel against the very intention of objectivizing a
‘subject’ (who is herself capable of objectivation) could find support in the existence of a cognitive struggle over the objective representation of the social world
in order to contest the pretension to escape the game of mutual objectivation that
is entailed in scientific ambition. In fact, scientific objectivation arms itself with
collective instruments that ordinary practices of objectivation do not have at their
disposal and, above all, it is accomplished within a field capable of submitting
the objectivations, which are necessarily provisional and revisable, to a collective
and public testing aimed at controlling the work of ‘desubjectivation’ (as
Bachelard says) that they presuppose, and which is perhaps never definitive.
Against Philosophical ‘Heroism’ The conduct of genuine scientific research
requires that one knows how to break oneself of all the habits of thought to which

are attached the attributes of theoretical grandeur and depth: to abandon radical
doubt in favor of a doubt proportionate to the degree of doubt in the thing, such
as Leibniz recommended, to renounce the narcissistic satisfactions provided by
all prestigious and sterile meta-discourses, whether methodological or epistemological, in favor of the methodically and epistemologically controlled production
of new knowledge, to sacrifice the anxiety over the ultimate foundation to the
historical critique of unconscious presuppositions, to repudiate the mystical

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ambition to reach the essence in a single leap in favor of the patient reconstruction of genesis, etc.
The Epistemology of Ressentiment Those who, like today’s ‘postmoderns’,
colourless continuators of the age-old battle of philosophy against sociology, are
wont to contest social science’s claims to scientificity are almost always recruited
from among the philosophers who feel threatened in their anthropological
monopoly; for this reason, they are not limited to the spiritualists attached to the
irreducibility of the ‘human person’. They find their natural allies among the
failed or déclassé representatives of these sciences (often defrocked philosophers
who have not succeeded in their conversion to history or sociology): for lack of
having proven themselves on properly scientific terrain, these latter are prone to
seeking the appearance of a revenge in meta-scientific, epistemological-looking
considerations made for allowing them to convert their personal limitations into
universal limits by decreeing a priori the impossibility of doing that which they
were unable to do.
Bernouilli and the Varignons The sense of theoretical hauteur, which constitutes

the main if not the sole support of so many philosophical ambitions, encourages
and authorizes large-predator behaviors, notably with regard to the social
sciences, those auxiliary and ancillary disciplines barely good enough for providing ‘matter for reflection’. Thus it is that the linguists, sociologists, ethnologists
and historians who, burdened with ambiguous, sticky, fuzzy realities, and bogged
down in interminable empirical verifications, know that they are destined to
arrive after the battle and thus to appear, more often than not, as slavish imitators (suiveurs) of the very ‘thinkers’ whom they inspired, might find a measure of
comfort and perhaps even some weapons against all the Varignons and their
unconfessed borrowings or their hasty generalizations – whose paradigm is no
doubt the notion of ‘ideological state apparatus’ – in the story told by Cournot
about Jean Bernouilli:
Scientists, philosophers, very inclined to generalization, to classification, very fecund
in creating new words or new labels for the genera and the classes that they imagine,
are not those who cause the most genuine advances made in the sciences and in philosophy. The truly active principle, the principle of fecundity and life, for everything
that relates to the development of reason and of the philosophical mind, must
therefore be found not in the faculty of abstracting, classifying, and generalizing. It is
reported that the great geometrician Bernouilli, despondent at seeing that his contemporary Varignon seemed to want to arrogate his discoveries for himself, under the
pretext of adding to them some generality that the author had neglected, and which
did not demand a great expense of invention, said with cunning, when finishing a new
memoir: ‘Varignon will generalize that for us’. (Cournot, 1973: 20)

‘Power/Knowledge’ 1 The philosophers, and in particular Michel Foucault, could
1In

English in the original. (Trans.)

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have posed in earnest the question of symbolic power, a power that is exercised
through an action of knowledge, and could have produced, in particular, a theory
of the power of theory, of the conditions of possibility, and thus the limits, of its
exercise, and of its distribution among the different categories of agents, only at
the price of genuinely abdicating the status of philosopher (encouraged by a
critical awareness of the logic of the academic field and of the hierarchy between
disciplines). Entering into a practice humbler and closer to the facts, such as that
of the historian or the sociologist, is indeed the condition of a real overcoming
of the traditional antinomy, on which the philosophical ambition rests, between
the political and practical concerns of the man of the agora, on the one hand,
and the theoretical, pure, disinterested preoccupations of the philosopher, bound
to the distinctive privileges of skholè, on the other.
Symbolic Capital To account for recognized domination and for obedience, that
is, for the conditions that must be met for a command to be obeyed, one must
integrate traditionally separate, nay opposing, theoretical traditions: the
‘constructivist’ tradition that considers symbolic schemata as the instruments of
construction of the world of objects; the structuralist or hermeneutic tradition
that, notably in Habermas, treats them as instruments of communication, reducing issues of power and politics to issues of meaning; finally the traditions that
see in them instruments of power (or of the legitimation of power), by priority
of the economic, as in Marx, or the political, as in Nietzsche. As the synthesis of
the three traditions, the notion of symbolic power (or capital) enables one to
account for the relations of force that are actualized in and by relations of cognition (or recognition) and of communication.
Symbolic capital exists by and for perception or, more precisely, by and for
those who perceive it and who can perceive it and make it exist as such only
because they are endowed with adequate categories of perception. This means
that it depends, for its very existence, on those who bear its effects. These
categories (or schemata) of perception are historical principles of vision and

division rooted in the objective divisions of the social order (this is the case with
the three ‘orders’ of ancien régime societies which, as Georges Duby has shown,
are at the same time objective structures and cognitive structures) or, more
precisely, in the structure of the distribution of capital. Symbolic capital is made,
in the last analysis, by those who are submitted to it but if, and only if, the objective structure of its distribution is at the basis of the cognitive structures that they
bring into play in order to produce it – as, for example, with such structuring
oppositions as masculine/feminine, young/old, noble/common, rich/poor,
white/black, etc. Nobility exists only for and by those who have at their disposal
the principle of division between the noble and the common, that is to say by
and for the other nobles or the commoners who have acquired the disposition to
recognize it (in both senses) on account of their embeddedness in a universe
objectively organized according to this principle of division.
If the claim to symbolic power that permits one to act upon the social world
in its entirety or upon a particular field is universal, this capacity is very unequally


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accorded to the different agents according to the position they occupy in the structure of the distribution of symbolic capital within the given social space (that of
noble versus commoner, of the notable versus the ordinary person, of the Nobel
prizewinner versus the rank-and-file researcher, of the publisher consecrated and
capable of consecrating by publication versus the newcomer in the field of publishing, etc.) (see Bourdieu, 1999). Symbolic capital is the capital of recognition
accumulated in the course of the whole history of prior struggles (thus very
strongly correlated to seniority), that enables one to intervene effectively in current
struggles for the conservation or augmentation of symbolic capital, that is, for the
power of nomination and of imposition of the legitimate principle of vision and
division, universally recognized in a determinate social space. These cognitive and
communicative struggles which, as Goffman (1959) has shown so well, are
continually unfolding in daily existence, find their canonical form in the political

struggles that use the symbolic power to cause one to see and to believe (faire voir
et faire croire) in order to impose visions of the world and, in particular, visions of
the divisions of the world (principles of classification), and thereby to produce
groups, families, clans, tribes, classes or nations, and to give them existence by
making them visible, notably by the demonstration,2 or, in other universes, the
procession (e.g. bridal or funeral procession), the cortège, etc. exhibitions of the
force and form of the group, of its divisions and hierarchies.
As the logic of the symbolic is fundamentally diacritical, distinction is the
specific form of profit that symbolic capital procures. Lifestyle, as the exemplary
manifestation of symbolic capital, exists only by and for the gaze of the other and
as diacritical deviation from the modal, ordinary, common, banal, ‘average’ style,
a deviation that can be unwitting or obtained by a ‘stylization of life’. The
symbolic profit of distinction (which can be reconverted into material profits)
results, apart from every intentional pursuit, from the monopolistic possession
(exclusivity) of some species of capital and from the exhibition, intentional or
not, of this capital and of the difference attached to its possession. This is as much
as to say that the effect of distinction inherent in the unequal distribution of a
good, service, or practice, contributes of itself to legitimating the structure of this
distribution. The institutionalization of this effect, by customs and rules of dress,
sumptuary laws, etc. tends to constitute ‘status groups’ (‘orders’, nobility, etc.) by
constituting as permanent and founded in nature certain de facto differences, and
by establishing mechanisms destined to assure their perpetuation (inheritance
laws, matrimonial norms aimed at excluding mésalliance, etc.).
Symbolic capital can thus be possessed by singular agents or by collectives,
especially corps, families, status groups, constituted bodies, the state. Possessor of
the monopoly over legitimate symbolic violence, capable of acting as central bank
of the symbolic capital accumulated by a nation, the state can exercise the power
of naming, an act of consecration that confers upon a singular agent or a group
its official identity, universally recognized (within the limits of its jurisdiction),
its social titles of recognition (academic or occupational in particular). As the

2In

English in the original, together with the French term (manifestation) (Trans.)

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strict opposite to insult as idios logos (singular discourse) without consequence,
and of all individual or collective strategies of defamation or degradation, aimed
at eliciting discredit, the verdict (positive or negative), the solemn enunciation of
the social truth of an individual or group, it places a limit, if not a term, on the
struggle of all against all about the social world and about the social truth and
value of those engaged in it.
One can thus understand the paradox of symbolic efficacy, revived by the
reflection of philosophers (notably Austin, 1962) and linguists (Benveniste, 1969
among others) on the performative. The command that makes itself obeyed, if it
is an exception to the laws of physics in that it obtains an effect out of proportion to the energy expended, and thus liable to appear as a form of magic, is in
perfect conformity with the law of the conservation of social energy, that is, of
capital: it turns out that, to be in a position to act at a distance and without
expense of energy, by virtue of an act of social magic, as with the order or the
watchword (ordre et mot d’ordre), one must be endowed with authority, that is,
authorized, in one’s personal capacity or by proxy, as delegate, representative, or
functionary, to set off, as by a trigger mechanism, the social energy that has been
accumulated in a group or an institution by the work, often protracted and difficult, that is the condition of the acquisition and conservation of symbolic capital.
The Historical Raison d’Être of Reason Rationalism too easily grants itself its

raison d’être. It is perhaps on condition of radicalizing the historical critique of
the supposed ‘foundations’ of reason, and of the social order, and of refusing all
manners of transcendental deus ex machina which the philosophers, from Kant to
Husserl to Habermas, have proposed to escape the mute confrontation with the
brute fact of historical contingency, that one can discover, in history itself, how
and on what conditions what we call reason was able, in certain situations and
under certain conditions, to constitute itself by tearing itself away from history.
Science and Politics One can, for heuristic purposes, oppose as two ‘ideal types’,
arrived at by pushing to the limit, on the one hand, the most purely political
form of the political field where the force of ideas would depend essentially on
the force of the groups that recognize them because they recognize themselves in
them, who accept them as true because they believe them to be such or, in more
accurate terms, because they believe that their existence and their economic and
social interests depend on them; and on the other hand, the most purely scientific form of the scientific fields where the force of ideas would depend essentially
on ‘their intrinsic force’, as Spinoza said, that is, on the conformity of propositions or procedures to the rules of logical coherence or on compatibility with the
facts. In historical reality, there is no scientific field, however ‘pure’, that does not
entail a ‘political’ dimension, no political field that makes no room for some
disputes over truth. That said, while in scientific fields one does not settle a debate
by means of a physical confrontation or by a vote, in political fields, and in
particular in those that are subjected to democratic rules, the victors are those
propositions that Aristotle calls endoxic, that is those with which one is obliged


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to reckon because the people who matter would like them to be true and also
because, partaking of the doxa, of the ordinary vision, which is also the most
widespread and the most widely shared, they are liable to receive the approbation and applause of the greatest number.
It follows that the political field is in an ambiguous position: site of a competition for truth (especially about the social world), it is also the site of a competition for power (notably over the state, and the resources whose accumulation and

redistribution it controls), power granted by the art of producing or mobilizing
idées-forces that contain a force of mobilization, notably as predictions or forecasts,
true or capable of making themselves come true, on account of their intrinsic force
of truth or the social force that their ‘bearers’ have the means of mobilizing, be it
by virtue of their own symbolic capital (their charisma) or through the agency of
an organized group, a party. In short, things are not simple, and political struggles
always make room for the logic of quasi-scientific ‘verification’ by argumentation
and for the logic of properly political ‘ratification’ by plebiscite.
The social sciences are in a particularly difficult position owing to the fact that
they have the social world for object and claim to produce a scientific representation of it. Each and every specialist is in this regard in competition not only
with other researchers but also with the other professionals in symbolic production, and in particular journalists and politicians, and, more broadly still, with
all those who work to impose their vision of the social world, with very unequal
symbolic force and equally unequal success. This is the case, whether the social
researcher knows it or not, wishes it or not, and even when she chooses to enclose
herself in the ivory tower of a scientific practice that would be an end in and for
itself, in a fantasy of purity (and equanimity) that is necessarily doomed to failure
because politics is present within the field itself through the effects of temporal
powers that continue to weigh on the City of science. Propositions that are inconsistent or incompatible with the facts have infinitely greater chances to perpetuate themselves there and even to prosper there than in the most autonomous
scientific fields, provided that they are endowed, inside the field and also outside
it, with a social authority liable to compensate for their insignificance and insufficiency by assuring them material and institutional supports (credits, grants,
posts, etc.) – and conversely.
In fact, social scientists can, without contradiction, struggle, within their own
sphere, to reinforce the autonomy of the scientific field and to rid it of everything
political that may remain in it, and outside it in the political field itself, they can
struggle to try to impose scientific truth on the social world, without being able
to resort to weapons other than those of truth. And they can even, to give more
force to their weak weapons, make the scientific field play the role of a realized
utopia of the political field or, better, the role of a regulative idea permitting one
at once to orient political practices and to submit them to a methodical questioning. The major virtue of the confrontation between the scientific field, in its
different states, and the political field lies in making a very large number of questions arise regarding both fields, questions that must be converted into scientific

problems liable to receiving empirical answers. And it above all prevents one from

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forgetting, against the typically scholastic illusion of the omnipotence of ideas,
everything that separates the world of science from the world of politics, the
awareness and knowledge of which must in any case orient properly scientific
work and the effort to try to communicate its results in the political world.
Habitus and Freedom If only to make things more difficult for those who would
like to see in the theory of habitus a form of determinism, it will suffice to point
out that the habitus offers the only durable form of freedom, that given by the
mastery of an art, whatever the art. And that this freedom made nature, which
is acquired, paradoxically, by the obligated or elective submission to the conditionings of training and exercise (themselves made possible by a minimal
distance from necessity), is indeed, as is the freedom in regard to language and
body that is called ease, a property (this is one of the senses that the Scholastics
gave to the word ‘habitus’) or, if you wish, an acquisition and inheritance predisposed by their unequal distribution to function as capital. This then raises the
question of whether there can be any liberty other than that to master one’s inheritance and acquisitions. Pedagogical action can thus, because of and despite the
symbolic violence it entails, open the possibility of an emancipation founded on
awareness and knowledge of the conditionings undergone and on the imposition
of new conditionings designed durably to counter their effects.
References
Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press.
Benveniste, Emile (1969) Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Paris: Editions
de Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1999) ‘Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition’, Actes de la Recherche
en Sciences Sociales 126/127 (March): 3–28.
Cournot, A.A. (1973) Œuvres complètes, Vol. II, ed. J.-C. Pariente. Paris: Vrin.
Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor
Books.

■ Pierre Bourdieu

holds the Chair in Sociology at the Collège de France and is
Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Address:
EHESS, 54, bd Raspail, F-75006 Paris.

Translated by Tarik Wareh and Loïc Wacquant