The three forms of theoretical knowledge (Pierre Bourdieu)

and methods
Théorie et méthodes

Theory

PIERRE

BOURDIEU

The three forms of theoretical

knowledge

The social world may be subjected to three modes of theoretical knowledge,
each of which implies a set of (usually tacit) anthropological theses.
The only
thing these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all stand in
opposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge we shall term
phenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of currently active schools,
&dquo;interactionist&dquo; or &dquo;ethnomethodological&dquo;) makes explicit primary experience of the social world: perception of the social world as natural and selfevident is not self-reflective by definition and excludes all interrogation about
its own conditions of possibility. At a second level, objectivist knowledge
(of which the structuralist hermeneutic constitutes a particular case) constructs
the objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) structuring not only practices but representations of practices and in particular primary knowledge,
practical and tacit, of the familiar world, by means of a break with this primary
knowledge and, hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which confer
upon the social world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivist
knowledge can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and the
objective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of
these structures is absent), provided it poses the very problem doxic experience
of the social world excludes by definition, namely the problem of the (specific)
conditions under which this experience is possible. Thirdly, what we might

refer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned not only with the system
of objective relations constructed by the objectivist form of knowledge, but
also with the dialectical relationships between these objective structures and the
structured dispositions which they produce and which tend to reproduce
them, i.e. the dual process of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality. This knowledge presupposes a break with the objectivist form of knowledge, that is, it presupposes investigation into the conditions of possibility and, consequently, into the limits of the objectivistic viewpoint which grasps practices from the outside, as a fait accompli, rather than
53


54

construct their

generative principle by placing itself inside the process of their
accomplishment.
The praxeological form of knowledge may appear to be a regression to the
phenomenological mode of knowledge, while the implied critique of objectivism is liable to be confused with the critique of scientific objectification formulated by naive humanism in the name of lived experience and the rights
of subjectivity. This is so because it is the product of a double theoretical
movement of translation : in effect, it carries out a second reversal of the problematic that objective science of the social world, seen as a system of objective relationships, constituted by posing those problems which practical experience and the phenomenological analysis of that experience exclude. Just
as objectivist knowledge poses the problem of the conditions of possibility
of practical experience, thereby demonstrating that this experience is defined,
fundamentally, by the fact that it does not pose this problem, so praxeological knowledge sets objectivist knowledge on its feet by posing the problem
of the conditions of possibility of this problem (theoretical, but also social conditions) and, at the same time, makes it apparent that objectivist knowledge
is defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it excludes this problem. Being
set up in opposition to practical perception of the social world, objectivist
knowledge is distracted from the task of constructing the theory of practical
knowledge of the social world. Praxeological knowledge does not cancel out
the gains accruing from objectivist knowledge, rather it conserves and transcends them by integrating that which this knowledge had to exclude in order
to obtain them.

We must pause for a moment on what is objectivism’s field par excellence,

that of semiology. Just as Saussure postulates that language is an autonomous object, irreducible to its concrete actualizations, that is to the speechbehaviour it makes possible, so Panofsky establishes that what he calls,
following Alois Riegl, Kunstwollen, in other words, roughly, the objective
meaning of a work 1, is no more reducible to the artist’s &dquo;will&dquo; than it is to the
&dquo;will of the age&dquo; or to the lived experiences which the work arouses in the spectator. In so doing, both Saussure and Panofsky carry out, with regard to
speech, that particular form of behaviour, and to works of art, those particular products of action, the operation which builds objectivist science by building a system of objective relations that are as irreducible to the practices
within which they are realized and manifested as they are to the intentions
of the subjects, and to any awareness these may have of its constraints or its
Saussure shows that the true medium of communication between two
logic.
is
agents not speech, as an immediate datum grasped in its observable materiality, but language, as the structure of objective relations making both the
1. "That which ’presents itself’, not to us, but objectively, as the ultimate and definitive
meaning of the artistic phenomenon" (E. Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens",
Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14, 1920, pp. 321-339).


55

production and decoding of speech possible. Similarly, Panofsky shows that
iconological interpretation treats the tangible properties of the work of art,
with the affective experiences it arouses, as mere &dquo;cultural symptoms&dquo;, which
only fully yield up their meaning to a reading armed with the cultural code
the creator himself has &dquo;involved&dquo; in his work.
Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo; presupposes an unconscious decoding operation which can only be perfectly adequate where the competence which one
of the agents engages in his practice or in his works is identical to that objectively engaged by the other agent in his perception of this practice or work;
in other words, in the particular case in which the coding
in the sense of the
transformation of a subjective meaning into a practice or a work - coincides
with the symetrical decoding operation. Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo;, a decoding act that does not recognize itself as such, is only possible (and only really
accomplished) in the particular case where the historical code which makes the

(unconscious) act of decoding possible, is completely mastered (as a cultivated
disposition) by the perceiving agent and coincides with the code which has (as
a cultivated disposition) made the production of the perceived practice or
work possible. Partial or total misunderstanding is the rule in all other cases,
the illusion of immediate comprehension leading to illusory comprehension,
that of ethnocentrism, in the sense of a code interference: in short, when its
sole cognitive tool is what Husserl termed the &dquo; intentional transfer into the
Other&dquo;, even the most &dquo;comprehensive&dquo; interpretation is liable to amount
to no more than a particularly irreproachable form of ethnocentrism.
As the heirs to an intellectual heritage, that of linguistics, whose conditions
of production they are not always able to reproduce, structuralist anthropologists have all too often contented themselves with literal translations of
linguistic terms dissociated from the structure from which they derived their
original meaning, sparing themselves the trouble of undertaking their own
epistemological reflection on the conditions and the limits of the validity
of the transposition of the Saussurian construction. It is noteworthy, for
example, that, with the exception of Sapir, who was predisposed by his dual
formation as linguist and anthropologist to raise the problem of the relationship between culture and language, no anthropologist has attempted
to bring out all the implications of the homology (which Leslie White is virtually alone in formulating explicitly) between two oppositions, language
and speech on one side culture, and behaviour or works on the other side.
Objectivism states that immediate communication is possible if, and only if,
the agents are objectively disposed in such a way that they associate the same
meaning with the same sign (speech, practice or work) and the same sign with
the same meaning or, to put it another way, if they are objectively disposed
in such a way that, in their coding and decoding operations, i.e. in their practices and their interpretations, they both refer to one and the same system
of constant relations, independent of individual consciousness or wills and
irreducible to their execution in the form of practices or works (code or cipher).
-


56

In

so doing, objectivism does not deny the phenomenological analysis of
primary experience of the social world and of the immediate comprehension
of speech or actions: it merely sets the limits of its validity by establishing
the particular conditions within which it is possible and which phenomenological analysis leaves out of account. The social sciences have, necessarily,
to quote Husserl, &dquo;a thematics with a consistently dual orientation, a thematics consistently linking theory of the scientific field with a theory of the
knowledge of that theory&dquo; 2; in other words, epistemological reflection on
the conditions of possibility of the anthropological sciences forms an integral part of the anthropological sciences. That is so firstly because a science
which has as its very object that which makes the science possible, such as
language or culture, can only constitute itself by the constitution of its own
conditions of possibility; but it is also because complete knowledge of the
conditions of the science, that is, of the operations whereby this science acquires
symbolic mastery of a language, a myth or a rite, implies the knowledge of practical comprehension: the practical knowledge accomplishes the same operations, though in absolute ignorance of the general and particular conditions
within which it is possible and which confer its particularity upon it.
We have only to examine the theoretical operations whereby Saussure builds
up linguistics as a science, by treating language as an autonomous object,
distinct from its materializations in speech, in order to reveal the presuppositions implicit in any form of knowledge which treats practices or works
as symbolic facts to be decoded and, more generally, which treats them as
accomplished facts rather than as practices. Although one could invoke
the existence of dead languages or of mutism in old age as demonstrating that
it is possible for speech to disappear while language remains preserved,
although language faults reveal language as constituting the objective norms
underlying speech (were it otherwise, any language fault would modify the
language and there would be no language faults), speech appears to be the condition of language, as much from an individual as from a collective point of view,
since language cannot be apprehended outside of speech, because language
is learnt by means of speech, and because speech lies at the origin of innovations in and transformations of language. But the priority of the two processes mentioned is merely chronological; when one leaves the field of individual or collective history, as does objectivist hermeneutics, in order to inquire
into the logical conditions of decoding, the relationship is turned on its head :
language is the condition of the intelligibility of speech, that is the mediation

which, ensuring the identity of the associations of sounds and concepts operated by the senders and receivers, guarantees mutual comprehension. So,
from this point of view, that of intelligibility, speech is the product of language 3. It follows that, because it is developed from the strictly intellec-

2. E. Husserl, Logique formelle
France, 1965, p. 52.
3. F. de

et

logique transcendentale, Paris,

Presses Universitaires de

Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, Payot, 1960, pp.

37-38.


57

tualist point of view, that of decoding, Saussurian linguistics gives priority
to the structure of signs, that is, to the relations between them, to the detriment
of their practical functions, which are never reducible, as structuralism tacitly
assumes, to functions of communication or knowledge: those practices apparently most strictly oriented towards functions of communication for the sake of communication (the phatic function) or communication for the purposes of knowledge, such as feasts and ceremonies, ritual exchanges or, in a wholly different
field, the circulation of scientific information, are always more or less openly
oriented towards political or economic functions.
Structuralist linguistics bases the construction of the structural properties
of the message as such, that is to say, as a system, on the assumption of an
impersonal and interchangeable sender and receiver and on the ignorance
of the functional properties that each message owes to its utilization within

a certain social(>,
structured interaction. In fact, we know well that the symbolic interactions within any group depend, not only on the structure of the
interaction group within which they occur 4, but also on the social structures within which the interacting agents are situated (e.g. the class structure):
consequently, it is probable that a measurement of symbolic exchanges which
would enable us to distinguish, with Chapple and Coon 5, those who only
originate, those who only respond and those who respond to the sending of
the first group while originating with regard to the second group, would reveal,
both on the level of a society in its entirety and inside a circumstantial group,
the dependence of the structure of symbolic power relations upon the structure of political power relations. The perfect competition model is just as
unrealistic here as it is elsewhere, the market in symbolic goods also having
its monopolies and its structures of domination.
In short, the moment one shifts from the structure of language to the functions it fulfills, that is, to the uses agents really make of it, one sees that knowledge of the code alone permits only a very imperfect mastery of the linguistic
interactions actually carried out; as Luis Prieto observes, the meaning of a
linguistic element depends at least as much on extra-linguistic as on linguistic
factors, that is, on the context and situation in which it is employed. It is
as if, in the class of significates abstractly corresponding to a speech sound,
the receiver &dquo;selected&dquo; the one that seemed to him to be compatible with the
circumstances, such as he perceives them 6. Which is another way of saying
that the reception (and doubtless the emission too) largely depends on the
objective structure of the relations between the objective positions in the social structure of the interacting agents (e.g. competitive relations, objectively
4. S. Moscovici and M. Plon, "Les situations-colloques : Observations théoriques et expérimentales", Bulletin de psychologie, jan. 1966, pp. 701-722.
5. E. D. Chapple and C. S. Coon, Principles of anthropology, London, Jonathan Cape,
1947, p. 283.
6. L. J. Prieto, Principes de noologie, Paris, Mouton, 1964, and J. C. Pariente, "Vers un
nouvel esprit linguistique", Critique, apr. 1966, pp. 334-358.


58

antagonistic relations

or

power and

authority relationships, etc.), for it is this
by the interactions observed

structure which determines the form assumed

within

a particular conjuncture.
Nothing demonstrates better the inappropriateness of the theory of practice haunting linguistic (and also anthropological) structuralism than its
inability to integrate, into this theory, all that pertains to execution, as Saussure puts it.
The foundations of this inability reside in the incapacity to
think of speech and, more generally, of practice otherwise than as execution 1.
Objectivism constructs a theory of practice (as execution), but only as a negative sub-product or, one might say, as a refuse immediately thrown away,
left over from the construction of language or culture as systems of objective
relations. So, with the aim of delimiting, within language facts, the &dquo;field
of language&dquo; and of isolating &dquo;a well defined object&dquo;, &dquo;an object capable of
being studied seperately&dquo;, &dquo;with a homogeneous nature&dquo;, Saussure rejects
the &dquo;physical aspect of communication&dquo;, that is, speech as a pre-constructed
object, liable to obstruct the construction of language; then within the &dquo;speech
circuit&dquo;, he isolates what he terms the &dquo;executive aspect &dquo;, that is, speech as a
constructed object, defined as the actualization of a certain meaning within
a particular combination of sounds, which he finally eliminates by stating that
&dquo;execution is never carried out by the collectivity&dquo;, but is &dquo;always individual&dquo;.
Thus, the same concept, that of speech, is divided by theoretical construction
into a preconstructed datum, which is immediately observable and the very one

against which the operation of theoretical construction is carried out, and a
constructed object, the negative product of the operation whereby language as
such is constituted or, better, which produces the two objects by producing
the conflicting relationship within which and by which they are defined. It

would be easy to show that the construction of the concept of culture
in
the sense of cultural anthropology
or of social structure (in RadcliffeBrown’s sense and that of social anthropology) also implies the construction
of a notion of conduct as execution which coexists with the primary notion
of conduct as simple behaviour taken at face value. The extreme confusion
of debates on the relationship between &dquo;culture&dquo; (or &dquo;social structures&dquo;)
and conduct usually arises out of the fact that the constructed meaning of
conduct and its implied theory of practice lead a kind of clandestine existence
inside the discourse of both the defenders and the opponents of cultural
anthropology. In fact, the most virulent opponents of the notion of &dquo;cul-

-

7. "Neither is the psychological part of the circuit wholly responsible: the executive side
is missing, for execution is never carried out by the collectivity. Execution is always individual, and the individual is always its master: I shall call the executive side speaking (parole)"
(F. de Saussure, Course in general linguistics, New York, Philosophical Library, 1959, p. 13).
The most explicit formulation of the theory of speech as execution is certainly found in the work
of Hjelmslev, who clearly reveals the various dimensions of the Saussurian opposition between
language and speech, the former being institutional, social and "rigid", the other being
executive, individual and "non-rigid" (L. Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques, Copenhagen,
Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturforlag, 1959, esp. p. 79).


59

ture&dquo;, such

as Radcliffe-Brown, can only set over a naive realism against
the realism of the ideas which turn &dquo;culture&dquo; into a transcendent and autonomous
reality, which obeys only its own internal laws e. The implicit state of its theory
of practice is what protects objectivism against the only really decisive criticism, that which would be aimed at its theory of practice, the generator of all
those metaphysical aberrations on the &dquo;locus of culture&dquo;, on the mode of
existence of the &dquo;structure&dquo; or on the unconscious finality of the history
of systems, not to mention the too famous &dquo;collective consciousness&dquo; 9.
Short of constructing practice other than negatively, that is, as execution,
objectivism is condemned either only to record regularities, ignoring the whole

8. "Let

us

consider what

are

the concrete, observable facts with which the social anthro-

pologist is concerned. If we set out to study, for example, the aboriginal inhabitants of a
part of Australia, we find a certain number of individual human beings in a certain natural
environment. We can observe the acts of behaviour of these individuals, including of course
their acts of speech, and the material products of past actions. We do not observe a "culture", since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction. But direct observation does reveal to us that these human
beings are connected by a complex network of social relations. I use the term "social structure" to denote this network of actually existing relations" (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, "On
social structure", Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
70, 1940, pp. 1-12). The reason for the extreme confusion surrounding debates on the

if only in order to oppose
notion of culture probably lies in the fact that most authors place
them — concepts of very different epistemological status, such as culture and society or the
individual or conduct, etc., on the same level. The imaginary dialogue on the notion of
culture presented by Clyde Kluckhohn and William H. Kelly .
cf C. Kluckhohn and W. H.
(
Kelly, "The concept of culture", pp. 78-105 in: R. Linton (ed.), The science of man in the
world crisis, New York, Columbia University Press, 1945) gives a more summary, though
livelier image of this debate than that to be found in A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn’s
work, Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 1952, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 67 (1). Leach has observed that, despite their apparent opposition, Malinowski and
Radcliffe-Brown at least agree to consider each "society" or each "culture" (in their respective vocabularies) as a "totality made up of a number of discrete, empirical ’things’, of
rather diverse kinds
e. g. groups of people, ’institutions’, customs" or also as "an empirical whole made up of a limited number of readily identifiable parts", the comparison
between different societies having the purpose of examining whether the "same kinds of
parts" are to be found in all cases (E. R. Leach, Rethinking anthropology, London, Athlone
Press, 1961, p. 6).
9. If we except those rare authors who confer on the notion of conduct a meaning that
is rigorously defined by the operation constituting it as opposed to "culture" (for example,
H. D. Laswell, who states that "if an act conforms to culture then it is conduct, if not, it is behaviour", H. D. Lasswell, "Collective autism as a consequence of culture contact", Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung 4, 1935, pp. 232-247) without drawing any conclusions from it, most of
those who employ the opposition propose epistemologically discordant definitions of culture
or of conduct, opposing a constructed object to a preconstructed datum, leaving the place
of the second constructed object, namely practice, in the sense of execution, empty: thus
and this is far from the worst example
Harris opposes "cultural patterns" to "culturally
patterned behaviours", as "what is constructed by the anthropologist" and "what members
of a society observe or impose upon others" (M. Harris, "Review of selected writings of
Edward Sapir, language, culture and personality", Language 27 (3), 1951, pp. 288-333).

—

—

—

—


60

question of the principle of their production, or to reify abstractions, by
be they &dquo;culture&dquo;, &dquo;structures&dquo;,
treating objects constructed by science
&dquo;social classes&dquo;, &dquo;modes of production&dquo;, etc.
as autonomous realities,
endowed with social efficacity, capable of acting as subjects responsible for
historical actions or as a power capable of constraining practices. Although
it has the merit of rejecting the coarser forms of the realism of ideas, the
hypothesis of the unconscious nonetheless tends to mask the contradictions
arising out of the uncertainties of the theory of practice which &dquo;structural
anthropology&dquo; accepts, if only by omission, and even worse, it may permit
the restoration
in the apparently secularized form of a structure that is
structured without the aid of any structuring principle
of the old entelechies
of social metaphysics. Unless, of course, one assumes, along with Durkheim,
that none of the implicit rules constraining subjects &dquo;are to be found in
their entirety in their applications by individuals, since they may even exist
without actually being applied&dquo; 10, and consequently that the rules have

-

-

-

-

the transcendent and permanent existence that Durkheim ascribes to all collective &dquo;realities&dquo;, it is impossible to escape the coarsest naiveties of legalism,
which believes practices to be the product of obedience to norms, except by
playing on the multiple meanings of the word rule: most often used in the sense
of a social norm, expressly stated and explicitly recognized, as the moral or
juridical law, sometimes in the sense of a theoretical model, a construction
developed by science in order to explain practices, the word is also used,
exceptionally, in the sense of a scheme (schème) (or a principle) that is immanent in practice, which should be considered implicit rather than unconscious, merely in order to signify that it exists in a practical state, in the
practice of agents, and not in their consciousness.
One has only to re-read the following paragraph, from the preface of the
second edition of Structures elenrerrtaires de la pat-eiiti (Elementary structures
of kinslrip) dealing with the distinction between &dquo;preferential&dquo; and &dquo;prescriptive systems&dquo;, in which one may assume that the terms norm, rule or model
are used with particular care: &dquo;Conversely, a system which recommends marriage with the mother’s brother’s daughter may be called prescriptive even
if the rule is seldom observed, since what it says must be done. The question
of how far and in what proportion the members of a given society respect
the norm is very interesting, but a different question to that of where this
society should properly be placed in a typology. It is sufficient to acknowledge the likelihood that awareness of the rule inflects choices ever so little
in the prescribed direction, and that the percentage of conventional marriages
is higher than would be the case if marriages were made at random, to be able
to recognize what might be called a matrilateral ‘oper-ator’ at work in this
society and acting as a pilot: certain alliances at least follow the path which it
10. E. Durkheim, Les
de France, 1956, p. 11.

règles de la méthode sociologique, Paris,

Presses Universitaires


61

charts out for them, and this suffices to imprint a specific curve in the genealogical space. ~( No doubt there will be not just one curve but a great number of
local curves, merely incipient for the most part, however, and forming closed
cycles only in rare and exceptional cases. But the structural outlines which
emerge here and there will be enough for the system to be used in making
a probabilistic version of more rigid systems the notion of which is completely
theoretical and in which marriage would conform rigorously to any rule the
social group pleases to enunciate.&dquo; 11 This passage, as indeed the whole preface,
is written in the language of norms, while Structural anthropology is written in
the language of models, or if one prefers, of structures; this vocabulary is not
entirely absent here, since the system of physico-mathematical metaphors
on which the central passage is founded (&dquo;operator&dquo;, &dquo;certain alliances&dquo;
&dquo;follow the path which it charts out for them&dquo;, &dquo;curvature&dquo; of the &dquo;genealogical space&dquo;, &dquo;structures&dquo;) evokes the logic of the theoretical model and the
both declared and repudiated
equivalence of model and norm : &dquo;A preferential system is prescriptive when envisaged at the model level, a prescriptive system must be preferential when envisaged on the level of reality.&dquo; 12
But for those who remember the passages in Structural anthropology on the
relationship between language and kinship (e.g. &dquo; ’Kinship systems’, like
’phonemic systems’, are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought. &dquo;13)
and the imperious flatness with which &dquo;cultural norms&dquo; and all the &dquo;rationalizations&dquo; or &dquo;secondary arguments&dquo; produced by the natives were rejected in
favour of &dquo;unconscious tructures&dquo;, not to mention those passages where
the universality of the rule lying at the origins of exogamy is affirmed, the
concessions made here to &dquo;awareness of the rule&dquo;, and the dissociation from these
rigid systems, whose notion is completely theoretical, may come as a surprise,

as may this other passage taken from the same preface: &dquo;It is nonetheless true
that the empirical reality of so-called prescriptive systems only takes on its
full meaning when related to a theoretical mode worked out by the natives
themselves prior to ethnologists.&dquo;11; or again: &dquo;Those who practise them
know .fully that the spirit of such systems cannot be reduced to the tautological
proposition that each group obtains its women from ’givers’ and gives its
daughters to ’takers’. They are also aware that marriage with the matrilateral
cross cousin (mother’s brother’s daughter) provides the simplest illustration
of the rule, the form most likely to guarantee its survival. On the other hand,
marriage with the patrilateral cross cousin (father’s sister’s daughter)
would violate it irrevocably&dquo; 15. One must mention, here, a passage in which
-

11.

-

C.

backs, 1969,
12.
13.

Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship, London, Social science
p. 33 (my italics).

Ibid.
C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural

anthropology, London,

Allen Lane,

1968, p. 34.
14.
15.

Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship, op. cit., p. 32.
Ibid.

paper-

Penguin Press,


62

Wittgenstein enumerates all the questions evaded by structural anthropology
and doubtless, more generally, by all intellectualism, which transfers the objective truth established by science into a practice which excludes the disposition
which would make it possible to establish this truth 16 :&dquo;What do I call the
rule by which he proceeds? The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use of
words; or the rule which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he
gives us in reply if we ask him what his rule is? But if observation does not
enable us to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light ? For he
did indeed give me a definition when I asked him what he understood by ’N’;
but he was prepared to withdraw and alter it. So, how am I to determine the
rule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself. Or, to
ask a better question: What meaning is the expression ’the rule according to
which he acts’ supposed to have left in it here?&dquo; 11 To consider regularity,
i. e. what recurs with a certain statistically measurable freguency, as the product

of a consciously laid-down and consciously respected regulation (so having
to explain both their genesis and their effectiveness), or else as the product
of the ullconsciolls regulation of some mysterious cerebral and social mechanism, is to slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model: &dquo;Take
the example of the difference between ’the train is regularly two minutes late’
and ’as a rule the train is two minutes late’: [...]in the latter case it is suggested that the fact that the train is two minutes late is the result of a policy or
plan [...]I Rules relate to plans and policies, while regularities do not [...]To
claim that there ought to be rules in natural language amounts to claiming
that roads ought to be red because they correspond to the red lines on a map&dquo; 18.
All sociological statements should be preceded by a sign announcing &dquo;it is
as if&dquo; and should function in the same way as quantifiers in logic, which would
continually remind us of the epistemological status of the constructed concepts
of objective science. Everything conspires to encourage the reification of
concepts, beginning with the logic of ordinary language, which is inclined to
infer the substance from the substantive or to award to concepts the power
to act in history in the same way as the words designating them act in the sentences of historical discourse, that is as historical subjects. As Wittgenstein
remarked, one has only to slip from the adverb &dquo;unconsciously&dquo; (&dquo;unconsciously I have a toothache&dquo;) to the substantive &dquo;unconscious&dquo;, or to a certain usage of the adjective &dquo;unconscious&dquo; (as in &dquo;I have an unconscious toothache&dquo;) in order to produce prodigies of metaphysical profundity 19. Simi16. This is an unwarranted transfer of the same type as that which, according to Merleaucf M. Merleau(
Ponty, generates the intellectualist and the empiricist errors in psychology .
Ponty, La structure du comportement, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949, esp. p.
124, 135).
17. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1963,
pp. 38-39.
18. P.

Ziff, Semantic analysis, New York, Cornell University Press, 1960, p. 38.
Wittgenstein, Le cahier bleu et le cahier brun, études préliminaires aux investigations philosophiques, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 57-58.
19.

L.

63

larly, one can observe the theoretical (and political) effects capable of being
engendered by the personification of collectives (in such sentences as &dquo;the
bourgeoisie thinks that...&dquo; or &dquo;the working class rejects...&dquo;) which amounts
to an assertion of the existence of

a group or class &dquo;collective consciousness&dquo; :
institutions
with dispositions that can only arise in
by crediting groups
individual consciousness, even if they are the product of collective conditions,
such as the awakening of consciousness of class interests, one gets out of analyzing these conditions and those, in particular, which determine the degree
of objective and subjective homogeneity of the group under consideration and
the degree of consciousness among its members.
The paralogism underlying legalism consists in implicitly placing in the
consciousness of individual agents the theoretical knowledge which can only
be constructed and conquered against practical experience; in other terms,
it consists in conferring the value of an anthropological description upon a
theoretical model constructed in order to account for practices. The theory
of action as simple execution of a model (in the dual sense of norm and of
scientific construction) is only one example among many of the imaginary
anthropology engendered by objectivism when, taking, as Marx puts it, &dquo;the
things of logic for the logic of things&dquo;, it turns the objective meaning of practices or works into the subjective purpose of the activity of the producers of
these practices or works, with its impossible homo economicus subjecting his
decision-making to rational calculation, its actors carrying out roles or acting
in conformity with models, or its speakers selecting from among phonemes.

or

~
’

1
’

Structures, habitus

and

practices

.

It is necessary to go beyond methodical objectivism, which constitutes a
necessary phase in all research, as a tool facilitating the break with primary
experience and as an instrument for the construction of objective relations.
To escape from the realism of the structure, which treats systems of objective
relations as substances by converting them into wholes already constituted
outside of the history of the individual and the history of the group, it is both
necessary and sufficient to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi,
from statistical regularity or from algebraic structure to the principle of the
production of this observed order: the construction of the theory of practice
or, more precisely, of the mode of generation of practices, is the condition of
the construction of an experimental science of the dialectic of internality and
externality, that is, of the ititet-iializatioti of externality and of the extertiali.:atiof2 of internality. The structures of a particular type of environment (e.g.
the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition), which
may be grasped empirically in the form of the regularities associated with
a socially structured environment, produce habitus, systems of durable dis-

64

positions 2°, structured

structures predisposed to function as structuring structprinciple of the generation and structuration of practices and
representations. Consequently, these can be objectively &dquo;regulated&dquo; and
&dquo;regular&dquo; without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their purposes without presupposing any conscious aiming
of ends and an express mastery of those operations leading to these ends and,
. being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of a conductures, i.e.

as

the

or’s orchestrating action.
Even when they appear to be determined by the future, that is, by the explicit
and explicitly stated - purpose of a project or plan, the practices produced
by the habitus, as the generating principle of strategies enabling one to cope
with unforeseen and ever-changing situations, are determined by the implicit
anticipation of their consequences; being determined by the past conditions
of the production of their principle of production, they always tend to reproduce the objective structures of which they are, in the last analysis, the product.
Thus, for example, in the interaction between two agents or groups of agents
possessing the same habitus (say A and B), it is as if the actions of each of them
(say, alfor A) were organized in relation to the reactions they would call forth
in any agent possessing the same habitus (say bl, B’s reaction to al) in such a
way that they objectively anticipate the reaction which these reactions call
forth in turn (say a2, the reaction to bl). Nothing could be more naive,
however, than to accept the teleological description according to which each
action (say, al) was designed to make possible the reaction to the reaction

it provoked (say a2 as reaction to bl). The habitus generates a sequence of
&dquo;moves&dquo; which are objectively organized as strategies without in any way being
the product of a true strategic intention (which would suppose, for example,
that they be perceived as one strategy among several possible strategies).
We cannot exclude the possibility that the habitus’ responses may be accompanied by a strategic calculation tending to carry out, quasi-consciously,
what the habitus carries out in another manner, namely an estimate of the
chances based on the transformation of the past effect into anticipated future
effect. These responses are nonetheless primarily related to a field of objective potentialities, immediately contained within the present, things to be
done or not to be done, to be said or not said, which, as opposed to the future
as &dquo;absolute possibility&dquo; (absolute Möglichkeit), in Hegel’s sense, projected
by the pure project of a &dquo;negative liberty&dquo;, has an urgency and a claim to
existence excluding all deliberation. Symbolic, that is, conrentional and conditional stimuli, which only act upon agents conditioned to perceive them, tend
to impose themselves unconditionally and necessarily when inculcation of
-

20. The word "disposition" seems particularly appropriate for expressing what is covered by the concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions): firstly, it expresses the
result of an organizing action, having a meaning very close to such words as structure; furthermore, it designates a manner of being, an habitual state (in particular, concerning the body)
and, especially, a predisposition, a tendency, a propensity or an inclination.


65

the arbitrary abolishes the arbitrariness of the inculcation and of the significations inculcated: the world of emergencies, of goals already achieved, of
objects possessing a &dquo;permanently teleological character&dquo;, as Husserl puts it,
such as tools, of paths already marked out, of values transformed into things,
which is that of practice can allow only a conditional freedom - liberet si
liceret
rather similar to that of the magnetic needle which, as Leibniz imagined it, actually enjoyed pointing northwards. One regularly observes a very
close relationship between scientifically constructed objective probabilities (e. g.
opportunities of access to higher education or to museums, etc.) and subjective aspirations (&dquo;motivations&dquo;) : this is not so because agents consciously

adjust their aspirations to a precise evaluation of their chances of success the
way a gambler might modify his bets as a function of perfect information
as we assume implicitly when, forgetting
regarding his chances of winning
the &dquo;it is as if&dquo;, we act as if the game theory or the calculus of probabilities,
both of them constructed against spontaneous dispositions, amounted to
anthropological descriptions of practice. Completely reversing the tendency
of objectivism, we can, on the contrary, seek in the rules of the scientific construction of probabilities or strategies, not an anthropological model of practice, but rather a negative description of the implicit tendencies of the spontaneous strategy or statistics, which they necessarily imply, since they are explicitly constructed against these implicit tendencies (e.g. the propensity to
ascribe an exaggerated importance to primary experiences). Unlike the
scientific calculus of probabilities that is based on controlled experiments
and on data established according to precise rules, the subjective evaluation
of a specific action’s chances of success in a specific situation brings into play
a whole body of semi-formalized wisdom, dicta, commonplaces, ethical precepts (&dquo;that’s not for us&dquo;) and, more profoundly, the unconscious principles
of the ethos, a general and transposable disposition which, being the product
of a learning dominated by a specific type of objective regularity, determines
&dquo;reasonable&dquo; or &dquo;unreasonable&dquo; behaviour for any agent subject to these
regularities 21. &dquo;We are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of
satisfying any desire&dquo;, said approximately Hume, in his Treatise on human
nature, &dquo;than desire itself vanishes&dquo;. And Marx in the Gl1mdrisse: &dquo;Whatin the sense
ever I am, if I have no money to travel, then I have no need
I am, if I
of
satisfied.
Whatever
of a real need to travel
capable
being
feel an urge to study but I have no money to pay for my studies, then I have no
urge to study, that is no effective, true urge.&dquo; Practices may be objectively
-

-

-

-

-

which sometimes excludes doubt
21. "We call this subjective, variable probability
and engenders certainty sui generis and which, at other times appears as no more than a vague
glimmer
philosophical probability because it refers to the exercise of the higher faculty
whereby we comprehend the order and the rationality of things. All reasonable men have
a confused notion of similar probabilities; this then determines, or at least justifies, those
unshakable beliefs we call common sense" (A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de la connaissance et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique, Paris, Hachette, 1922, p. 70).
—

—


66

to objective chances without the agents having to carry out the slightest
calculation, nor even a more or less conscious estimate of the chances of success:
so, it is as if the a posteriori or e.~ post probability of an event, which is known as
a result of past experience, would determine the a priori or ex ante probability

adjusted

subjectively ascribed to it. Because the dispositions durably inculcated by the
objective conditions (which science perceives through statistical regularities as
probabilities objectively attached to a group or a class) gives rise to aspirations
and practices that are objectively compatible with these objective conditions and,
to some extent, preadapted to their objective requirements, the most improbable

events are

able,
by refusing
or

at the cost

excluded, either without even being examined, as unthinkof a double negation tending to make a virtue out of necessity

what is anyway refused and loving the inevitable. The very
conditions of the production of the ethos, a virtue fumed into necessity, are
such that the anticipations arising out of it tend to ignore the restriction to
which the validity of any calculus of probabilities is subject, namely that
the conditions of the experiment should not have been modified. Unlike
scientific estimates, which are corrected, following each experiment, according
to rigourous rules, practical estimates ascribe a disproportionate weight to
primary experiments: the characteristic structures of a determinate type of
conditions of existence, through the mediation of the economic and social
necessity which they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous universe of
family relationship, or better, through the mediation of specifically familial
manifestations of this external necessity (e. g. taboos, worries, lessons in morality, conflicts, tastes, etc.), produce the habitus structures which, in turn, generate the perception and appreciation of all further experience.
Finally, as

a result of the effect of hysteresis necessarily entailed in the logic of the genesis
of habitus, practices are always exposed to negative sanctions, hence to a
&dquo;secondary negative reinforcement&dquo;, when the environment with which
they are in fact confronted differs too widely from the environment to which
they are objectively adjusted. It is understandable, in the same logic, that
generation conflicts oppose, not age classes separated by natural properties,
but classes of habitus produced according to different modes of generation:
by instilling different definitions of what is impossible, possible, probable
and certain, the conditions of existence cause one group to experience as natural or reasonable the same practices or aspirations which the other group finds
unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa.
In other words, one must abandon all those theories which, explicitly or
implicitly, treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by
antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the functioning of pre-established mechanisms, &dquo;models&dquo;, &dquo;norms&dquo; or &dquo;roles&dquo;; if not, one is supposed
to assume that these mechanisms exist in infinite number, as the fortuitous
configurations of stimuli capable of releasing them from the outside, thus being
condemned to the kind of grandiose and desperate enterprise undertaken by
the anthropologist who, armed with fine positivist courage, recorded 480 ele-


67

mentary units of behaviour in twenty minutes of observation of his wife in
the kitchen ~~. But, the rejection of mechanistic theories in no way implies

that, according to the traditional opposition between objectivism and subjectivism, we bestow upon some free and creative will the free and arbitrary
power to produce, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projecting
the goals aiming at its transformation. Nor does it mean that we reduce the
objective intentions and constituted significations of human actions and works
to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors.
and the same time, necessary and relatively autonomous

Practice is, at
reference to
the situation considered in its precise immediacy, because it is the product
of the dialectical relationship between a situation and a habitus, understood
as a system of durable and transposable dispositions which, integrating all
past experiences, functions as a matrix of perceptions, of appreciations and
actions, making possible the accomplishment of an infinite variety of tasks,
thanks to analogical transfers of schemes, practical metaphors, in the strictest
sense of the term, which permit the resolution of problems having the same
form, and thanks to incessant correction of the results obtained, that these
results dialectically produce. As the durably generating principle of regulated improvisations (principium importans ordillem ad actllll1 , as the scholastics put it), the habitus produces practices which tend to reproduce the
regularities inserted in the objective conditions of the production of their
generating principle, .while adjusting to the demands inserted as objective
potentialities in the situation directly being confronted. Hence it follows
that the practices can directly be deduced neither from the objective conditions,
defined as the instantaneous sum of the stimuli which may appear directly
to have set them in motion, nor from the conditions which produced the lasting principle of their production. Consequently, we can only explain these
practices if we relate the objective structure defining the social conditions
of production of the habitus which engendered them to the conditions of the
operation of this habitus, that is, if we relate the former to the conjuncture
which, except when these conditions have been radically transformed, represents a particular state of this structure. The habitus is capable of functioning
as an operator which accomplishes practically this relating of these two systems of relations in and by the production of practice, because it is history
transformed into nature, that is to say, denied as such because turned into
second nature; the &dquo;unconscious&dquo; is never anything more than the forgetting
one

by

22. "Here we confront the distressing fact that the sample episode chain under analysis

is a fragment of a larger segment of behavior which in the complete record contains some 480
separate episodes. Moreover, it took only twenty minutes for these 480 behavior stream
events to occur. If my wife’s rate of behavior is roughly representative of that of other actors,
we must be prepared to deal with an inventory of episodes produced at the rate of some
20 000 per sixteen-hour day [...]
In a population consisting of several hundred actor-types,
the number of different episodes in the total repertory must amount to many millions during
the course of an annual cycle" (M. Harris, The nature of cultural things, New York, Random

House, 1964, pp. 74-75).


68

history itself produces by incorporating the objective
quasi-natures, the habitus: &dquo;Inside each one
of us, in varying proportions, there exists part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts
to little as compared with the long past, in the course of which we were formof the

history

which

structures in the form of these

ed and from which we result. But we do not sense this man from the past,
since he is so much a part of us ; he is the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently, we do not take him into account, anymore than we take account
of his legitimate requirements. On the contrary, we are very much aware
of the most recent acquisitions of civilization since, being recent, they have
not yet had time to settle into our unconscious&dquo;23. Amnesia of the genesis,

one of the paradoxical effects of history, is encouraged, also, (if not entailed)
by objectivist perception: comprehending the product of history as opus
operatum and placing itself before the fait accompli, objectivism has to invoke
the mysteries of pre-established harmony or the prodigies of conscious concertation in order to account for what, perceived purely synchronically, appears
as the objective meaning, whether it be the internal coherence of works or of
such institutions as myths, rites or laws or the objective concertation both
manifested and presupposed (insofar as they entail a community of repertoires)
by the concordant or even conflicting practices of members of the same group
or class.
The fallacy of objectivism is the consequence of the complete failure to analyse the dual process of internalization and externalization or, more
precisely, the production of objectively concerted habitus, hence apt and inclined to produce practices and works which are, themselves, objectively concerted.
g
Because the
h identity
.d
of[ the
h conditions
d..
off.
existence tends to produce similar
least
of
(at
partially so) systems
dispositions, the resulting (relative) homogeof
habitus
an
neity
generates
objective harmonization of practices and works

conferring upon them the regularity as well as the objectivity which define
their specific &dquo;rationality&dquo; and which result in their being experienced as
evident or taken for granted : they are seen as immediately intelligible and
predictable by all agents possessing practical mastery of the system of schemes
of action and interpretation objectively implied in their accomplishment and
by those alone; that is by all those who, like the members of the same group
or class, are products of identical objective conditions, which exercice a llniversalizing aiid pa;ticulari=iiig effect insofar as they only homogenize the members of a group by distinguishing them from all the others. As long as we
ignore the true principle of this conductorless orchestration, which confers
regularity, unity and systematicity upon the practices of a group or class,
and that in the absence of any spontaneous or imposed organization of individual projects, we condemn ourselves to the kind of naive artificialism which
recognizes no unifying principle of ordinary or extraordinary activity of a
.

23.

E.

d

d..1

L’évolution pédagogique en France, Paris, Alcan, 1938, p.
Durkheim,

16.


69

group or class other than the conscious and meditated concertation found

in conspiracies. In this way, some may deny, with no other proof than their
own fashionable impressions, the unity of the ruling class and challenge those
who hold the opposite view to establish empirical proof, that the members
of the ruling class have an explicit policy, expressly imposed by explicit concertation. 2~. Others, who at least provide an explicit and systematic formulation
of this naive representation of collective action, transpose the archetypal
question of the philosophy of consciousness to the level of the group, and turn
awakening of class consciousness into a sort of revolutionary cogito, this alone
being considered capable of bringing the class into existence, by constituting
it as a &dquo;class for-itself&dquo; ( &dquo;Classe pour soi &dquo;) 25.
The objective harmonization of group or class habitus results in the fact
that practices can be objectively attuned without any direct interaction and,
a fortiori, in the absence of any explicit concertation. &dquo;Imagine, suggested
Leibniz, two clocks in perfect agreement as to the time. This may occur in
three ways. The first consists in mutual influence; the second in assigning
to each a skillful worker who would correct them and synchronize them
continually; the third way would be to construct the two clocks with such art
and precision that one could be assured of their subsequent agreement&dquo; 26.
By systematically retaining only the first, or at the most, the second of these
hypotheses when one casts a party or charismatic leader in the role of Deus
ex machina
one ignores the surest foundation of the integration of groups
or classes: the practices of members of the same group or class are always
more and better attuned than the agents themselves know or would have it,
-

-

24. "As for the margin of autonomy enjoyed by political personnel with regard to the
industrial leadership, it is neither fixed, once and for all in any given country, nor is it the
I challenge Meynaud to account for the vicissitudes

same in different domains of activity.
of the French decolonization process in terms of the influence exercized by capitalists
(some were colonialists, others anticolonialists). And I am sure he will be unable to
explain General De Gaulle’s diplomacy in terms of the influence of M. Villiers, or of
the French Employers’ Council." (R. Aron, "Catégories dirigeantes ou classe dirigeante?", Revue française de science politique 15 (1), feb. 1965, p. 24.) From his long
"demonstration" of the governing class’s unconsciousness, and incoherence, we shall
merely quote a few passages: "One of my disappointments has been to observe that those
who, according to the Marxist representation of the world, determine the course of events,
most often have no political conceptions [...] I have met a number of representatives of
this ’damned race’, I have never known them to hold resolute, or unanimous, opinions concerning the policy to be adopted [...]the capitalists themselves were divided. I have discoamong ’monopolists’, or ’big capitalists’, uncertainties, doubts and quarrels which
aired in public, in the press, and in Parliament. In order to imagine that it is they who
have directed French policy, I would have to assume that some among them were able to
impose their policies [...] In most of the cases I have been able to observe directly, the representatives of big capitalism are less politically motivated than is generally believed" (R. Aron,

vered,
were

Démocratie et totalitarisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 145-149).
25. See Appendix.
26. G. W. Leibniz, "Second éclaircissement du système de la communication des substances", p. 548 in: P. Janet (ed.), Oeuvres philosophiques (vol. 2), Paris, de Lagrange, 1866.

;
/


70

because, as Leibniz says, &dquo;by only obeying its own laws&dquo;, each &dquo;nonetheless
is attuned to the other&dquo; 27. The habitus is nothing either than this immanent
law, lex iiisita deposited in each agent by his basic education, which is not only

the condition of the concertation of practices but also of practices of concertation : the rectifications and adjustments consciously carried out by the
agents presuppose the mastery of a common code, and attempts at collective
mobilization cannot succeed without a minimum of agreement between the
habitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g. prophet or party leader, etc.) and the
dispositions of those whose aspirations they attempt to express. Far from the
concertation of practices always being the product of concertation, one of
the prime functions of the orchestration of habitus might be to allow a saving
in &dquo;intention&dquo; and in the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo; by making
possible a kind of practical behaviourism which, in most situations in life,
dispenses with close analysis of the nuances of someone else’s conduct or with
direct investigation of his intentions (&dquo;What do you mean ?&dquo;): just as someone
who posts a letter supposes simply, as Schutz has shown, that anonymous
employees will conduct themselves anonymously, in conformity with his anonymous intention, in the same way someone who accepts money as an instrument of exchange implicitly takes into account, as Weber shows, the chances
that other agents will agree to recognize its function. Automatic and impersonal,
significant without intending to signify, the ordinary conduct of life lends
itself to a no less automatic and impersonal decoding: the decoding of the
objective intention which they express in no way requires the &dquo;reactivation&dquo;
of the intention &dquo;experienced&dquo; by the person who accomplishes this conduct ~e.
Each agent is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning: because
his actions are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer
and of which he does not possess conscious mastery, they contain an &dquo;objective intention&dquo;, as the scholastics say, which always exceeds his conscious
intentions. Thus, just as is shown by Gelb and Goldstein, certain aphasics
who have lost the power to evoke the word or notion called forth by the meaning, may pronounce, as though inadvertently, formulae in which they only
later recognize the response called for, so the internalized schemes of thought
and expression make possible the intentionless invention of regulated improvisation whose points of departure and support lie in ready-made &dquo;formulae&dquo;,
such as word-pairs or contrasting images 29: continually overtaken by his
Ibid.
It is one of the merits of subjectivism and moralism that it demonstrates, per
absurdum, in analyses in which it condemns actions subject to the world’s objective sollicitations as unauthentic (whether Heideggerian analyses of daily existence and of "das Man"
or Sartrean analyses of "the spirit of serious-mindedness"), the impossibility of the "authentic"

existence which would gather into a project of liberty all the pre-given significations and ob
jective determinations.
29. If it did not constitute a rudimentary, hence economic and practical form, thought
in terms of couples would probably be less frequent in ordinary language and, even in scholarly language, beginning with the language of anthropologists, still dominated by numerous
27.
28.


71

words, with which he carries on a relationship of &dquo;carry and be carried&dquo;,
Nicolai Hartmann puts it, the virtuoso discovers, in the opus operatum,
new cues and new supports for the modus operandi of which it is the product,
in such a way that his discourse continuously feeds off itself like a train bringing along its own rails 3°. Witticisms surprise their author no less than their
audience and they ~mpress as much by their retrospective necessity as by their
novelty, because the discovery appears as the simple revelation, both fortuitous and ineluctable, of a possibility immanent in the structures of language.
It is because subjects do not, properly speaking, know what they are doing
that what they are doing has more meaning than they suspect. The habitus
is the universalizing mediation which makes practices that have neither explicit
reason nor significant intention &dquo;sensible&dquo;, &dquo;reasonable&dquo; and objectively
orchestrated: that part of practices which remains obscure in the eyes of
their own producers is the aspect whereby they are objectively adjusted to
the other practices and structures of which the principle of their own production is, itself, the product. In order to be finished with chitchat concerning
the &dquo;comprehension&dquo; which constitutes the last resort of those who defend
the rights of subjectivity against the &dquo;reductive&dquo; imperialism of the human
sciences, we have only to recall that the decoding of the objective intention
of practices and works has nothing to do with the &dquo;reproduction&dquo; (Nachbildung, as the early Dilthey put it) of subjective experiences and the reconstitution, useless and uncertain, of the personal singularities of an &dquo;intention&dquo;
which did not actually generate them.
Because they are the product of dispositions which, being the internalization of the same objective structures, are objectively concerted, the practices
of the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, of the same

class, possess an objective meaning that is both unitary and systematic,
transcending subjective intentions and conscious individual or collective projects 31 : in other words, the process of objectification cannot be described in
the language of interaction and mutual adjustment, because the interaction itself
owes its form to the objective structures which produced the dispositions of
own

as

false dichotomies, such as the individual and society, personality and culture, community
and society, "folk" and "urban", etc., which are just as inadequate as the most traditional

philosophical dichotomies, such as matter and spirit, body and soul, theory and practice, etc.
cf R. Bendix and P. Berger, "Images of society and problems of concept formation in socio(
.
logy", pp. 92-118 in: L. Gross (ed.), Symposium on sociological theory, New York, Harper
and Row, 1959.
30. R. Ruyer, Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l’automatisme, Paris, A. Michel,
19G6, p. 136.
31. Were this language not otherwise dangerous, one would be tempted
to say, against all forms of subjectivist voluntarism, that the unity of a class fundamentally rests
upon the "class unconscious": "consciousness" is not an originating act which would constitute the class in an effulgence of freedom; its only effectiveness, as in all actions of symbolic
duplication, comes from the extent to which it brings everything that is implicitly assumed
concerning the unconscious mode in the class habitus to the conscious level.


72

the interacting agents and which assign them their relative positions in the
interaction and elsewhere. The apparently limitless universe of theories of
acculturation and cultural contacts can be reduced to an opposition between

the realism of ideas and the realism of the sensible. The first category of
theories treat cultural or linguistic changes as the result of contacts between
cultures and languages, subject to laws which are generic as the law of the
restructuring of borrowings or specific as those established by the analysis
of the structures specific to the languages or cultures in contact. The realism
of the sensible emphasizes contacts between the societies involved (in the sense
of populations, reducible to a set of individuals) and ignores most of the time
even the objective structure of the relations between the societies confronting
each other (domination, etc.). In fact, in every singular confrontation between
two individual agents or groups (e.g. boss giving orders to a subordinate,
colleagues talking about their pupils, intellectuals taking part in a symposium, etc.), that is in every interaction structured by the objective structure
of the relationship between the corresponding groups (e.g. colonizer and colonized), generic habitus (borne by biological individuals) are confronted:
interaction occurs between systems of dispositions, such as linguistic competence and cultural competence and, through this habitus, all the objective
structures of which they are the product and, in particular, the structures of
the systems of symbolic relations, such as language. In this way, the structures of the phonological systems involved are only active (as is witnessed, for
example, by the accent of non-native users of the dominant language) if they
are incorporated into a competence acquired in the course of an individual
history (the different kinds of bilinguism being the result of different modes
of acquisition) within a learning process which implies a selective deafness
and systematic restructuring operations.
To speak of class habitus (or of &dquo;culture&dquo;, in the sense of cultural competence acquired within a homogeneous group) is, then, a reminder against all
forms of the occasionalist illusion which consists in directly relating practices
to the properties contained in the situation: &dquo;interpersonal&dquo; relations are
never, except in appearance, individual to individual relationships and the truth
of the interaction never completely resides in the interaction itself. Social
psychology, interactionism and ethnomethodology forget this when, reducing the objective structure of the relationship between individuals brought
together to the conjunctural structure of their interaction in a particular situation and group, they propose to explain everything that occurs in an experimental or observed interaction by the experimentally controlled characteristics of
the situation, such as the relative position in space of the participants or the
nature of the channels utilized. It is their past and present position in the
social structure which biological individuals carry with them, at all times and

in all places, in the form of the habitus. The dispositions are seen as signs
off social positions and, hence, of the social distance between objective positions, or, to put it another way, between the social persons conjuncturally


73

brought together (in physical

space, which is not the same thing as social
reminders of this distance and of the conduct necessary to strategically manipulate social distances symbolically or in reality, to shorten them
(which is easier for the dominating agent than for the dominated) or to increase
them or, quite simply, to maintain them (by avoiding &dquo;permitting familiarities&dquo;, in short, by &dquo;standing on one’s dignity&dquo;, or, conversely, by avoiding
&dquo;taking liberties&dquo; and, in other words, by &dquo;staying in one’s place&dquo;).
Even those forms of interaction most apparently susceptible to description
in terms of the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo;, such as sympathy, friendship or love, are dominated through the mediation of the harmony of habitus
and taste
doubtless sensed in the imperceptible
or, more precisely, of
indices of bodily
by the objective structure of the relations between
conditions and positions, as is confirmed by class homogamy. The illusion
of elective aflinity or mutual predestination arises out of ignorance of the social
conditions of the harmony of aesthetic tastes or ethical inclinations, thus perceived as a proof of the ineffable afhnities it originates. In short, the habitus,
a product of history, produces individual and collective practices, hence
history, in conformity with the generative schemes generated by history. More
precisely, as a past which has survived into the present and which tends to
perpetuate itself into the future by generating practices structured in accordance with its principles, as the internal law through which the law of
external necessities
irreducible to the immediate constraints of the circumstances
continually operates, the habitus generates on the one hand

the continuity and the regularity which objectivism observes in the social
world without being able to present a rational explanation for them, and,
on the other hand, the regulated transformations and revolutions which neither the extrinsic and instantaneous determinisms of mechanistic sociologism
nor the purely internal
though equally punctual determination of voluntarist or spontaneist subjectivism are capable of accounting for.
It is just as true, and just as untrue to say that collective actions produce
the event or that they are the product of the event: in fact they are the product of a conjuncture that is, of the necessary conjunction of dispositions
and an objective event. For example, the conditional stimulation of the revolutionary conjuncture calls forth a determinate response on the part of all
those who perceive it as such, that is those who are disposed to perceive it
as such because they possess a determinate type of habitus, which may be
duplicated and reinforced by the awakening of class consciousness, that is,
the possession, direct or indirect, of a form of discourse capable of ensuring
symbolic mastery of the practically mastered principles of class habitus ~.

space) and

as

existethos

-

-

-

-

-

32. The illusion of free creation probably finds some of its justification in the characteristic circle of any conditional stimulation: habitus can only give rise to the type of response
objectively contained within its logic insofar as it bestows its effectiveness as a cue upon the
conjuncture by constituting it according to its own principles, in other words, by making
it exist as a question in reference to a particular manner of interrogating reality.


74

The conjuncture capable of transforming practices which are objectively coordinated because adapted to partially or totally identical objective necessities
into collective action is the product of the dialectical relationship between
the dispositions and the event. Without ever being totally coordinated, since
they are the product of &dquo;causal series&dquo; characterized by different structural
durations, the dispositions and the situation, which combine synchronically
in order to constitute a determinate conjuncture, are never totally independent,
since they are engendered by objective structures, that is, in the final analysis,
by the economic structures: the hysteresis of habitus, which is implied in the
logic of the process of reproduction of the structures within habitus, is one
of the foundations of the structural gap between opportunities and the disposition to grasp them which leads to missed opportunities and, in particular,
to the incapacity to analyse historical crises according to categories of perception other than those of the past, even revolutionary ones.
So, the objective structures are products of historical practices continuously
reproduced (with or without transformations) by historical practices whose
productive principle is, itself, the product of structures which, because of
this, it tends to reproduce. When one is unaware of the dialectical relationship
between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures
they produce and which tend to reproduce them, one has no choice but to
reduce the relationship between the different social agencies
seen as &dquo;different translations of the same sentence&dquo;, according to a Spinozist metaphor
to the logical formula which permits us to rediscover any one of them on the
basis of any other and to find the principle of the development of structures
in a kind of theoretical parthenogenesis, thus offering an unexpected revenge

to the Hegel of the Philosophy of history and to his Ti’eltgeist, who &dquo;develops
his unique nature&dquo; while always remaining identical to itself. As long as
one accepts the canonic opposition which continually reappears in new forms
throughout the history of social thought and today, for example, places the
&dquo;humanist&dquo; interpretations of the early Marx in opposition to &dquo;structuralist&dquo;
readings of Capital, one can only escape subjectivism by falling into fetishism
of social laws: by establishing the relationship of the potential to the actual,
of the musical score to the execution, of the essence to the existence, between
structure and practice, objectivism merely substitutes a man subjugated by
the dead laws of natural history for the creator man of subjectivism. The,
challenging of the indiridual, considered as ens realissimum, leads merely
to his being treated as an epiphenomenon of hypostasized structure, and the assertion of the primacy of objective relations leads to bestowing upon these products of human action
the power to develop according to
structures
their own laws and to determine, or to overdetermine, other structures. The
problem is not a new one, and the attempt to transcend the opposition between
subjectivism and objectivism always came up against that epistemological
obstacle, the individual, still capable of haunting the theory of history, even
when he is reduced, as with Engels, to the state of a molecule which, in its
-

-

-

-


75

relations with other molecules, in a kind of Brownian motion, produces an
objective meaning reducible to the mechanical composition of singular
chances 33.
Just as the opposition of language to speech as simple execution, or even
as preconstructed object, masks the opposition between the objective relations
of language and the dispositions of linguistic competence, so, the opposition
between structure and individual (against which structure has to be conquered,
and conquered over and over again), obstructs the construction of the dialectical relationship between the structures and the dispositions of the habitus.
The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation which
is necessary to make possible the reproduction of these products of collective
history: thanks to this work, objective structures (e.g. of language, economics, etc.) come to reproduce themselves, in the form of durable dispositions,
in all individual organisms (which one may call individuals) durably subjected
to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of
existence. In other words, sociology treats all those biological individuals
which, being the product of the same objective conditions, act as supports
for the same habitus, as identical: social class, as a system of objective relations, must be related, not to the individual or to the &dquo;class&dquo; as a population,
i.e. as the sum of enumerable and measurable biological individuals, but to
the class habitus as a system of dispositions which are (partially) common
to all the products of the same structures. If it is not possible that all members of the same class (or even two of them) can have had the same experiences in the same order, it is nonetheless clear that any member of the same class
has a greater chance than any member of another class of having found himself
confronted, either as an actor or as a witness, by those situations which are
most common for the members of that class. The objective structures, which
science grasps in the form of statistical regularities (for example, in the form
of rates of employment, of income curves, of chances of access to secondary
education, etc.) and which confer its physiognomy upon a collective landscape,
with its closed careers, its &dquo;inaccessible&dquo; positions, its &dquo;blocked horizons&dquo;,
inculcate, through convergent experiences, that kind of &dquo;art of evaluating
33. "History is made in such a way that the final result always emerges from the conflict
of a great number of individual wills, of which each one in turn is made what it is as the result
of a crowd of specific conditions of existence; in it, consequently, innumerable forces mutually

cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which one resultant
which may, in turn, be seen as the product of a force acting
the historical event
emerges
as a whole, unconsciously and blindly.
Because, what an individual desires is obstructed
by every other individual and what emerges is something that nobody wanted. In this way,
up till now, history has unfolded like a natural process and is also subject, in its entirety, to
the same laws of movement" (F. Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, sept. 21, 1890). "Men make
their history themselves, but, not, up till the present, with the collective will of an overall plan,
not even in a given, clearly delimited society. Their efforts cancel each other out and that
is precisely why necessity, completed and expressed by chance, reigns in all societies of this
type" (F. Engels, Letter to Hans Starkenburg, jan. 25, 1894).
—

—


76

likelihoods&dquo;, as Leibniz puts it, that is, of anticipating the objective forthcoming, in short, that sense of reality, or realities.
The relationship between class, habitus and organic individuality, which
can never entirely be removed from sociological discourse
insofar as being
immediately available to perception (intuitus personae), it is also socially
designated and recognized (name, legal person, etc.) and insofar as it is defined by a social trajectory irreducible to any other
can be expressed, at least
metaphorically, as those who use the notion of the unconscious sometimes
do implicitly, within the language of transcendental idealism. Considering
the habitus as a subjective, but not individual, system of internalized structures,

of perception, conception and action
schemes common to all the members
of the same group or class which constitutes the condition of all objectification
we are, in this perspective, brought to found the objective concertation
of practices and the uniqueness of the world view on the perfect impersonality
and substitutability of singular practices and views. But this amounts to
claiming that all practices or views produced by identical schemes are impersonal and interchangeable, in the manner of individual intuitions of space
which, according to Kant, reflect none of the peculiarities of the empirical
ego. In fact, the diversity within homogeneity, which is characteristic of the
-

-

-

-

individual habitus of the different members of the same class and which reflects
the diversity within the homogeneity of the social conditions of production
of these habitus, is based on the fundamental relationship of homology which
develops between the habitus of the members of a single group or class because
they are the product of the internalization of the same fundamental structures:
to employ Leibnizian language, the homology of world views correlative with
the identity of perceptual schemes does not exclude the systematic differences
and yet conseparating individual world views, developed from individual
certed
points of view.
Owing to the very logic of its genesis, the habitus is a chronologically ordered series of structures, a structure of definite rank specifying the structures
of lower rank (hence genetically antecedent), and structuring the higher ranking structures through the intermediary of its structuring action upon the
structured experiences which generate these structures : thus, for example,

the habitus acquired in the family gives its structure to school experiences
(and in particular to the reception and assimilation of the specifically educational message), the habitus transformed by scholastic action itself, in turn,
giving its structure to all subsequent experiences (for example, to the reception
and assimilation of messages produced and diffused by the cultural industry,
or professional experiences).
These experiences are integrated into the unity
of a systematic biography which is developed on the basis of the original situation of class, experienced in a determinate type of family structure. The
history of the individual is never any more than a certain specific case of the
collective history of his group or class and, in consequence, the systems of
individual dispositions are structural variants of the group or class habitus,
-

-


77

even in the differences which separate them and which
reflect the differences between trajectories and positions within, or outside
the class. &dquo;Personal&dquo; style, that is, the particular mark borne by all the products
of a single habitus, practices or works, is simply a deviation, itself regulated
and sometimes even codified, in relation to the style of a period or a class.
As such, it relates back to the common style, not only by its conformity, in
the manner of Phydias who, according to Hegel, had no &dquo;style&dquo;, but also
by the difference which makes the &dquo;style&dquo;.

systematically arranged

APPENDIX (note 25)

Sartre offers

ultra-subjectivist response to the ritual question underlying the endless
objectivism and subjectivism. Treating revolutionary consciousness as the
product of a kind of imaginary variation, he claims for it the power to create present meaning by creating the revolutionary future which negates it: &dquo;For it is necessary here to reverse
the common opinion and on the basis of what it is not, to acknowledge the harshness of a
situation or the sufferings it imposes, both of which are motives for conceiving another state
of affairs in which things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we can conceive a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and
that we decide that these are unbearable&dquo; (J.P. Sartre, Bering and nothingness, London,
Methuen, 1957, pp. 434-435). Having ignored or rejected the question of the economic
and social conditions of awakening of consciousness of economic and social conditions, Sartre
can put an absolute act of attribution of meaning, an &dquo;invention&dquo; or a conversion, at the
origin of action (J.P. Sartre, &dquo;R6ponse A Lefort&dquo;, Les temps modemes 89, apr. 1953, pp. 15711629). If the world of action is nothing other than an imaginary universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent upon the decrees of the consciousness which creates it
and hence totally void of objectivity, if it is moving because the subject chooses to be moved,
revolting because he chooses to be revolted, emotions, passions and actions are merely games,
of &dquo;bad faith&dquo; and of &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo;, sad farces in which one is both bad
actor and good audience: &dquo;It is not by chance that materialism is serious; it is not by chance
that it is found at all times and places as the favorite doctrine of the revolutionary. This
is because revolutionaries are serious. They come to know themselves first in terms of the world
which oppresses them [...] The serious man is ’of the world’ and has no resource in himself.
He does not even imagine any longer the possibility of getting out of the world [...]he is
in bad faith.&dquo; (Sartre, Beirrg and rrothirrgrress, op. cit., p. 580.) The same incapacity to treat
&dquo;seriousness&dquo; other than in the disapproved form of the &dquo;spirit of serious-mindedness&dquo;
can be seen in an analysis of emotion which, and this is significant, is separated by the Imaginary from the less radically subjectivist descriptions of The outline of a theory of emotions
(L’esquisse d’une theorie des émotions): &dquo;What will make me decide to choose the magical
aspect or the technical aspect of the world? It cannot be the world itself, for this in order
debate

over

an