From: "Hiro Saito" <hirosophy-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [BOU:]'objective class interest'
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2003 18:27:13 -0400


In his" What Makes a Social Class? On The Theoretical and Practical 
Existence Of Groups" in Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987), Bourdieu 
argued: "[W]e will say that a "class," be it social, sexual, ethnic, or 
otherwise, exists when there are agents capable of imposing themselves, as 
authorized to speak and act officially in its place and in its name, upon 
those who… recognize themselves as members of the class, and in doing so, 
confer upon it the only form of existence a group can possess" (15).

Bourdieu wouldn't deny the existence of objective structures (that exist 
independently of an agent's conception, as intransitive objects exist 
independently of transitive objects in the critical realist sense) that 
condition some agents' dispositions similarly; however, in the passage 
quoted above, Bourdieu seems to maintain that the delineation of class, a 
group of agents, is performative. That is, any "class" does not exist 
"objectively" (in the sense of existing independently of our conception a la 
Bhaskar) prior to its own naming; class comes into existence only when some 
people come to identify themselves with a certain category, such as 
"worker," "black," "woman," and so on. Thus, I would read Bourdieu as saying 
that "objective class interest" does not exist (in the ontological sense). 
If it did, it would be a retroactive construction after certain agents come 
to interpellate themselves as some kind of class members in order to make 
their struggle more effective...?

Oh well,
Hiro

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