Date: Tue, 09 May 2000 19:41:47 -0700
From: Gary Davis <philosophy-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: HAB: Habermas & Bourdieu




Bill Hord wrote (#24):

> One note:  G. Davis wrote:
>
> "Also: one a social scientist influenced by philosophy, the other a
> philosopher influenced by social science."
>
> Bourdieu's intellectual formation was in philosophy, then he turned to
> anthropology and sociology.

I didn't know that. Thanks. One would want, then, to understand what "turned to"
means metatheoretically or, further, philosophically (as philosophy is not
basically metatheory)

>  ....Habermas is a social theorist.

Not basically.

> Bourdieu writes:
>
> "I am loath to engage too insistently here in reflections on theory or
> method addressed simply to researchers: 'We do nothing but gloss one
> another,' as Montaigne used to say...."

Vigilance toward the relations and differences between theory and practice--doing
theory, theorizing practice, applying theory, adjusting practice--has been an
overt concern of Habermas since at least 1971, "Some Aspects of the Difficulties
of Linking Theory and Practice", _Theory & Practice_. Habermas doesn't believe
that a concentration on theory is simulacral; it has a manifoldly constructive
place outside of research.

> [Bourdieu continues] "....And even if it is a question of
> doing only that but in quite another mode, I would like to avoid
> pedantic disquisitions on hermeneutics or the 'ideal communication
> situation': ...."

Don't we all! How, though, does one distinguish discourse that is unreflexive
("pedantic....") from discourse that is genuinely exhibitive of very difficult
cross-disciplinary issues? Does one avoid difficulty because something else is
easier (the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight because it's easer
to see there)? Of course not. Someone who worries about being too theoretical,
but simultaneously distances himself from hermeneutics just doesn't know much
about hermeneutics. Likewise with practical standards of idealized communication.
This is extremely pertinent to reflexive practice, and central to Habermas' work.

> "....indeed, I believe there is no more real or more realistic
> way of exploring communication in general than by focusing on the
> simultaneously practical and theoretical problems that emerge from the
> particular interaction between the investigator and the person being
> questioned."

But research--Bourdieu's context here--without a tacit theory of communicative
action cannot assess its focusing, obvously, so an overt, fallible theory of
communicative action that proposes a conceptual basis for assessing the problems
of interaction, relative to differentiations of intentionality, normativity, and
beliefs is desirable. Also, a focus that is less motivated by problems than by
*interests* provides a more genuine promise for "exploring".

> "Many decades of empirical research in all its forms, from ethnography
> to sociology and from the so-called closed questionnaire to the most
> open-ended interview,...."

--which *does* suggest a more open-ended sense of exploring than his sense above
of what's most "realistic"---

> "....have convinced me that the adequate scentific
> expression of this practice is .... to make explicit the intentions and the
> procedural principles that we put into practice in the research project
> that we present here. ..."

But, while making-explicit--theorizing practice or a reflexivity of practice--is
necessary for adequate scientific practice, it's not itself "the" adequate
"expression of this practice," which, after all, is primarily interested in
learning something *new*, beyond basically according conception with action
(which is biased toward corroborative results). Ironically, many mis-readers of
Habermas believe that he fosters top-down research, such as Bordieu connotes
above. In fact, though, the difference between reflective (critical),
interpretive (openly practical) and empirical (model-theoretic) dispositions is
fundamental to Habermas' sense of science.

> "....The reader will thus be able to reproduce in the
> reading of the texts the work of both construction and understanding
> that produced them."

So, an hermeneutical reception is anticipated for the *product* of research. But
is hermeneutical receptivity inherent to practice itself for Bordieu? Does
Bordieu work top-down after all, while polemicizing the *other* for doing this?
Is the "materiality" of his field inevitable?

> [Bourdieu's] text goes on to present in fairly close detail the considerations
> that went into the various interviews that contributed to the
> understanding constructed and presented in the published book.  For
> Bourdieu, this is precisely where methodological reflexivity is
> essential.

I agree.

> Bourdieu has contrasted his field theory of the social world with
> Luhmann's systems theory by asserting the role of agents in producing
> social realities through their practices.  In the process of living
> through a set of embodied practices (habitus) that is both constructed
> by and constructs social fields and positions in social fields, social
> agents employ an infinite number of "infinitely subtle strategies" to
> pursue the objective interests.

The keywords here seem to be: 'social,' 'strategies,' and 'objective'. This
accords with quotation of Bordieu in an earlier posting, which appeared social
structuralist, possibly occluding the dimensions of subjectivity and normativity
(which becomes systematized as "field" and "structure").

> Bourdieu also insists that for the most
> part in practice objective interests must be misrecognized.

"Must"? This accords with a top-down sense of research that tends to corroborate
what it expects to find (and if you don't recognize this, you're
misrecognizing---as Marxists say that, if you don't believe you're alienated,
then that just proves your class unconsciousness; so, alienation is corroborated,
whatever appears to be the case).

> (An
> example: Bourdieyu found that in Kabyle society (Algeria) economic
> exchange was often 'misrecognized' as gift giving.  This misrecognition
> depends on allowing a sufficient time between a gift and a
> gift-in-return.)

So, the history of gift-giving was basically unconscious of its materiality?
Culturally extended significance of the gift-as-reciprocity is "sufficient time"
to forget what it really was, despite history? Economics is the hidden destiny of
the sacred? Bring on the tourists! It's what the natives really desire.

> Now, Bourdieu recognizes that while the social agent in the object
> domain will employ a battery of strategies to hide or misrecognize
> everyday practices that correspond to a social structure (described as
> fields, relations between positions in fields, and the embodied pracices
> of the agents), thus making social ressearch more challenging than a
> simple matter of asking questions and receiving answers, the researcher
> herself, as a social agent herself, is similarly located.  And the fact

> that one has gone through a disciplined course of study does not
> automatically and objectively certify that one is removed from the
> social world of embodied practices.

Indeed. Becoming an *experienced* researcher is more important.

> In fact, the case is exactly
> opposite.  By going through extensive training in scientific practices,
> the researcher has much more invested in the social strucutre itself,

This appears to confuse the social structure of research (which is supposed to be
inherently critical) and the social structure of average everydayness (which
widely varies according to degrees of individual development and cultural
modernity); issues of cultural relativity are part of good science, while this is
not the case for pre-reflective daily life or the taken-for-valid lifeworld.

>
> but with a different "illusio" (misrecognition), namely, the illusio of
> scientific objectivity itself.

But this delusory prospect is a basic caveat of *normal* science's critical
dimension. Habermas' articulate sense of systematically distorted communication
and the innately reflexive character of discursive practice provides a basis for
constructive critique beyond the old polemic against scientism.

> For these reasons, that misrecognition of scientific objectivity hides
> the interested practice of constructing social subjects through
> imposition of the researcher's "point of view" onto acting social
> agents, Bourdieu writes quite a bit in every text about how he and his
> colleagues put methodological reflexivity into practice.

Thereby exhibiting the problem of reflexivity that also appears in formulations
about that reflexivity?

> I think this
> is how 'reflexivity' has a precise meaning for Bourdieu ...

I take you at your word.

> ...that it doesn't
> have for Habermas, or for Dewey, or for other theorists who use this
> word or its cognates in their own theorising.

I agree!

> (I mean their meanings,
> even if precise, are different.)

True.

Thanks for your stimulating posting. Excuse me, if I seem incredulous.

Best regards,


Gary



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