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    The online version of this article can be found at :

    DOI: 10.1177/053901847301200103 1973 12: 53Social Science Information

    Pierre BourdieuThe three forms of theoretical knowledge

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    53

    Theory and methodsThorieet mthodes

    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 onlything these modes of knowledge have in common is that they all stand inopposition to practical knowledge. The mode of knowledge we shall termphenomenological (or, if one prefers to speak in terms of currently active schools,&dquo;interactionist&dquo;or &dquo;ethnomethodological&dquo;)makes explicit primary expe-rience of the social world: perception of the social world as natural and self-evident is not self-reflective by definition and excludes all interrogation aboutits own conditions of possibility. At a second level, objectivist knowledge(of which the structuralist hermeneutic constitutes a particular case) constructsthe objective relations (e.g. economic or linguistic) structuring not only prac-tices but representations of practices and in particular primary knowledge,practical and tacit, of the familiar world, by means of a break with this primaryknowledge and, hence, with those tacitly assumed presuppositions which conferupon the social world its self-evident and natural character. Objectivistknowledge can only grasp the objective structures of the social world, and theobjective truth of primary experience (from which explicit knowledge of

    these structures is absent), provided it poses the very problem doxic experienceof the social world excludes by definition, namely the problem of the (specific)conditions under which this experience is possible. Thirdly, what we mightrefer to as praxeological knowledge is concerned not only with the systemof objective relations constructed by the objectivist form of knowledge, butalso with the dialectical relationships between these objective structures and thestructured dispositions which they produce and which tend to reproducethem, i.e. the dual process of the internalization of externality and the exter-nalization of internality. This knowledge presupposes a break with the objec-tivist form of knowledge, that is, it presupposes investigation into the condi-tions of possibility and, consequently, into the limits of the objectivistic view-point which grasps practices from th e outside, as a fait accompli, rather than

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    construct their generative principle by placing itself inside the process of theiraccomplishment.

    The praxeological form of knowledge may appear to be a regression to thephenomenological mode of knowledge, while the implied critique of objecti-vism is liable to be confused with the critique of scientific objectification for-mulated by naive humanism in the name of lived experience and the rightsof

    subjectivity.This is so because it is the

    productof a double theoretical

    movement of translation : in effect, it carries out a second reversal of the pro-blematic that objective science of the social world, seen as a system of objec-tive relationships, constituted by posing those problems which practical expe-rience and the phenomenological analysis of that experience exclude. Justas objectivist knowledge poses the problem of the conditions of possibilityof practical experience, thereby demonstrating that this experience is defined,fundamentally, by the fact that it does not pose this problem, so praxeolo-gical knowledge sets objectivist knowledge on its feet by posing the problemof the conditions of possibility of this problem (theoretical, but also social con-ditions) and, at the same time, makes it apparent that objectivist knowledgeis defined, fundamentally, by the fact that it excludes this problem. Beingset up in opposition to practical perception of the social world, objectivistknowledge is distracted from the task of constructing the theory of practicalknowledge of the social world. Praxeological knowledge does not cancel outthe gains accruing from objectivist knowledge, rather it conserves and trans-cends them by integrating that which this knowledge had to exclude in orderto obtain them.

    We must pause for a moment on what is objectivisms field par excellence,that of semiology. Just as Saussure postulates that language is an autono-mous object, irreducible to its concrete actualizations, that is to the speech-behaviour it makes possible, so Panofsky establishes that what he calls,following Alois Riegl, Kunstwollen, in other words, roughly, the objectivemeaning of a work 1, is no more reducible to the artists &dquo;will&dquo;than it is to the&dquo;willof the age&dquo;or to the lived experiences which the work arouses in the spec-tator. In so doing, both Saussure and Panofsky carry out, with regard to

    speech, that particular form of behaviour, and to works of art, those particu-lar products of action, the operation which builds objectivist science by build-ing a system of objective relations that are as irreducible to the practiceswithin which they are realized and manifested as they are to the intentionsof the subjects, and to any awareness these may have of its constraints or itslogic. Saussure shows that the true medium of communication between twoagents is not speech, as an immediate datum grasped in its observable mate-riality, 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 definitivemeaning of the artistic phen omenon" (E. Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens",Zeitschrift fr Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14, 1920, pp. 321-339).

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    production and decoding of speech possible. Similarly, Panofsky shows thaticonological interpretation treats the tangible properties of the work of art,with the affective experiences it arouses, as mere &dquo;culturalsymptoms&dquo;,whichonly fully yield up their meaning to a reading armed with the cultural codethe creator himself has &dquo;involved&dquo;in his work.

    Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo;presupposes an unconscious decoding ope-ration which can only be perfectly adequate where the competence which oneof the agents engages in his practice or in his works is identical to that objec-tively 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 thetransformation of a subjective meaning into a practice or a work - coincideswith the symetrical decoding operation. Immediate &dquo;comprehension&dquo;,a de-coding act that does not recognize itself as such, is only possible (and only reallyaccomplished) 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 (asa cultivated disposition) made the production of the perceived practice orwork 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 itssole cognitive tool is what Husserl termed the &dquo;intentional transfer into theOther&dquo;,even the most &dquo;comprehensive&dquo;interpretation is liable to amountto no more than a particularly irreproachable form of ethnocentrism.

    As the heirs to an intellectual heritage, that of linguistics, whose conditionsof production they are not always able to reproduce, structuralist anthropo-logists have all too often contented themselves with literal translations oflinguistic terms dissociated from the structure from which they derived theiroriginal meaning, sparing themselves the trouble of undertaking their ownepistemological reflection on the conditions and the limits of the validityof the transposition of the Saussurian construction. It is noteworthy, forexample, that, with the exception of Sapir, who was predisposed by his dualformation as linguist and anthropologist to raise the problem of the rela-

    tionship between culture and language, no anthropologist has attemptedto bring out all the implications of the homology (which Leslie White is vir-tually alone in formulating explicitly) between two oppositions, languageand 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 samemeaning with the same sign (speech, practice or work) and the same sign withthe same meaning or, to put it another way, if they are objectively disposedin such a way that, in their coding and decoding operations, i.e. in their prac-tices and their interpretations, they both refer to one and the same systemof constant relations, independent of individual consciousness or wills andirreducible to their executio n in the f orm of practices or works (code or cipher).

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    In so doing, objectivism does not deny the phenomenological analysis ofprimary experience of the social world and of the immediate comprehensionof speech or actions: it merely sets the limits of its validity by establishingthe particular conditions within which it is possible and which phenomeno-logical analysis leaves out of account. The social sciences have, necessarily,to quote Husserl, &dquo;athematics with a consistently dual orientation, a the-matics

    consistently linking theoryof the scientific field with a

    theoryof the

    knowledge of that theory&dquo; 2;in other words, epistemological reflection onthe conditions of possibility of the anthropological sciences forms an inte-gral part of the anthropological sciences. That is so firstly because a sciencewhich has as its very object that which makes the science possible, such aslanguage or culture, can only constitute itself by the constitution of its ownconditions of possibility; but it is also because complete knowledge of theconditions of the science, that is, of the operations whereby this science acquiressymbolic mastery of a language, a myth or a rite, implies the knowledge of prac-tical comprehension: the practical knowledge accomplishes the same oper-ations, though in absolute ignorance of the general and particular conditionswithin which it is possible and which confer its particularity upon it.

    We have only to examine the theoretical operations whereby Saussure buildsup linguistics as a science, by treating language as an autonomous object,distinct from its materializations in speech, in order to reveal the presuppo-sitions implicit in any form of knowledge which treats practices or worksas symbolic facts to be decoded and, more generally, which treats them asaccomplished facts rather than as practices. Although one could invokethe existence of dead languages or of mutism in old age as demonstrating thatit is possible for speech to disappear while language remains preserved,although language faults reveal language as constituting the objective normsunderlying speech (were it otherwise, any language fault would modify thelanguage and there would be no language faults), speech appears to be the condi-tion of language, as much from an individual as from a collective point of view,since language cannot be apprehended outside of speech, because languageis learnt by means of speech, and because speech lies at the origin of inno-

    vations in and transformations of language. But the priority of the two pro-cesses mentioned is merely chronological; when one leaves the field of indivi-dual or collective history, as does objectivist hermeneutics, in order to inquireinto the logical conditions of decoding, the relationship is turned on its head :language is the condition of the intelligibility of speech, that is the mediationwhich, ensuring the identity of the associations of sounds and concepts ope-rated by the senders and receivers, guarantees mutual comprehension. So,from this point of view, that of intelligibility, speech is the product of lan-guage 3. It follows that, because it is developed from the strictly intellec-

    2. E. Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendentale, Paris, Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1965, p. 52.

    3. F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale,Paris, Payot, 1960, pp. 37-38.

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    tualist point of view, that of decoding, Saussurian linguistics gives priorityto the structure of signs, that is, to the relations between them, to the detrimentof their practical functions, which are never reducible, as structuralism tacitlyassumes, to functions of communication or knowledge: those practices apparent-ly most strictly oriented towards functions of communication for the sake of com-munication (the phatic function) or communication for the purposes of know-ledge, such as feasts and ceremonies, ritual exchanges or, in a wholly differentfield, the circulation of scientific information, are always more or less openlyoriented towards political or economic functions.

    Structuralist linguistics bases the construction of the structural propertiesof the message as such, that is to say, as a system, on the assumption of animpersonal and interchangeable sender and receiver and on the ignoranceof the functional properties that each message owes to its utilization withina certain social(>, structured interaction. In fact, we know well that the sym-bolic interactions within any group depend, not only on the structure of the

    interaction group within which they occur 4, but also on the social struc-tures within which the interacting agents are situated (e.g. the class structure):consequently, it is probable that a measurement of symbolic exchanges whichwould enable us to distinguish, with Chapple and Coon 5, those who onlyoriginate, those who only respond and those who respond to the sending ofthe 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 struc-ture of political power relations. The perfect competition model is just asunrealistic here as it is elsewhere, the market in symbolic goods also havingits monopolies and its structures of domination.

    In short, the moment one shifts from the structure of language to the func-tions it fulfills, that is, to the uses agents really make of it, one sees that know-ledge of the code alone permits only a very imperfect mastery of the linguisticinteractions actually carried out; as Luis Prieto observes, the meaning of alinguistic element depends at least as much on extra-linguistic as on linguisticfactors, 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 thecircumstances, such as he perceives them 6. Which is another way of sayingthat the reception (and doubtless the emission too) largely depends on theobjective structure of the relations between the objective positions in the so-cial structure of the interacting agents (e.g. competitive relations, objectively

    4. S. Moscovici and M. Plon, "Les situations-colloques : Observations thoriqueset exp-rimentales", Bulletin de psychologie, jan. 1966, pp. 701-722.

    5. E. D.Chapple

    and C. S.Coon, Principles of anthropology, London,

    JonathanCape,1947, p. 283.

    6. L. J. Prieto, Principes de noologie, Paris, Mouton, 1964, and J. C. Pariente, "Vers unnouvel esprit linguistique", Criti que, apr. 1966, pp. 334-358.

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    antagonistic relations or power and authority relationships, etc.), for it is thisstructure which determines the form assumed by the interactions observedwithin a particular conjuncture.

    Nothing demonstrates better the inappropriateness of the theory of prac-tice haunting linguistic (and also anthropological) structuralism than itsinability to integrate, into this theory, all that pertains to execution, as Saus-sure puts it. The foundations of this inability reside in the incapacity tothink of speech and, more generally, of practice otherwise than as execution 1.Objectivism constructs a theory of practice (as execution), but only as a nega-tive sub-product or, one might say, as a refuse immediately thrown away,left over from the construction of language or culture as systems of objectiverelations. So, with the aim of delimiting, within language facts, the &dquo;fieldof language&dquo;and of isolating &dquo;awell defined object&dquo;,&dquo;anobject capable ofbeing studied seperately&dquo;,&dquo;witha homogeneous nature&dquo;,Saussure rejectsthe &dquo;physicalaspect of communication&dquo;,that is, speech as a pre-constructed

    object, liableto

    obstruct the construction of language; then within the &dquo;speechcircuit&dquo;,he isolates what he terms the &dquo;executiveaspect &dquo;,that is, speech as aconstructed object, defined as the actualization of a certain meaning withina particular combination of sounds, which he finally eliminates by stating that&dquo;executionis never carried out by the collectivity&dquo;,but is &dquo;alwaysindividual&dquo;.Thus, the same concept, that of speech, is divided by theoretical constructioninto a preconstructed datum, which is immediately observable and the very oneagainst which the operation of theoretical construction is carried out, and aconstructed object, the negative product of the operation whereby language assuch is constituted or, better, which produces the two objects by producingthe conflicting relationship within which and by which they are defined. Itwould be easy to show that the construction of the concept of culture

    - inthe sense of cultural anthropology - or of social structure (in Radcliffe-Browns sense and that of social anthropology) also implies the constructionof a notion of conduct as execution which coexists with the primary notionof conduct as simple behaviour taken at face value. The extreme confusionof debates on the relationship between &dquo;culture&dquo;(or &dquo;socialstructures&dquo;)and conduct

    usuallyarises out of the fact that the constructed

    meaningof

    conduct and its implied theory of practice lead a kind of clandestine existenceinside 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 sideis missing, for execution is never carried out by the collectivity. Execution is always indivi-dual, 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

    clearlyreveals the various dimensions of the Saussurian

    oppositionbetween

    language and speech, the former being institutional, social and "rigid", the other beingexecutive, individual and "non-rigid" (L. Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques, Copenhagen,Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturforlag, 1959, esp. p. 79).

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    ture&dquo;,such as Radcliffe-Brown, can only set over a naive realism againstthe 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 theoryof practice is what protects objectivism against the only really decisive criti-cism, that which would be aimed at its theory of practice, the generator of allthose metaphysical aberrations on the &dquo;locusof culture&dquo;,on the mode ofexistence of the &dquo;structure&dquo;or on the unconscious finality of the historyof systems, not to mention the too famous &dquo;collectiveconsciousness&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 apart of Australia, we find a certain number of individual human beings in a certain naturalenvironment. We can observe the acts of behaviour of these individuals, including of coursetheir acts of speech, and the material products of past actions. We do not observe a "cul-

    ture", since that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is com-monly used a vague abstraction. But direct observation does reveal to us that these humanbeings are connected by a complex network of social relations. I use the term "social struc-ture" to denote this network of actually existing relations" (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, "Onsocial structure", Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland70, 1940, pp. 1-12). The reason for the extreme confusion surrounding debates on thenotion of culture probably lies in the fact that most authors place if only in order to opposethem concepts of very different epistemological status, such as culture and society or theindividual or conduct, etc., on the same level. The imaginary dialogue on the notion ofculture 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 theworld crisis, New York, Columbia University Press, 1945) gives a more summary, thoughlivelier image of this debate than that to be found in A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohnswork, Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions, Cambridge, Mass., HarvardUniversity Press, 1952, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethno-logy 67 (1). Leach has observed that, despite their apparent opposition, Malinowski andRadcliffe-Brown at least agree to consider each "society" or each "culture" (in their respec-tive vocabularies) as a "totality made up of a number of discrete, empirical things, ofrather diverse kinds e. g. groups of people, institutions, customs" or also as "an empi-rical whole made up of a limited number of readily identifiable parts", the comparisonbetween 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, AthlonePress, 1961, p. 6).

    9. If we except those rare authors who confer on the notion of conduct a meaning thatis 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 be-haviour", H. D. Lasswell, "Collective autism as a consequence of culture contact", ZeitschriftfrSozialforschung 4, 1935, pp. 232-247) without drawing any conclusions from it, most ofthose who employ the opposition propose epistemologically discordant definitions of cultureor of conduct, opposing a constructed object to a preconstructed datum, leaving the placeof 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

    "culturallypatterned behaviours", as "what is constructed by the anthropologist" and "what membersof a society observe or impose upon others" (M. Harris, "Review of selected writings ofEdward Sapir, language, cult ure and personality", Language 27 (3), 1951, pp. 288-333).

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    question of the principle of their production, or to reify abstractions, bytreating objects constructed by science - be they &dquo;culture&dquo;,&dquo;structures&dquo;,&dquo;socialclasses&dquo;,&dquo;modesof production&dquo;,etc. - as autonomous realities,endowed with social efficacity, capable of acting as subjects responsible forhistorical actions or as a power capable of constraining practices. Althoughit has the merit of rejecting the coarser forms of the realism of ideas, thehypothesis of the unconscious nonetheless tends to mask the contradictionsarising out of the uncertainties of the theory of practice which &dquo;structuralanthropology&dquo;accepts, if only by omission, and even worse, it may permitthe restoration - in the apparently secularized form of a structure that isstructured without the aid of any structuring principle - of the old entelechiesof social metaphysics. Unless, of course, one assumes, along with Durkheim,that none of the implicit rules constraining subjects &dquo;areto be found intheir entirety in their applications by individuals, since they may even existwithout actually being applied&dquo;10, and consequently that the rules havethe transcendent and

    permanentexistence that Durkheim ascribes to all col-

    lective &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 byplaying on the multiple meanings of the word rule: most often used in the senseof a social norm, expressly stated and explicitly recognized, as the moral orjuridical law, sometimes in the sense of a theoretical model, a constructiondeveloped by science in order to explain practices, the word is also used,exceptionally, in the sense of a scheme (schme) (or a principle) that is im-manent in practice, which should be considered implicit rather than uncons-cious, merely in order to signify that it exists in a practical state, in thepractice of agents, and not in their consciousness.

    One has only to re-read the following paragraph, from the preface of thesecond edition of Structures elenrerrtaires de la pat-eiiti (Elementary structuresof kinslrip) dealing with the distinction between &dquo;preferential&dquo;and &dquo;pres-criptive systems&dquo;,in which one may assume that the terms norm, rule or modelare used with particular care: &dquo;Conversely,a system which recommends mar-riage with the mothers brothers daughter may be called prescriptive evenif the rule is seldom

    observed,since what it

    saysmust be done. The

    questionof how far and in what proportion the members of a given society respectthe norm is very interesting, but a different question to that of where thissociety should properly be placed in a typology. It is sufficient to acknow-ledge the likelihood that awareness of the rule inflects choices ever so littlein the prescribed direction, and that the percentage of conventional marriagesis higher than would be the case if marriages were made at random, to be ableto recognize what might be called a matrilateral oper-ator at work in thissociety and acting as a pilot: certain alliances at least follow the path which it

    10. E. Durkheim, Les rglesde la mthodesociologique, Paris, Presses Universitairesde France, 1956, p. 11.

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    charts out for them, and this suffices to imprint a specific curve in the genea-logical space. ~( No doubt there will be not just one curve but a great number oflocal curves, merely incipient for the most part, however, and forming closedcycles only in rare and exceptional cases. But the structural outlines whichemerge here and there will be enough for the system to be used in makinga probabilistic version of more rigid systems the notion of which is completelytheoretical and in which marriage would conform rigorously to any rule thesocial 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 inthe language of models, or if one prefers, of structures; this vocabulary is notentirely absent here, since the system of physico-mathematical metaphorson which the central passage is founded (&dquo;operator&dquo;,&dquo;certainalliances&dquo;&dquo;followthe path which it charts out for them&dquo;,&dquo;curvature&dquo;of the &dquo;genealo-gical space&dquo;,&dquo;structures&dquo;)evokes the logic of the theoretical model and the- both declared and repudiated - equivalence of model and norm : &dquo;Apre-ferential system is prescriptive when envisaged at the model level, a prescrip-tive system must be preferential when envisaged on the level of reality.&dquo; 12But for those who remember the passages in Structural anthropology on therelationship between language and kinship (e.g. &dquo; Kinshipsystems, likephonemic systems, are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought. &dquo;13)and the imperious flatness with which &dquo;culturalnorms&dquo;and all the &dquo;rationali-zations&dquo;or &dquo;secondary arguments&dquo;produced by the natives were rejected infavour of &dquo;unconscious tructures&dquo;,not to mention those passages wherethe universality of the rule lying at the origins of exogamy is affirmed, the

    concessions made here to &dquo;awarenessof the rule&dquo;,and the dissociation from theserigid systems, whose notion is completely theoretical, may come as a surprise,as may this other passage taken from the same preface: &dquo;Itis nonetheless truethat the empirical reality of so-called prescriptive systems only takes on itsfull meaning when related to a theoretical mode worked out by the nativesthemselves prior to ethnologists.&dquo;11;or again: &dquo;Thosewho practise themknow .fully that the spirit of such systems cannot be reduced to the tautologicalproposition that each group obtains its women from givers and gives itsdaughters to takers. They are also aware that marriage with the matrilateralcross cousin (mothers brothers daughter) provides the simplest illustrationof the rule, the form most likely to guarantee its survival. On the other hand,marriage with the patrilateral cross cousin (fathers sisters daughter)would violate it irrevocably&dquo;15. One must mention, here, a passage in which

    11. C. Lvi-Strauss,The elementary structures of kinship, London, Social science paper-backs, 1969, p. 33 (my italics).

    12. Ibid.13. C. Lvi-Strauss,Structural anthropology, London, Allen Lane, Penguin Press,

    1968, p. 34.14. Lvi-Strauss,The elementary structures of kinship, op. cit., p. 32.15. Ibi d .

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    Wittgenstein enumerates all the questions evaded by structural anthropologyand doubtless, more generally, by all intellectualism, which transfers the objec-tive truth established by science into a practice which excludes the dispositionwhich would make it possible to establish this truth 16 :&dquo;Whatdo I call therule by which he proceeds? The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use ofwords; or the rule which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which hegives 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 hedid 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 therule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself. Or, toask a better question: What meaning is the expression the rule according towhich 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 productof a consciously laid-down and consciously respected regulation (so havingto explain both their genesis and their effectiveness), or else as the productof the ullconsciolls regulation of some mysterious cerebral and social mecha-nism, is to slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model: &dquo;Takethe example of the difference between the train is regularly two minutes lateand as a rule the train is two minutes late: [...]in the latter case it is suggest-ed that the fact that the train is two minutes late is the result of a policy orplan [...]I Rules relate to plans and policies, while regularities do not [...]Toclaim that there ought to be rules in natural language amounts to claimingthat 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;itisas if&dquo;and should function in the same way as quantifiers in logic, which wouldcontinually remind us of the epistemological status of the constructed conceptsof objective science. Everything conspires to encourage the reification ofconcepts, beginning with the logic of ordinary language, which is inclined toinfer the substance from the substantive or to award to concepts the powerto act in history in the same way as the words designating them act in the sen-tences of historical discourse, that is as historical subjects. As Wittgensteinremarked, one has only to slip from the adverb &dquo;unconsciously&dquo;(&dquo;uncons-ciously I have a toothache&dquo;)to the substantive &dquo;unconscious&dquo;,or to a cer-tain usage of the adjective &dquo;unconscious&dquo;(as in &dquo;Ihave an unconscious tooth-ache&dquo;)in order to produce prodigies of metaphysical profundity 19. Simi-

    16. This is an unwarranted transfer of the same type as that which, according to Merleau-Ponty, generates the intellectualist and the empiricist errors in psychology (cf. M. Merleau-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. 38.19. L. Wittgenstein, Le cahier bleu et le cahier brun, tudesprliminairesaux investi-

    gations philosophiques, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 57-58.

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    larly, one can observe the theoretical (and political) effects capable of beingengendered by the personification of collectives (in such sentences as &dquo;thebourgeoisie thinks that...&dquo;or &dquo;theworking class rejects...&dquo;)which amountsto an assertion of the existence of a group or class &dquo;collectiveconsciousness&dquo; :

    by crediting groups or institutions with dispositions that can only arise inindividual consciousness, even if they are the product of collective conditions,such as the awakening of consciousness of class interests, one gets out of ana-

    lyzing these conditions and those, in particular, which determine the degreeof objective and subjective homogeneity of the group under consideration andthe degree of consciousness among its members.

    The paralogism underlying legalism consists in implicitly placing in theconsciousness of individual agents the theoretical knowledge which can onlybe constructed and conquered against practical experience; in other terms,it consists in conferring the value of an anthropological description upon atheoretical model constructed in order to account for practices. The theoryof action as simple execution of a model (in the dual sense of norm and ofscientific construction) is only one example among many of the imaginaryanthropology engendered by objectivism when, taking, as Marx puts it, &dquo;thethings of logic for the logic of things&dquo;,it turns the objective meaning of prac-tices or works into the subjective purpose of the activity of the producers ofthese practices or works, with its impossible homo economicus subjecting hisdecision-making to rational calculation, its actors carrying out roles or actingin conformity with models, or its speakers selecting from among phonemes.

    ~

    1

    Structures, habitus and practices .

    It is necessary to go beyond methodical objectivism, which constitutes anecessary phase in all research, as a tool facilitating the break with primaryexperience and as an instrument for the construction of objective relations.To escape from the realism of the structure, which treats systems of objectiverelations as substances by converting them into wholes already constitutedoutside of the history of the individual and the history of the group, it is bothnecessary and sufficient to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi,from statistical regularity or from algebraic structure to the principle of theproduction of this observed order: the construction of the theory of practiceor, more precisely, of the mode of generation of practices, is the condition ofthe construction of an experimental science of the dialectic of internality andexternality, that is, of the ititet-iializatioti of externality and of the extertiali.:a-tiof2 of internality. The structures of a particular type of environment (e.g.

    the material conditions of existence characteristic ofa class

    condition),which

    may be grasped empirically in the form of the regularities associated witha socially structured envir onment, produce habitus, systems of durable dis-

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    positions 2, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring struct-ures, i.e. as the principle of the generation and structuration of practices andrepresentations. Consequently, these can be objectively &dquo;regulated&dquo;and&dquo;regular&dquo;without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objec-tively adapted to their purposes without presupposing any conscious aimingof ends and an express mastery of those operations leading to these ends and,

    . being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of a conduct-ors orchestrating action.

    Even when they appear to be determined by the future, that is, by the expli-cit - and explicitlystated - purpose of a project or plan, the practices producedby the habitus, as the generating principle of strategies enabling one to copewith unforeseen and ever-changing situations, are determined by the implicitanticipation of their consequences; being determined by the past conditionsof the production of their principle of production, they always tend to repro-duce 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 agentspossessing the same habitus (say A and B), it is as if the actions of each of them(say, al for A) were organized in relation to the reactions they would call forthin any agent possessing the same habitus (say bl, Bs reaction to al) in such away that they objectively anticipate the reaction which these reactions callforth in turn (say a2, the reaction to bl). Nothing could be more naive,however, than to accept the teleological description according to which eachaction (say, al) was designed to make possible the reaction to the reactionit 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 beingthe 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 accom-panied by a strategic calculation tending to carry out, quasi-consciously,what the habitus carries out in another manner, namely an estimate of thechances based on the transformation of the past effect into anticipated futureeffect. These responses are nonetheless primarily related to a field of object-ive potentialities, immediately contained within the present, things to bedone or not to be done, to be said or not said, which, as opposed to the futureas &dquo;absolutepossibility&dquo;(absolute Mglichkeit), in Hegels sense, projectedby the pure project of a &dquo;negativeliberty&dquo;,has an urgency and a claim toexistence excluding all deliberation. Symbolic, that is, conrentional and condi-tional stimuli, which only act upon agents conditioned to perceive them, tendto impose themselves unconditionally and necessarily when inculcation of

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

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    the arbitrary abolishes the arbitrariness of the inculcation and of the signi-fications inculcated: the world of emergencies, of goals already achieved, ofobjects possessing a &dquo;permanentlyteleological 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 siliceret - rather similar to that of the magnetic needle which, as Leibniz ima-

    gined it, actually enjoyed pointingnorthwards. One

    regularlyobserves a

    veryclose relationship between scientifically constructed objective probabilities (e. g.opportunities of access to higher education or to museums, etc.) and subject-ive aspirations (&dquo;motivations&dquo;) :this is not so because agents consciouslyadjust their aspirations to a precise evaluation of their chances of success - theway a gambler might modify his bets as a function of perfect informationregarding his chances of winning - as we assume implicitly when, forgettingthe &dquo;itis 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 tendencyof objectivism, we can, on the contrary, seek in the rules of the scientific cons-truction of probabilities or strategies, not an anthropological model of prac-tice, but rather a negative description of the implicit tendencies of the sponta-neous strategy or statistics, which they necessarily imply, since they are expli-citly constructed against these implicit tendencies (e.g. the propensity toascribe an exaggerated importance to primary experiences). Unlike thescientific calculus of probabilities that is based on controlled experimentsand on data established according to precise rules, the subjective evaluationof a specific actions chances of success in a specific situation brings into playa whole body of semi-formalized wisdom, dicta, commonplaces, ethical pre-cepts (&dquo;thatsnot for us&dquo;)and, more profoundly, the unconscious principlesof the ethos, a general and transposable disposition which, being the productof a learning dominated by a specific type of objective regularity, determines&dquo;reasonable&dquo;or &dquo;unreasonable&dquo;behaviour for any agent subject to theseregularities 21. &dquo;Weare no sooner acquainted with the impossibility ofsatisfying any desire&dquo;,said approximately Hume, in his Treatise on human

    nature, &dquo;thandesire itself vanishes&dquo;. And Marx in the Gl1mdrisse: &dquo;What-ever I am, if I have no money to travel, then I have no need

    - in the senseof a real need to travel - capable of being satisfied. Whatever I am, if Ifeel an urge to study but I have no money to pay for my studies, then I have nourge to study, that is no effective, true urge.&dquo;Practices may be objectively

    21. "We call this subjective, variable probability which sometimes excludes doubtand engenders certainty sui generis and which, at other times appears as no more than a vagueglimmer 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 havea confused notion of similar probabilities; this then determines, or at least justifies, thoseunshakable beliefs we call common sense" (A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de la connais-sance et sur les caractresde la critique philosophique, Paris, Hachette, 1922, p. 70).

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    adjusted to objective chances without the agents having to carry out the slightestcalculation, 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 asa result of past experience, would determine the a priori or ex ante probabilitysubjectively ascribed to it. Because the dispositions durably inculcated by theobjective conditions (which science perceives through statistical regularities as

    probabilities objectivelyattached to a

    groupor a

    class) givesrise to

    aspirationsand practices that are objectively compatible with these objective conditions and,to some extent, preadapted to their objective requirements, the most impro-bable events are excluded, either without even being examined, as unthink-able, or at the cost of a double negation tending to make a virtue out of necessityby refusing what is anyway refused and loving the inevitable. The veryconditions of the production of the ethos, a virtue fumed into necessity, aresuch that the anticipations arising out of it tend to ignore the restriction towhich the validity of any calculus of probabilities is subject, namely thatthe conditions of the experiment should not have been modified. Unlikescientific estimates, which are corrected, following each experiment, accordingto rigourous rules, practical estimates ascribe a disproportionate weight toprimary experiments: the characteristic structures of a determinate type ofconditions of existence, through the mediation of the economic and socialnecessity which they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous universe offamily relationship, or better, through the mediation of specifically familialmanifestations of this external necessity (e. g. taboos, worries, lessons in moral-

    ity,conflicts, tastes,

    etc.), producethe habitus structures which, in turn, gene-

    rate the perception and appreciation of all further experience. Finally, asa result of the effect of hysteresis necessarily entailed in the logic of the genesisof habitus, practices are always exposed to negative sanctions, hence to a&dquo;secondarynegative reinforcement&dquo;,when the environment with whichthey are in fact confronted differs too widely from the environment to whichthey are objectively adjusted. It is understandable, in the same logic, thatgeneration 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, probableand certain, the conditions of existence cause one group to experience as natu-ral or reasonable the same practices or aspirations which the other group findsunthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa.

    In other words, one must abandon all those theories which, explicitly orimplicitly, treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined byantecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the functioning of pre-estab-lished mechanisms, &dquo;models&dquo;,&dquo;norms&dquo;or &dquo;roles&dquo;;if not, one is supposedto assume that these mechanisms exist in infinite number, as the fortuitousconfigurations of stimuli capable of releasing them from the outside, thus beingcondemned to the kind of grandiose and desperate enterprise undertaken bythe anthropologist who, armed wi th fine positivist courage, recorded 480 ele-

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    mentary units of behaviour in twenty minutes of observation of his wife inthe kitchen ~~. But, the rejection of mechanistic theories in no way impliesthat, according to the traditional opposition between objectivism and subjec-tivism, we bestow upon some free and creative will the free and arbitrarypower to produce, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projectingthe goals aiming at its transformation. Nor does it mean that we reduce the

    objectiveintentions and constituted

    significationsof human actions and works

    to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors. Practice is, atone and the same time, necessary and relatively autonomous by reference tothe situation considered in its precise immediacy, because it is the productof the dialectical relationship between a situation and a habitus, understoodas a system of durable and transposable dispositions which, integrating allpast experiences, functions as a matrix of perceptions, of appreciations andactions, making possible the accomplishment of an infinite variety of tasks,thanks to analogical transfers of schemes, practical metaphors, in the strictestsense of the term, which permit the resolution of problems having the sameform, and thanks to incessant correction of the results obtained, that theseresults dialectically produce. As the durably generating principle of regulat-ed improvisations (principium importans ordillem ad actllll1 , as the schol-astics put it), the habitus produces practices which tend to reproduce theregularities inserted in the objective conditions of the production of theirgenerating principle, .while adjusting to the demands inserted as objectivepotentialities in the situation directly being confronted. Hence it followsthat the practices can directly be deduced neither from the objective conditions,defined as the instantaneous sum of the stimuli which may appear directlyto have set them in motion, nor from the conditions which produced the last-ing principle of their production. Consequently, we can only explain thesepractices if we relate the objective structure defining the social conditionsof production of the habitus which engendered them to the conditions of theoperation of this habitus, that is, if we relate the former to the conjuncturewhich, except when these conditions have been radically transformed, repre-sents a particular state of this structure. The habitus is capable of functioningas an operator which accomplishes practically this relating of these two sys-tems of relations in and by the production of practice, because it is historytransformed into nature, that is to say, denied as such because turned intosecond nature; the &dquo;unconscious&dquo;is never anything more than the forgetting

    22. "Here we confront the distressing fact that the sample episode chain under analysisis a fragment of a larger segment of behavior which in the complete record contains some 480separate episodes. Moreover, it took only twenty minutes for these 480 behavior streamevents to occur. If my wifes 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 duringthe course of an annual cycle" (M. Harris, The nature of cultural things, New York, RandomHouse, 1964, pp. 74-75).

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    of the history which history itself produces by incorporating the objectivestructures in the form of these quasi-natures, the habitus: &dquo;Insideeach oneof us, in varying proportions, there exists part of yesterdays man; it is yes-terdays man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amountsto little as compared with the long past, in the course of which we were form-ed and from which we result. But we do not sense this man from the past,since he is so much a

    partof us ; he is the unconscious

    partof ourselves. Con-

    sequently, we do not take him into account, anymore than we take accountof his legitimate requirements. On the contrary, we are very much awareof the most recent acquisitions of civilization since, being recent, they havenot 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 opusoperatum and placing itself before the fait accompli, objectivism has to invokethe mysteries of pre-established harmony or the prodigies of conscious concert-ation in order to account for what, perceived purely synchronically, appearsas the objective meaning, whether it be the internal coherence of works or ofsuch institutions as myths, rites or laws or the objective concertation bothmanifested and presupposed (insofar as they entail a community of repertoires)by the concordant or even conflicting practices of members of the same groupor class. The fallacy of objectivism is the consequence of the complete fail-ure to analyse the dual process of internalization and externalization or, moreprecisely, the production of objectively concerted habitus, hence apt and incli-ned to

    produce practicesand works which are,

    themselves, objectivelyconcert-

    ed. gh .d

    .

    [ h d.. f. d d..1Because the identity of the conditions of existence tends to produce similar(at least partially so) systems of dispositions, the resulting (relative) homoge-neity of habitus generates an objective harmonization of practices and worksconferring upon them the regularity as well as the objectivity which definetheir specific &dquo;rationality&dquo;and which result in their being experienced asevident or taken for granted : they are seen as immediately intelligible andpredictable by all agents possessing practical mastery of the system of schemes

    of action and interpretation objectively implied in their accomplishment andby those alone; that is by all those who, like the members of the same groupor class, are products of identical objective conditions, which exercice a llni-versalizing aiid pa;ticulari=iiig effect insofar as they only homogenize the mem-bers of a group by distinguishing them from all the others. As long as weignore the true principle of this conductorless orchestration, which confersregularity, unity and systematicity upon the practices of a group or class,and that in the absence of any spontaneous or imposed organization of indi-vidual projects, we condemn ourselves to the kind of naive artificialism whichrecognizes no unifying principle of ordinary or extraordinary activity of a

    23. E. Durkheim,Lvolution pdagogiqueen France, Paris, Alcan, 1938, p. 16.

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    group or class other than the conscious and meditated concertation foundin conspiracies. In this way, some may deny, with no other proof than theirown fashionable impressions, the unity of the ruling class and challenge thosewho hold the opposite view to establish empirical proof, that the membersof the ruling class have an explicit policy, expressly imposed by explicit concer-tation. 2~. Others, who at least provide an explicit and systematic formulationof this naive

    representationof collective action,

    transposethe

    archetypalquestion of the philosophy of consciousness to the level of the group, and turnawakening of class consciousness into a sort of revolutionary cogito, this alonebeing considered capable of bringing the class into existence, by constitutingit as a &dquo;classfor-itself&dquo;( &dquo;Classe poursoi &dquo;)25.

    The objective harmonization of group or class habitus results in the factthat practices can be objectively attuned without any direct interaction and,a fortiori, in the absence of any explicit concertation. &dquo;Imagine,suggestedLeibniz, two clocks in perfect agreement as to the time. This may occur in

    three ways. The first consists in mutual influence; the second in assigningto each a skillful worker who would correct them and synchronize themcontinually; the third way would be to construct the two clocks with such artand 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 thesehypotheses - when one casts a party or charismatic leader in the role of Deusex machina - one ignores the surest foundation of the integration of groupsor 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 theindustrial leadership, it is neither fixed, once and for all in any given country, nor is it thesame in different domains of activity. I challenge Meynaud to account for the vicissitudesof 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 toexplain General De Gaulles diplomacy in terms of the influence of M. Villiers, or ofthe French Employers Council." (R. Aron, "Catgoriesdirigeantes ou classe dirigean-te?", Revue franaisede science politique 15 (1), feb. 1965, p. 24.) From his long"demonstration" of the governing classs unconsciousness, and incoherence, we shall

    merely quote a few passages: "One of my disappointments has been to observe that thosewho, 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 ofthis damned race, I have never known them to hold resolute, or unanimous, opinions con-cerning the policy to be adopted [...] the capitalists themselves were divided. I have disco-vered, among monopolists, or big capitalists, uncertainties, doubts and quarrels whichwere aired in public, in the press, and in Parliament. In order to imagine that it is they whohave directed French policy, I would have to assume that some among them were able toimpose their policies [...] In most of the cases I have been able to observe directly, the repre-sentatives of big capitalism are less politically motivated than is generally believed" (R. Aron,Dmocratieet totalitarisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 145-149).

    25. See Appendix.26. G. W. Leibniz, "Second claircissementdu systmede la communication des subs-

    tances", p. 548 in: P. Janet (ed.) , Oeuvres philosophiques (vol. 2), Paris, de Lagrange, 1866.

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    because, as Leibniz says, &dquo;byonly obeying its own laws&dquo;,each &dquo;nonethelessis attuned to the other&dquo;27. The habitus is nothing either than this immanentlaw, lex iiisita deposited in each agent by his basic education, which is not onlythe condition of the concertation of practices but also of practices of concert-ation : the rectifications and adjustments consciously carried out by theagents presuppose the mastery of a common code, and attempts at collectivemobilization cannot succeed without a minimum of agreement between thehabitus of the mobilizing agents (e.g. prophet or party leader, etc.) and thedispositions of those whose aspirations they attempt to express. Far from theconcertation of practices always being the product of concertation, one ofthe prime functions of the orchestration of habitus might be to allow a savingin &dquo;intention&dquo;and in the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo;by makingpossible a kind of practical behaviourism which, in most situations in life,dispenses with close analysis of the nuances of someone elses conduct or withdirect investigation of his intentions (&dquo;Whatdo you mean ?&dquo;):just as someone

    who posts a letter supposes simply, as Schutz has shown, that anonymousemployees will conduct themselves anonymously, in conformity with his ano-nymous intention, in the same way someone who accepts money as an instru-ment of exchange implicitly takes into account, as Weber shows, the chancesthat other agents will agree to recognize its function. Automatic and impersonal,significant without intending to signify, the ordinary conduct of life lendsitself to a no less automatic and impersonal decoding: the decoding of theobjective 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: becausehis actions are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producerand of which he does not possess conscious mastery, they contain an &dquo;objec-tive intention&dquo;,as the scholastics say, which always exceeds his consciousintentions. Thus, just as is shown by Gelb and Goldstein, certain aphasicswho have lost the power to evoke the word or notion called forth by the mean-ing, may pronounce, as though inadvertently, formulae in which they onlylater recognize the response called for, so the internalized schemes of thought

    and expression make possible the intentionless invention of regulated impro-visation whose points of departure and support lie in ready-made &dquo;formulae&dquosuch as word-pairs or contrasting images 29: continually overtaken by his

    27. Ibid.28. 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 worlds objective solli-citations 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 objective determinations.

    29. If it did not constitute a rudimentary, hence economic and practical form, thoughtin terms of couples would probably be less frequent in ordinary language and, even in schol-arly language, beginning with the languag e of anthropologists, still dominated by numerous

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    own words, with which he carries on a relationship of &dquo;carryand be carried&dquo;,as 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 bring-ing along its own rails 3. Witticisms surprise their author no less than theiraudience and they ~mpressas much by their retrospective necessity as by theirnovelty, because the discovery appears as the simple revelation, both fortuit-ous and ineluctable, of a possibility immanent in the structures of language.It is because subjects do not, properly speaking, know what they are doingthat what they are doing has more meaning than they suspect. The habitusis the universalizing mediation which makes practices that have neither explicitreason nor significant intention &dquo;sensible&dquo;,&dquo;reasonable&dquo;and objectivelyorchestrated: that part of practices which remains obscure in the eyes oftheir own producers is the aspect whereby they are objectively adjusted tothe other practices and structures of which the principle of their own produc-tion is, itself, the product. In order to be finished with chitchat concerningthe &dquo;comprehension&dquo;which constitutes the last resort of those who defendthe rights of subjectivity against the &dquo;reductive&dquo;imperialism of the humansciences, we have only to recall that the decoding of the objective intentionof practices and works has nothing to do with the &dquo;reproduction&dquo;(Nach-bildung, as the early Dilthey put it) of subjective experiences and the reconsti-tution, 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 internaliza-tion of the same objective structures, are objectively concerted, the practicesof the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, of the sameclass, possess an objective meaning that is both unitary and systematic,transcending subjective intentions and conscious individual or collective pro-jects 31 : in other words, the process of objectification cannot be described inthe language of interaction and mutual adjustment, because the interaction itselfowes its form to the objective structures which produced the dispositions of

    false dichotomies, such as the individual and society, personality and culture, communityand society, "folk" and "urban", etc., which are just as inadequate as the most traditionalphilosophical 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, Harperand Row, 1959.

    30. R. Ruyer, Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de lautomatisme, Paris, A. Michel,19G6, p. 136.

    31. Were this language not otherwise dangerous, one would be temptedto say, against all forms of subjectivist voluntarism, that the unity of a class fundamentally rests

    uponthe "class unconscious": "consciousness" is not an

    originatingact which would consti-

    tute the class in an effulgence of freedom; its only effectiveness, as in all actions of symbolicduplication, comes from the extent to which it brings everything that is implicitly assumedconcerning the unconscious mode in the class habitus to the conscious level.

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    the interacting agents and which assign them their relative positions in theinteraction and elsewhere. The apparently limitless universe of theories ofacculturation and cultural contacts can be reduced to an opposition betweenthe realism of ideas and the realism of the sensible. The first category oftheories treat cultural or linguistic changes as the result of contacts betweencultures and languages, subject to laws which are generic as the law of therestructuring of borrowings or specific as those established by the analysisof the structures specific to the languages or cultures in contact. The realismof the sensible emphasizes contacts between the societies involved (in the senseof populations, reducible to a set of individuals) and ignores most of the timeeven the objective structure of the relations between the societies confrontingeach other (domination, etc.). In fact, in every singular confrontation betweentwo individual agents or groups (e.g. boss giving orders to a subordinate,colleagues talking about their pupils, intellectuals taking part in a sympo-sium, etc.), that is in every interaction structured by the objective structure

    of the relationship between the corresponding groups (e.g. colonizer and colo-nized), generic habitus (borne by biological individuals) are confronted:interaction occurs between systems of dispositions, such as linguistic compe-tence and cultural competence and, through this habitus, all the objectivestructures of which they are the product and, in particular, the structures ofthe systems of symbolic relations, such as language. In this way, the struct-ures of the phonological systems involved are only active (as is witnessed, forexample, by the accent of non-native users of the dominant language) if theyare incorporated into a competence acquired in the course of an individualhistory (the different kinds of bilinguism being the result of different modesof acquisition) within a learning process which implies a selective deafnessand systematic restructuring operations.

    To speak of class habitus (or of &dquo;culture&dquo;,in the sense of cultural compe-tence acquired within a homogeneous group) is, then, a reminder against allforms of the occasionalist illusion which consists in directly relating practicesto the properties contained in the situation: &dquo;interpersonal&dquo;relations arenever, except in appearance, individual to individual relationships and the truthof the

    interactionnever

    completely residesin

    the interaction itself. Socialpsychology, interactionism and ethnomethodology forget this when, reduc-ing the objective structure of the relationship between individuals broughttogether to the conjunctural structure of their interaction in a particular situa-tion and group, they propose to explain everything that occurs in an experimen-tal or observed interaction by the experimentally controlled characteristics ofthe situation, such as the relative position in space of the participants or thenature of the channels utilized. It is their past and present position in thesocial structure which biological individuals carry with them, at all times andin all places, in the form of the habitus. The dispositions are seen as signsoff social positions and, hence, of the social distance between objective posi-tions, or, to put it anot her way, between the social persons conjuncturally

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    brought together (in physical space, which is not the same thing as socialspace) and as reminders of this distance and of the conduct necessary to strate-gically manipulate social distances symbolically or in reality, to shorten them(which is easier for the dominating agent than for the dominated) or to increasethem or, quite simply, to maintain them (by avoiding &dquo;permittingfamilia-rities&dquo;,in short, by &dquo;standingon ones dignity&dquo;,or, conversely, by avoiding&dquo;takingliberties&dquo;and, in other words, by &dquo;stayingin ones place&dquo;).

    Even those forms of interaction most apparently susceptible to descriptionin terms of the &dquo;intentional transfer to the Other&dquo;,such as sympathy, friend-ship or love, are dominated through the mediation of the harmony of habitusor, more precisely, of ethosand

    taste - doubtless sensed in the imperceptibleindices of bodily exist-by the objective structure of the relations betweenconditions and positions, as is confirmed by class homogamy. The illusionof elective aflinity or mutual predestination arises out of ignorance of the socialconditions of the harmony of aesthetic tastes or ethical inclinations, thus per-

    ceived as a proof of the ineffable afhnities it originates. In short, the habitus,a product of history, produces individual and collective practices, hencehistory, in conformity with the generative schemes generated by history. Moreprecisely, as a past which has survived into the present and which tends toperpetuate itself into the future by generating practices structured in accor-dance with its principles, as the internal law through which the law ofexternal necessities - irreducible to the immediate constraints of the cir-cumstances - continually operates, the habitus generates on the one handthe continuity and the regularity which objectivism observes in the socialworld without being able to present a rational explanation for them, and,on the other hand, the regulated transformations and revolutions which nei-ther the extrinsic and instantaneous determinisms of mechanistic sociologismnor the purely internal - though equally punctual - determination of volun-tarist or spontaneist subjectivism are capable of accounting for.

    It is just as true, and just as untrue to say that collective actions producethe event or that they are the product of the event: in fact they are the pro-duct of a conjuncture that is, of the necessary conjunction of dispositionsand an

    objectiveevent. For

    example,the conditional stimulation of the revo-

    lutionary conjuncture calls forth a determinate response on the part of allthose who perceive it as such, that is those who are disposed to perceive itas such because they possess a determinate type of habitus, which may beduplicated and reinforced by the awakening of class consciousness, that is,the possession, direct or indirect, of a form of discourse capable of ensuringsymbolic mastery of the practically mastered principles of class habitus ~.

    32. The illusion of free creation probably finds some of its justification in the character-istic circle of any conditional stimulation: habitus can only give rise to the type of responseobjectively contained within its logic insofar as it bestows its effectiveness as a cue upon theconjuncture by constituting it according to its own principles, in other words, by makingit exist as a question in referen ce to a part icular manner of interrogating reality.

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    The conjuncture capable of transforming practices which are objectively coord-inated because adapted to partially or totally identical objective necessitiesinto collective action is the product of the dialectical relationship betweenthe dispositions and the event. Without ever being totally coordinated, sincethey are the product of &dquo;causalseries&dquo;characterized by different structuraldurations, the dispositions and the situation, which combine synchronicallyin 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 thelogic of the process of reproduction of the structures within habitus, is oneof the foundations of the structural gap between opportunities and the dispo-sition to grasp them which leads to missed opportunities and, in particular,to the incapacity to analyse historical crises according to categories of percep-tion other than those of the past, even revolutionary ones.

    So, the objective structures are products of historical practices continuously

    reproduced (withor without

    transformations) byhistorical

    practiceswhose

    productive principle is, itself, the product of structures which, because ofthis, it tends to reproduce. When one is unaware of the dialectical relationshipbetween the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structuresthey produce and which tend to reproduce them, one has no choice but toreduce the relationship between the different social agencies - seen as &dquo;diffe-rent 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 thebasis of any other and to find the principle of the development of structuresin a kind of theoretical parthenogenesis, thus offering an unexpected revengeto the Hegel of the Philosophy of history and to his Tieltgeist, who &dquo;developshis unique nature&dquo;while always remaining identical to itself. As long asone accepts the canonic opposition which continually reappears in new formsthroughout 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 fetishismof 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, betweenstructure and practice, objectivism merely substitutes a man subjugated bythe dead laws of natural history for the creator man of subjectivism. The,challenging of the indiridual, considered as ens realissimum, leads merelyto his being treated as an epiphenomenon of hypostasized structure, and the asser-tion of the primacy of objective relations leads to bestowing upon these pro-ducts of human action - structures - the power to develop according totheir own laws and to determine, or to overdetermine, other structures. Theproblem is not a new one, and the attempt to transcend the opposition between

    subjectivism and objectivism always came up against that epistemologicalobstacle, the individual, still capable of haunting the theory of history, evenwhen he is reduced, as with Engels, to the state of a molecule which, in its

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    relations with other molecules, in a kind of Brownian motion, produces anobjective meaning reducible to the mechanical composition of singularchances 33.

    Just as the opposition of language to speech as simple execution, or evenas preconstructed object, masks the opposition between the objective relationsof language and the dispositions of linguistic competence, so, the oppositionbetween structure and individual (against which structure has to be conquered,and conquered over and over again), obstructs the construction of the dialec-tical relationship between the structures and the dispositions of the habitus.The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation whichis necessary to make possible the reproduction of these products of collectivehistory: thanks to this work, objective structures (e.g. of language, eco-nomics, etc.) come to reproduce themselves, in the form of durable dispositions,in all individual organisms (which one may call individuals) durably subjectedto the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions ofexistence. In other

    words, sociologytreats all those

    biological individualswhich, being the product of the same objective conditions, act as supportsfor the same habitus, as identical: social class, as a system of objective rela-tions, 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 tothe class habitus as a system of dispositions which are (partially) commonto all the products of the same structures. If it is not possible that all mem-bers of the same class (or even two of them) can have had the same experi-ences in the same order, it is nonetheless clear that any member of the same classhas a greater chance than any member of another class of having found himselfconfronted, either as an actor or as a witness, by those situations which aremost common for the members of that class. The objective structures, whichscience grasps in the form of statistical regularities (for example, in the formof rates of employment, of income curves, of chances of access to secondaryeducation, 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;artof evaluating

    33. "History is made in such a way that the final result always emerges from the conflictof a great number of individual wills, of which each one in turn is made what it is as the resultof a crowd of specific conditions of existence; in it, consequently, innumerable forces mutuallycross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which one resultantemerges the historical event which may, in turn, be seen as the product of a force actingas a whole, unconsciously and blindly. Because, what an individual desires is obstructedby 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, tothe same laws of movement" (F. Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, sept. 21, 1890). "Men maketheir 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 thatis precisely why necessity, completed and expressed by chance, reigns in all societies of thistype" (F. Engels, Letter to Hans Starkenbur g, jan. 25, 1894).

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    likelihoods&dquo;,as Leibniz puts it, that is, of anticipating the objective forth-coming, in short, that sense of reality, or realities.

    The relationship between class, habitus and organic individuality, whichcan never entirely be removed from sociological discourse - insofar as beingimmediately available to perception (intuitus personae), it is also sociallydesignated and recognized (name, legal person, etc.) and insofar as it is defin-ed by a social trajectory irreducible to any other - can be expressed, at leastmetaphorically, as those who use the notion of the unconscious sometimesdo implicitly, within the language of transcendental idealism. Consideringthe habitus as a subjective, but not individual, system of internalized structures,of perception, conception and action - schemes common to all the membersof the same group or class which constitutes the condition of all objectifica-tion - we are, in this perspective, brought to found the objective concertationof practices and the uniqueness of the world view on the perfect impersonalityand substitutability of singular practices and views. But this amounts to

    claimingthat all

    practicesor views

    produced byidentical schemes are

    imper-sonal and interchangeable, i