Fighting Scholars: Bourdieu, Rancière, Wacquant, Derrida
1. Derrida vs Bourdieu
Loïc Wacquant's recent reflections on his use of Bourdieu's notion of 'habitus' to structure his ethnographic study of boxing in the Chicago ghetto (Wacquant 2004) are interesting in many ways. Firstly, this is because of his robust defense of the notion of habitus in the face of its critics. Secondly, Wacquant reiterates his critique of poststructuralist and postmodern approaches to sociology, anthropology and ethnography ('auto-ethnography') – which relate to deconstruction and also to Derrida's own critique of Bourdieuian sociology. And thirdly, Wacquant makes some comments that might recast the disagreement voiced by Rancière about Bourdieu's orientations and investments.
Both Derrida and Rancière offered critiques of Bourdieuian sociology. Rancière's is perhaps currently the most well known (Rancière 1991), but Derrida's critique of Bourdieu deserves recapitulating (Derrida 2002). Derrida basically takes issue with the philosophical stance of Bourdieu, which purports to be anti-philosophical – and which, in disidentifying with philosophy identifies instead with 'objectivity'. Thus, Derrida challenges the Bourdieuian 'interpretation of truth as "objectivity"' (Derrida 2002: 63), taking issue with the idea that 'the value of scientific statement, its truth, is in effect determined by its "objectivity"' (64).
It is important to note that Derrida's critique of Bourdieuian sociology in this essay begins with a very direct challenge to the kind of work that Wacquant will go on to develop in his studies of boxing. For what Wacquant wants to do is to get access to the truth of a particular nexus, chiasmus or conjuncture, organised by working class and sub-working class ('proletarian') male black boxing life in the Chicago ghetto. Put polemically, Wacquant wants to get to 'things themselves' by virtue of an immersion course that removes the distance between the ivory tower and the object of its knowledge. And, although I have planted the words 'things themselves' on Wacquant without his permission in order perhaps to entrap him unfairly, I think that the contrast between the type of 'Bourdieuian' knowledge that Wacquant seeks to construct and the problematics that Derrida could be said to anticipate here deserves attention.
So, in this essay in which he takes issue with Bourdieu's approach, Derrida writes:
Certain people are always impatient to access-the-things-themselves-directly-and-reach-right-away-without-waiting-the-true-content-of-the-urgent-and-serious-problems-that-face-us-all-etc. Thus, they will no doubt judge an analysis that deploys this range of meanings and possible sentences playful, precious, and formal, indeed futile: 'Why be so slow and self-indulgent? Why these linguistic stages? Why not go right to the things themselves?' Of course, one can share this impatience and nonetheless think, as I do, that not only do we gain nothing by immediately giving in to it, but that this lure has a history, interest, and a sort of hypocritical structure, and that one would always be better off to begin by acknowledging it by giving oneself the time for a detour and analysis. (Derrida 2002: 3-4)
There are two salient issues in this Derridean argument: the first is the problem of 'access to things themselves'; the second is what Derrida calls the 'hypocritical structure' of academic work that does not stop to think about the (linguistic and/or aesthetic, etc.) forms and structures of our way of 'accessing' (or constructing in discourse) 'things themselves'. In other words, for Derrida, the subject is always a barred subject, because of the unavoidable intrusion of language in between and in the way of everything. Thus, to think that you have got at the 'truth' is always going to be a problem for Derrida, because what you have got at is a linguistic discursive construct, one that is being engaged in and through one or another style of language.
Derrida's questions and critiques were formulated at a relatively early stage of the elaboration of Bourdieu's approach to sociology – around the time that those approaches could be said to have been gaining a kind of hegemony in France, in terms of connections between Bourdieu and French educational and sociological policies. And it is surely normal for critical thinkers to worry about, well, essentially everything that is new or gaining power. (As Derrida once put it, the future should be regarded as a kind of monstrosity…) But if we regard Wacquant as the current heir of the Bourdieuian approach to a sociology that seeks to bypass or beat the 'problem of writing', we can ask: were Derrida's worries founded? How does Wacquant's work fare in relation to the Derridean critique of its Bourdieuian orientation? And what does it say in response?
2. Rancière vs Bourdieu
The Rancièrean critique of Bourdieu is slightly different. It is organised not so much by questions and problems of language – at least, not directly – as by those of the presumption of inequality. To paraphrase quickly, Rancière argues that Bourdieuian sociology's stated aim of reducing or even eradicating class-based inequality in French society via interventions into the educational system is not only doomed to fail but is doomed to fail because it at best reproduces and at worst intensified the inequality it seeks to redress. This is because it is based on what Rancière calls a presumption of inequality.
Through a series of direct and indirect readings of Bourdieu's work, such as in The Philosopher and His Poor (Rancière 2004) as well as the earlier oblique work The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière 1991), and indeed throughout his entire critical corpus, Rancière takes issue with the what he construes as the presumption of inequality wherever he discerns it. And he discerns it everywhere: in the political presumption that 'the people' need 'leaders' or 'educators', in the aristocratic presumption that some people deserve to be socially superior to others, and in the pedagogical presumption that children need teachers, and so on. There are different versions of this that Rancière regularly returns to; most famously his preferred story of the proletarian workers who are often treated by academics 'as workers' – that is, as not scholars. However, archival research reveals that 'the workers' very often had all sorts of philosophical and aesthetic aspirations, and engaged in practices, that most scholars could not accept. Accordingly, scholars and activists have tried to 'police' such 'aberrations' back into their proper place: workers who indulged in art and literature have been regarded, even by Marxist and communist intellectuals, as 'class traitors'.
Rancière's work often identifies these moments where writers and thinkers betray their prejudices – their belief in the superiority of some groups over others; such as where they cannot accept that workers might be philosophers or artists, or where they cannot accept that children might not need teachers.
All of this is present in Rancière's book on politics, Disagreement (Rancière 1999), in which he reveals the extent to which political thinkers use what he calls a geometrical phantasy or model of society: each 'class' is presumed to have their proper place, and anyone who moves out of place should be policed back into it.
This is where Bourdieu comes in. Rancière argues that Bourdieu repeats the aristocratic perspective of presuming that the superior class (the sociologists) will always know more and know better than their object (the people). The people will never understand themselves fully, properly or even adequately, because for them to be able to do so, they would have to go through the universities and learn from the sociologists themselves. Thus, argues Rancière, Bourdieu works for the maintenance of the class hierarchies he claims to want to remove.
Rancière's work also has a strong critique of any pedagogy – which is something to be engaged more fully another day.
3. Wacquant and the boxers
Now, I have indeed read some Bourdieuian/Wacquantian sociological work which seems to fit the Rancièrean critique perfectly, in that it reproduces the inegalitarian view that any kind of 'emancipation' from this or that habitus (construed as a kind of force of 'determination' means, in a sense, struggling to move upward (Hilgers 2009). In such work, the lower classes – the ghetto boxers – are (or should be) aspiring to 'escape' from the subjugation/determination of their place in the social order. The implication here is that those who are most free are those who are higher up. But does Wacquant's recent work accord with this?
Wacquant gives two contributions to the recent collection Fighting Scholars (García and Spencer 2013). The first is positioned as the first chapter of the book (Wacquant 2013a). The second is the epilogue to the book (Wacquant 2013b). In other words, Wacquant's work is presented as central to the collection.
At the very end of his Epilogue, Wacquant asks what drove him 'to study boxers in the first place':
I was not motivated to spend three years in a boxing gym just to plumb the idiosyncratic features of the Manly Art. Aside from the sheer pleasure of being enwrapped in a gripping sensual and moral universe, I ploughed ahead in my journey among pugs because I held – and I still hold – that the ring offers an especially propitious experimental setting to show how social competency is fabricated and membership bestowed (Wacquant 2005a). I am keenly aware of the objection that practices vary in their 'physicality', or in their reliance on discursive reason, such that a prizefighter would seem to differ radically on that count from, say, a philosophy professor. For this objection was raised forcefully and rather intimidatingly by none other than John Searle after I presented the theoretical implications of Body and Soul to his Workshop on Social Ontology at Berkeley in April of 2010. While Searle agrees that some notion much like habitus, which he calls 'the Background', is needed to account for social action, he considers that there is a 'dramatic difference' (his words) between an athletic and an intellectual craft, one that renders transferring knowledge gained about the one to the other too risky if not invalid. He would advise to study 'intermediate cases', such as that of the soldier (in his response to my argument, he drew on the experiences of his son as a tank officer in a US Army battalion stationed in Germany). (198)
It is interesting that the staunch critic of Wacquant's sense that what he learned about identity, membership and ghetto life might be translated into all sorts of realms is none other than John Searle – who is most famously known in the fields of poststructuralism as the staunch critic of Derrida's essay 'Signature, Event, Context' (Derrida 1982). Searle's reply to Derrida prompted Derrida to write the long rejoinder that became Limited Inc. (Derrida 1988). And one way of characterizing the disagreement between them boiled down to Derrida's desire to radicalize and expand some aspects of the theory of speech acts as developed by Searle's mentor Austin. However, Searle disagreed, and argued, in a sense, that thought should focus on the, so to speak, 'intermediate cases', and far away from the grey areas of the borders, which is where Derrida wanted most to push and explore.
Like Derrida, Wacquant too is not prepared to stay away from the supposedly clear borders and boundaries between supposed realms. He continues immediately:
I am not convinced. I take the difference between pugilists and philosophers to be one of degree and not one of kind. The existential situation of the generic, run-of-the-mill agent is not ontologically different from that of the fighter and of the fighting scholar: like them, she is a sentient being of flesh and blood, bound to a particular point in physical space and tied to a given moment in time by virtue of her incarnation in a fragile organism. This porous, mortal organism exposes her to the world and thus to the risk of pain (emotional as well as physical) and injury (symbolic as well as material); but it also propels her onto the stage of social life, where she evolves in practice the visceral know-how and prediscursive skills that form the bedrock of social competency. Though carnal sociology is particular apt for studying social extremes, its principles and techniques apply across all social institutions, for carnality is not a specific domain of practices but a fundamental constituent of the human condition and thus a necessary ingredient of all action. For this reason, and until this methodological strategy is practically invalidated, I would urge social analysts to start from the assumption that, pace Searle, we are all martial artists of one sort or another. (198)
In a sense, then, Wacquant's thinking of 'habitus' might be related to Derrida's thinking of 'performatives'. In Derrida what becomes undecidable is the line between what is constative (or fixed and stable) and what is performative. He finds performativity active in even the most basic constative statement. Similarly, Wacquant is adamant that the habitus is not a field of determination, but a signifier of the logics of agency: 'habitus alone never spawns a definite practice', writes Wacquant, 'it takes the conjunction of disposition and position, subjective capacity and objective possibility, habitus and social space (or field) to produce a given conduct or expression' (194). Thus it is not a kind of determinism. Rather, habitus always involves a 'meeting between skilled agent and pregnant world', and the nature of such an encounters or process 'spans the gamut from felicitous to strained, smooth to rough, fertile to futile' (194). The key point of Wacquant's approach is that habitus 'must be studied in its actual formation and extant manifestations, and not stipulated by analytic fiat' (194). Accordingly:
far from being a 'theoretical deus ex machina' (DiMaggio 1979, 1464) that keeps us locked in conceptual obscurity, habitus is a standing invitation to investigate the social constitution of the agent. It is not an answer to the conundrum of action – lately rephrased by invoking the equally enigmatic category of 'agency' – but a question or, better yet, an empirical prompt: an arrow pointing to the need to methodically historicize the concrete agent embedded in a concrete situation by reconstituting the set of durable and transposable dispositions that sculpt and steer her thoughts, feelings and conduct. (194)
So far so good. Wacquant does not seem to elaborate itself according to Rancière's prophesies about Bourdieuian inequality inscribing itself everywhere. This is perhaps because Rancière's critique of Bourdieu in this sense may only be germane to his work on class and education. Indeed, Wacquant, as we have seen, although faithful to Bourdieu, actually goes on to regard the lessons he learned about habitus in the boxing club as generalizable here, there and everywhere – including to the figure of the philosophy professor.
Of course, I would propose, the example of 'an academic' given by a sociologist would almost have to be the figure of the philosopher. This is because, as the battles between Derrida, Rancière and Bourdieu suggest, the ultimate target of the sociologist is the philosopher. And vice versa.
4. Watching your language
But what of the problem of language? Readers of Derrida will know that for Derrida there's really no getting past it. (However, Rancière has never had much patience for the Derridean/deconstructive multiplication of words and wordiness – what Rey Chow calls the primary strategy of 'resistance' of deconstruction: to make things more complicated.) In his contributions to Fighting Scholars, Wacquant seems more than a little surly in the face of something that might be taken for the deconstructive turn in sociology, anthropology and ethnography. What he says about this is as follows.
According to Wacquant, 'the notion [of habitus was] intended to overcome the antinomy between an objectivism that reduces practice to the mechanical precipitate of structural necessities and a subjectivism that confuses the personal will and intentions of the agent with the spring of her action' (24). He decided upon his research methodology in the following way:
The idea that guided me here was to push the logic of participant observation to the point where it becomes inverted and turns into observant participation. In the Anglo-American tradition, when anthropology students first go into the field, they are cautioned, 'Don't go native!' In the French tradition, radical immersion is admissible – think of Jeanne Favret-Saada's ([1978] 1980) Deadly Words – but only on condition that it is coupled with a subjectivist epistemology that gets us lost in the inner depths of the anthropologist-subject. My position, on the contrary, is to say, 'go native' but go native armed, that is, equipped with your theoretical and methodological tools, with the full store of problematics inherited from your discipline, with your capacity for reflexivity and analysis, and guided by a constant effort, once you have passed the ordeal of initiation, to objectivize this experience and construct the object, instead of allowing yourself to be naively embraced and constructed by it. (27-8)
Thus, 'theory and method are joined to the point of fusion in the very empirical object whose elaboration they make possible' (28). But – and here's the sting:
Body and Soul is not an exercise in reflexive anthropology in the sense intended by what is called 'poststructuralist' or 'postmodern' anthropology, for which the return of the analytic gaze is directed either onto the knowing subject in her personal intimacy or onto the text that she delivers to her peers and the circuits of power-knowledge in which it travels, in a contradictory and self-destructive embrace of relativism (Hastrup 1995; Marcus 1998). Those forms of reflexivity, narcissistic and discursive, are rather superficial; they certainly constitute a useful moment in a research undertaking by helping to curb the play of the crudest biases (rooted in one's identity and trajectory, affects, rhetorical effects, etc.). But they stop the movement of critique at the very point where it should start, through the constant questioning of the categories and techniques of sociological analysis and of the relationship to the world these presuppose. It is this return onto the instruments of construction of the object, as opposed to the subject of objectivation, which is the hallmark of what one may call epistemic reflexivity (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 36- 46; Bourdieu 2002a). And here is another difference with the 'egological' or textual reflexivity of the subjectivist anthropologists: epistemic reflexivity is deployed not at the end of the project, ex post, when it comes to drafting the final research report, but durante, at every stage in the investigation. It targets the totality of the most routine research operations, from the selection of the site and the recruitment of informants to the choice of questions to pose or to avoid, as well as the engagement of theoretic schema, methodological tools and display techniques, at the moment when they are implemented. (30)
Wacquant's 'target' here is perhaps explained better by Adam Frank than by Wacquant himself. As Frank explains:
The postmodernist moment in anthropology began quasi-officially in 1986 with the publication of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986), a book that had the positive effect of demanding that anthropologists reflect upon their positionality in the writing of ethnography – in effect, that they treat ethnography as literature. This book opened a space for subaltern perspectives to move from the fringes to the center and, as Katz and Csordas (2003) note, created room for phenomenological ethnography. After Writing Culture, 'culture' as a given, useful concept for anthropologists ceased to exist for a time, and dire predictions arose as to the imminent demise of the discipline. Well into the 1990s and early 2000s, this situation had the effect of creating a contentious atmosphere in which the various isms competed with one another in journals and within departments. It was not merely a fight between the old and the new, but also a fight between contending pictures of the new. One largely unsatisfactory response to this state of affairs has been to pretend that those irritating isms never happened at all and return instead to a kind of modified, anachronistic empiricism. (Frank 2006: 14-15)
Wacquant's picture of 'the new' is clearly one in which the body and agency are to be brought into visibility by way of a paradigm to be created by thinking and looking for 'habitus' in embodied research. I suspect that Rancièrean readers may indeed have some problems identifying 'a problem' with Wacquant's orientation according to the terms of Rancière's critique of Bourdieu (and Althusser, Wordsworth, etc.).
But what of Derridean or deconstructive readers? They could continue to have a field day. This is because there are loose threads everywhere, to be picked up and pulled.
As Wacquant says, immediately after attacking narcissistic postmodern approaches to sociology:
Body and Soul is written against subjectivism, against the narcissism and irrationalism that undergird so-called 'postmodern' literary theory, but that does not mean that we should for that deprive ourselves of the literary techniques and instruments of dramatic exposition that this tradition gives us. (31)
In other words, like Searle, Wacquant really would prefer to keep things in their proper place. Language can be 'used'. It is a helpful 'tool'. Wacquant approves of the use of language in two ways: first, we can use the insights of 'literary theory' to become 'reflexive', all the way through – but not too much. Second, even the 'objective' sociologist must find ways to write their objectivity. Body and Soul (Wacquant 2004) has three distinct voices, for three distinct sections, Wacquant informs us… But language is not a problem, properly constrained.
Language is indeed what Derrida called 'that dangerous supplement'. And, to supplement Derrida with Rancière, it must be policed. Otherwise, 'habitus', just like 'the constative', cannot become anything other than absolutely opaque and undecidable.
References
Derrida, Jacques (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Brighton: Harvester.
——— (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
——— (1999). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (2004). The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Comments
Post a Comment