THE INTERNATIONAL SCENE: CURRENT TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

STRUCTURALISM AND THEORY OF SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE*

BY PIERRE BOURDIEU

JL he originality of the trend in anthropological research called structuralism may be said to rest, paradoxically, on the fact that it has greatly contributed to wiping out the fictitious originality assigned to anthropological knowledge by the spontaneous theory of such a knowledge. The risk of underestimating or overestimat- ing (two alternatives which are not mutually exclusive) the origin- ality of this trend, which reasonably deserves less than mathematics or modern physics the name of structuralism, is due to the fact that the principles it has stirred up again or expressly constituted in their specifically anthropological form are diametrically op- posed to the spontaneous theory of knowledge of man and of society. Consequently, when anthropology undertakes to found itself upon principles that ultimately are those of any theory of scientific knowledge, it has to overcome epistemological obstacles that are not comparable with those faced by the natural sciences.

Properly to appraise the theoretical contribution of struc- turalism, we must introduce, in opposition to the usual ways of thinking, a clear-cut distinction between theory of sociological knowledge and theory of the social system. The theory of sociologi- cal knowledge, as the system of principles and rules governing the production of all sociological propositions scientifically grounded, and of them alone, is the generating principle of all partial theories of the social and, therefore, the unifying principle of a properly sociological discourse which must not be confused with a unitary theory of the social. In other words, a sociological dis-

* Editor's Note - Translated by Angela Zanotti-Karp.

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course, for example a theory of marriage transactions or of cul- tural diffusion, is scientific only to the extent that it makes use of the epistemological and logical principles of the theory of so- cial knowledge, that is, of sociological meta-science, in arranging a system of relations and of their explicatory principles. It fol- lows, on the one hand, that the plurality of theories of the social system must not conceal the unity of the meta-science upon which all that in the former stands out as scientific is founded: scholars such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, totally different in their views of social philosophy and ultimate values, were able to agree on the main points of the fundamental principles of the theory of knowledge of the social world. It follows, on the other hand, that what is usually called the "unity of science" is nothing but the unity of meta-science, the identity of principles upon which all science, including the science of man, is founded.

The originality of anthropological structuralism lies essentially in the fact that it attacks from first to last the substantialist way of thinking which modern mathematics and physics have constantly striven to refute. Only in relatively recent times has it been possible to break with the substantialist way of thinking that con- ceives of geometrical figures in their factual existence instead of considering them in their reciprocal relations; it has finally be- come possible to perceive that single elements only hold their properties by virtue of the relations linking one with another within a system, that is to say, by virtue of the function they fulfill within the system of relations. Finally, it has been possible to discover that any geometry is nothing but a pure system of rela- tions determined by the principles governing them and not by the intrinsic nature of the figures entering those relations. Thus, for

example, points, lines and planes of Euclidean geometry can be

replaced by an infinity of entirely different objects without affecting the validity of the corresponding theorems, in such a way that, as Bachelard writes, "the reality of a line is strengthened by its belonging to multiple varied surfaces; even better, . . . the essence of a mathematical notion is defined by the possibilities

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of deformation that allow for extending the application of such a notion." 1 One can immediately see all the epistemological ob- stacles anthropology must overcome in order to deal with its subject - cultural systems and systems of social relations - as modern geometry deals with its subject, that is, as systems defined not by some substantial "content" but only by the laws of com- bination of their constitutive elements. In the first place, such things as language, culture, or a complex of social relations cannot be dealt with as systems having internal coherence and necessity, except by overruling, as Ernst Cassirer remarks, the clear-cut opposition established by Leibniz and all classical rationalism between truths of reason and truths of fact, between formal eternal truths of logic and mathematics and contingent empirical truths of history. In ceasing to place in opposition to each other that which is formal and that which is real, reason and experience con- ceived as mere "Rhapsodie von Warnehmungen," structuralism places its foundation on the postulate that experience is a system.2

The postulate of the systematic character of empirical facts, however, presupposes the overcoming of a further epistemological obstacle which is typical of the sciences of man because it is linked to the particular relationship between the social scientist and his object. The artificialism inherent in the spontaneous philosophy of the social world leads to the "atheism of the moral world" criticized by Hegel in the introduction to his Philosophy of Right: social subjects are inclined to deny the social world the immanent necessity they recognize in the natural one, either because they are deluded by the experience of everyday life, where the meaning of others' conduct and activities is immediately seizable, or because they are anxious to retain the imprescriptible rights of man, in- cluding the right to be aware of the meaning of an action and

i G. Bachelard, Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, Paris, P.U.F., 1934; 5th ed., 1949, p. 24. Bachelard also writes: "The role of entities takes precedence over their nature . . . and the essence is concomitant with the relation" (p. 22). It is in relations that different geometries are equivalent. As relations they have a reality and not by reference to an object, an experience, or an image of intuition" (p. 28).

2E. Cassirer, "Structuralism in Modern Linguistics," Word, I, 1945, pp. 99-120.

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freely and rationally to determine it and its consequences. By recognizing in the social world a vicarious necessity only, of which man ever remains master and owner, one may avoid such arti- ficialism; social reality may be dealt with as a system that has im- manent necessity, independent of individuals' consciousness and will, and that, therefore, must be explored in the same way as are the relationships among facts of the physical world. The debate

recently developed, especially in France, about structuralism as a "philosophy without subject" misses what is truly original in this trend of research by attributing to structuralism what the founders of social science, Marx as well as Durkheim, always stated both in their theoretical writings and scientific practice: struc- turalism simply reaffirms the postulate of the systematic character, or the immanent intelligibility of the social world, thus divesting individual consciousness of the gnoseological privilege granted to it by the spontaneous theory of the social.

Considerable difficulties hinder the methodological decision to

regard a cultural formation, such as language, myth or ritual, or a social formation as a system containing the key to its own

interpretation, and to draw from the facts themselves the code for

unraveling their meaning: the symbols of culture formations -

myths or rituals even more than language - do not have the con- clusive clarity of the symbols of formal logic, which are arbitrary and are perceived to be so. Even more than geometrical figures, they appear as concrete individualities that must be dealt with in themselves and for themselves, rather than in their relations with all phenomena in the same class. Myths, rituals or even literary or

philosophical works belonging to different traditions are shielded

against interpretation, not so much because minds which are

deprived of the key of interpretation, and in addition of the consciousness of such a deprivation, experience in them an ap- parent absurdity and incoherence; but rather, because they give an appearance of sense to partial and selective readings, where the

meaning of each symbolic element is expected to derive from a

special revelation rather than from its methodically established

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relation with all the other elements of the same class.8 The true meaning of a given ritual act, of a symbol, may remain hidden from the observer because, paradoxically, this act or symbol assumes too easily the appearance of truth (as for example, the sexual significance of work). By allowing one to assign one mean- ing to each symbol separately taken, the books on dreams discour- age even the intention of referring each symbolic element to the total system of manifestations from which it derives its true sense. In the same way the earlier mythologists, paying greater attention to the subject matter of the myth than to the way it was told, to its vocabulary rather than to its syntax, were contented with word- by-word translations which were made possible by dictionaries of universal symbolism which included mythical or ritual elements borrowed from different traditions and considered in their con- tent only. By taking such short-cuts, which directly led from each signifiant to its correspondent signifié, scholars were diverted from the long detour by the total system of the constitutive significants of a ritual or mythical corpus. Yet that detour alone could have led them to the complete system of significants and, consequently, to the particular significant corresponding to each particular correspondent.

It would not be difficult to find equivalent practices at once lazy and over-hasty, among sociologists. The very logic of investiga- tion, a series of operations producing a collection of facts, leads into hair-splitting atomism those who, yielding to an easy task, take the statistical table as the unit of interpretation and who avoid exposing an entire coherent body of propositions to the confutation that might come from every table, because they skip over the question of articulating the propositions derived from

3 Several of the interpretations of Greek philosophers' works, especially those of the pre-Socratics, reveal more about the interpreters' way of thinking than about the structure of the discourse interpreted. Among other reasons, the ease of word- by-word, at times letter-by-letter, translation has shielded these works from a systematic interpretation at least as effectively as has the apparent absurdity of translating cultural works belonging to the most removed and least acknowledged tradition».

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each table or from series of tables, each entailing its own analysis. As against a discontinuous series of ad hoc hypotheses, a system of hypotheses owes its epistemological value to coherence, and to its vulnerability to attack: one fact alone can bring into question the whole system. Being built at the price of breaking away from phenomenal appearances, the system cannot receive the immediate and easy corroboration that facts at their face value or documents literally taken would provide: its verification is only made possible by the whole coherence of the total system of facts created by - and not for - the theoretical hypotheses. Such a method of proof, where the coherence of the system of intelligible facts is in itself its own proof, while, at the same time, the power of proof is conferred on the partial tests positivism manipulates in a scattered way, evidently presupposes the systematic decision to question the facts about the relations which bind them into a system. When Erwin Panofsky offers as an "element of proof" the inter se dis- putando of Villard de Honnecourt's Album, he does not ignore that that phrase does not settle a question of fact, the direct in- fluence of the scholastics upon the architects, for example: such a small fact derives its proof value from its relations with other facts which are insignificant as long as they are considered indepen- dently of the relations that a systematic hypothesis allows us to discover, but which take hold of their real "value" only as

organized links of one series.4 The sociologist sets in motion the same circular process in his analysis of the facts yielded by an

investigation: starting from the complex of responses to a question- naire, he interprets the meaning of each question by means of which he has elicited and built the responses, constantly reformu-

lating the meaning of the whole in the light of what he learns from each of the responses.

The structural approach can be established in research provided only that all automatic routines in scientific practice are broken.

* Cf. P. Bourdieu, "Post-face," in E. Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scholastique, précédé de L'Abbé Suger de Saint-Denis, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1966, pp. 135-167.

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In addition, however, the greater discipline implied by systematiza- tion always runs the risk of appearing as a cleverly disguised re- nunciation of scientific exactitude to those for whom just taking the "given" as such represents the ideal of precision. Actually, the proof obtained through the coherence of the system of proofs condemns any systematic procedure to a methodic cycle which inevitably appears as a vicious circle, inspired by the spirit of the system, to a positivist epistemology that reinterprets this logic of proof with reference to an analytical definition of verification. The same blindness leads some to perceive in the structural analy- sis of a myth the projection of the researcher's categories of thought, or even the protocol of a projective test or a bias in the chosen method of interpreting each statistical relation established by a multivariate analysis on the basis of the total system of the relations between the relations from which each derives its mean- ing.5 The strength of proof of a relation empirically discovered is not exclusively determined by a strong statistical correlation. The validity of the hypothesis tested is a function of the complete system of relations already established, whether statistical relations or regularities of a different type. In Reichenbach's words, it is a function of those "chains of proofs" that "may be stronger than their weakest link, even stronger than their strongest link," 6 since their validity is measured not only by the simplicity and coherence of the principles employed, but by the range and diversity of the

s Thus, in the same way that mathematics can consider the absence of property as itself a property, the sociologist can view the absence of a statistical relation between two variables as highly significant when he places it within the complete system of relations of which it is a part. For example, no significant relation (in a statistical sense) is found among students of different social origin in their knowledge of classical theater, while they systematically differentiate themselves in all other cultural practices. In this case, an interpretation of the meaning of the attitude toward academic culture, which reveals a non-significant relation, should contain the meaning of the socially conditioned and diversified relation of the students with the free culture (avant-garde theater or modern music) and vice versa, etc. (P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, Les Etudiants et leur études, Cahiers du Centre de Sociologie Européenne, n.l, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1964).

«A. Kaplan, The Conduct of Enquiry, Methodology of Behavioral Science, San Francisco, Chandler, 1964, p. 215.

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facts considered and by the multiplicity of unforeseen conse-

quences. The words that Duhem used to describe the progress of

physics can thus describe the progress of any structural research: "A symbolic painting to which incessant retouching gives greater extent and unity . . . , while each detail, cut off from the whole, loses any meaning and no longer represents anything." 7 It is not by chance, therefore, that a physicist has expounded the theory of scientific theory which is the most appropriate for removing the apparent difficulties in the application of the structural method to the social sciences. In the introduction to his book, The

Principles of Mechanics, Herz shows that the theoretical process consists in building symbolic representations whose structure is such that their necessary consequences in the sphere of thought are symbols of the consequences in the realm of things of the

objects represented. Here Herz is very close to a positivist philos- ophy of science such as that of Mach, for whom an adequate theory is defined by its conformity to the sense data which it expresses in their here and now. Herz, however, radically differentiates himself from positivism in that he stresses that, in order that the

theory be verified, it is not necessary to verify each single proposi- tion but only the complete system of propositions. That is to say that no element in a theory of nature, such as the notion of force or mass, can be isolated in order to be verified by an objective cor- relate, and that single concepts, hypothetically constructed, can no

longer be expected to reproduce concretely and empirically facts that can be demonstrated. It is in their totality, or, more exactly, in their mutual relations that such concepts represent their

objects, so that their "necessary consequences in the sphere of

thought" are always "symbols of the necessary consequences in the realm of things of the objects represented." The theory is not a literal translation based upon a term-by-term correspondence with the "real," merely reproducing the apparent elements and

properties of the object after the fashion of the mechanical models

T P. Duhem, La théorie physique, son objet, sa structure, Paris: M. Rivière, 1914, 2nd ed. reviewed and enlarged, p. 311.

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of ancient physics. The structure of symbols symbolizes8 the structure of relations established by experience in such a way that the relation between theory and facts, between reason and experi- ence, is still a structural homology. This is well expressed by Juvet: "In the rushing flux of phenomena, in the ever changeable reality, the physicist observes something permanent. In order to describe it his mind builds geometry, kinematics, mechanical models whose axioms fulfill the purpose of specifying that which, for want of a better term, we shall call useful understanding of the different concepts formed after experience and observation. If the axioms thus built are representations of a group whose invari- ants allow for the translation into reality of all permanent ele- ments discovered empirically, physical theory is free from contra- dictions and is a reflection of reality." 9 In other words, theory as a system of signs organized to represent, through their own rela- tions, the relations among the objects is a translation or, better, a symbol linked to what it symbolizes by a law of analogy.

More than cultural formations, social formations resist the ap- plication of such a meta-theory. In the first place, like cultural facts, social relations and institutions, because of their belonging to a system of relations among relations, are endowed with a necessary character which makes them appear to individuals as natural, at once as matter of course and as partaking of a human nature. Paradoxically, social relations or institutions, which otherwise would be perceived for what they objectively are -

arbitrary constructs - stand unquestioned concerning their belong- ing to the system and are rather apprehended in themselves, in absolute terms, precisely because of what they owe directly to the system of relations of which they are part: that is, their apparent necessity. In the second place, the logical expurgation presup- posed by the constitution of facts as elements of a system of rela- tions clashes here with particular difficulties: the "elements" in

» More accurately, one should say symbolizes with, as they did in the seventeenth century to indicate a relation of analogy between two things.

9 P. Juvet, La structure des nouvelles théories physiques, 1933, p. 170, quoted by G. Bachelard, op. cit., p. 35 (my italics).

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mutual relationship are individual agents directly perceptible and

immediately located in a here and now; they insistently demand to be conceived of in their separate existence, as if they had a real

autonomy as against the system of relations of which they are part and by which they are produced, in the sense that the electron, according to Herman Weyl, is not an element of the field but "a product of the field" (eine Ausgeburt des Felds). The methodo-

logical decision to focus upon the relationships rather than the elements composing them must therefore reckon with this ens realissimum of the spontaneous theory of the social: the individual, the "subject." One may believe, for example, that he has broken with all substantialism when he takes as his object the relation between two "substances" that, as often as not, indicate "inter-

subjective relations." The subject, hybrid offspring of Christian

spiritualism and of the Cartesian dogma of the "spirit in the machine," in Ryle's words, is more resistant than geometrical figures to the effort of grasping the system of relations from which it derives its raison d'être and even the appearance of an autono- mous existence. Thus, for example, the objective relations among the subjects' social positions are usually reduced to the "inter-

subjective relations" which actually involve the individuals occu-

pying those positions: such a procedure, however, ignores the fact that the property of social relations is precisely that of existing even if the subjects they involve (employers and workers, educated and uneducated people, etc.) do not have any direct relationship, even if they have never met and will never meet within the same here and now. It also ignores the fact that the actual relations

among subjects (and a number of kinds of conduct as well, cultural

practices for example, which are apparently free from any refer- ence to such relations) always imply an objective reference to the

objective relations of position which define their form and con- tent. Only a radical break with the spontaneous way of thought and perception, therefore, allows us to perceive that, for instance, the actual relations among agents constituting the intellectual field owe their specific form to the position each agent occupies

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within such a field, to the extent that each of these relations is dominated and defined by the objective relation between the

positions of the agents that enter it - such an objective relation being itself defined by its belonging to the intellectual field con- ceived as a system of relations.10 In the same way, the relation between individuals from different social classes and one or an- other cultural good, the meaning they give to different practices perceived as "vulgar" or "distinguished," "noble" or "common," and the actual relations they may hold among themselves on such an occasion, are always mediated: their relational meaning and function, therefore, are determined by the objective relations between class conditions and class positions which in these kinds of conduct, attitudes or opinions find a possibility of being actu- alized.11 For example, one could not understand the passionate and naive interest of sociologists and intellectuals in the problems of modern mass media, leisure or "popular culture," if it were not that the relationship between the intellectual and his culture encloses the whole question of how the intellectual is related to the intellectual condition, a question that is never so dramatically posed as in the issue of the relation between the intellectual and the lower classes as classes deprived of culture.

Being established among social conditions and positions (e.g., those defining a class situation), objective relations have more reality than the subjects involved, than the direct or mediated relations actually taking place among the agents, than the repre- sentations the agents form of these relations. To ignore the objective relations leads to apprehending all the characteristics observable or even disclosed by experimentation as if they were substantial properties, attached by nature to individuals or classes of individuals. The most elaborate notions in sociological theory which, like that of attitude, are but the abridged formula of a relation between two systems of relations, may be used in a real-

10 Cf. "Projet créateur et champ intellectuel," Les Temps Modernes, n.246, No- vember 1966.

n Cf. "Condition de classe et position de classe," Archives Européennes de Socio- logie, VII, 1966, pp. 201-223.

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istic frame when they define absolute properties, susceptible of

being thought of independently of the system of objective condi- tions of which they are the product and of the system of acts or conduct within which they become manifest (like, e.g., the notion of force in early physics). Most usages of concepts at once descrip- tive and explicatory such as "motivations," "tendencies," "needs," "inclinations" or "aspirations," rest upon a bracketing of the sys- tem of objective relations. An entirely similar procedure is

operated by spontaneous sociology when it separates acts and

expressions called "vulgar," "distinguished" or "pretentious" from the system of regularities and probabilities that objectively define the social conditions, hence the "motivations" of individuals in their behavior. Thus, one refrains from seeing, for example, that

upper class mobile petty bourgeois tend to adopt, through antici-

pation, and as much as their means allow (that is to say, more often in wishful thinking than in actuality), attributes which, at least in their eyes, belong to the objective position they will reach in the future according to statistics; to the extent that it favors antici-

patory socialization by fostering a favorable disposition to acquire the indispensable attitudes for social mobility, such a "pre- ten- sion" contributes to the realization of subjective hopes, themselves the product of a given system of objective opportunities.

To remove from physics any remnant of substantialism, it has been necessary to replace the notion of force with that of form. In the same way social sciences could not do away with the idea of human nature except by substituting for it the structure it conceals, that is by considering as products of a system of relations the properties that the spontaneous theory of the social ascribes to a substance. Marx's criticism of Stirner is valid in regard to all psychologists and sociologists who reduce social relations to re- lations among "subjects," or, even worse, to the "subjects'

" repre-

sentations of such relations, and who, in the name of some kind of practical artificialism, believe it possible to transform the objec- tive relations among the subjects by transforming the subjects' representations of them: "Sancho does not want two individuals

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to be 'in contradiction' with each other, like bourgeois and prole- tarian . . . , he would like to see them in a personal relationship of an individual to another one. He does not consider that, in the framework of the division of labor, personal relations neces- sarily, inevitably become class relations and crystallize as such; thus, all his verbiage reduces itself to a pious wish that he thinks to realize by exhorting the individuals in these classes to bar from their mind the idea of their 'contradictions' and particular 'privi- lege/ It would suffice to change the 'opinion' and the 'will' to destroy the 'contradiction' and the 'particular.'

" 12 The system of objective relations in which the individuals find themselves and which are more adequately expressed in the economy and morpho- logy of groups rather than in the individuals' declared opinions, contains the principle of the "satisfaction" or ' 'dissatisfaction' '

they feel, of the conflicts they experience or of the expectations and ambitions they express. It constitutes, therefore, the condi- tion for a complete understanding of the lived-through relation- ship individuals hold with their objectivated truth within a system of objective relations.

The apparent relations science must shatter in order to build up the system of objective relations they conceal, are not always mere fictions liable to be annihilated by exposing truth, as light dispels darkness. Ideological representations are, as it were, well founded errors of which the science of objective relations reveals at once theoretical fallacy and social function. It is useless to hope, for example, that the revelation of the objective truth of social relations, by force of its own evidence alone, can break down the ideologies of ''participation'* and "communication" conveyed and guaranteed by certain kinds of social psychology, and pre- disposed to become the justification of the enterprises or institu- tions which this science analyzes and to whose end it becomes accessory. This is the error of those who believe in the virtues of the dialogue and of the face-to-face situation, or who organize

12 K. Marx, Ideologie allemande, J. Molitor, trans., in Oeuvres Philosophiques, vol. IX, Paris, A. Costes, 1947, p. 94.

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magic cults of the new industrial age, socio-drama or non-directed interviews. The social science which finds in the adequate knowl- edge of objective relations the proof that transforming the repre- sentations of the objective relations is not sufficient to transform the latter, could not attribute to such a knowledge the power to transform the objective relations or even their representations.

Well founded errors, ideological representations, oppose to science an organized and systematic resistance because they are

supported by the whole social order they in turn help to support: the extreme difficulty encountered by the smallest conquests of science could not otherwise be understood, so evident are the truths once they are reached against all evidence. All "techniques'* by which the social system tends to conceal its own truth amount ultimately to the logic of camouflage: relations and their real configurations are in some way lost, confused, blurred, nullified, disfigured in the intertwining of their appearances. Whoever has done research work in the social sciences knows how cautiously it is necessary to proceed in order to avoid the false trails contained in the object itself, to resist the "plentiful abundance of epistemo- logical obstacles' ' as Georges Canguilhem says,13 and the ever

present allurement of the ready-made interpretations that reality insistently proposes to the interpreter, and not only through the informants' responses, often deceiving even without any intention of doing so. Thus, for example, a charismatic ideology, from which most of the privileged classes' representations of culture, of the relations with culture and of the modes of acquiring it

originate, can be produced by simply bracketing the evident rela- tion between education and culture. Such a bracketing is objec- tively authorized and sustained by a social system which insures to the privileged classes, among other things, that mode of ac-

quiring culture through which this bracketing can be more easily effected, in a more unconscious than conscious way.14

is G. Canguilhem, "Sur une epistemologie concordataire," in Hommage à Bachelard, Etudes de philosophie et d'histoire des sciences, Paris, P.U.F., 1957, pp. 3-12.

14 For a more systematic analysis or tne relation Deiween me sysiem or îaeoiogicai

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The adequate theory of the object implies the theory of the social conditions in which are produced the pre-constructed ob- jects that are proposed by ideology and that constitute the major obstacle to the formulation of an adequate theory of the object. Consequently, because of a blind acceptance of what Nietzsche calls "the dogma of the immaculate perception/' positivist socio- logy - viewing itself as free from preventions and presuppositions - is likely to fall into all the traps set by pre-constructed objects, social facts perceived and named by spontaneous sociology and "social problems" whose claim to exist as sociological problems is stronger the higher the degree of social reality they display for the global society and especially for the community of scholars. When, misled by a false philosophy of objectivity conceived as mere submission to the given as such, the sociologist negates him- self as a sociologist by refusing consciously to build his own dis- tance from reality and the conditions for an adequate knowledge of it, he condemns himself to ascertain pre-constructed facts which are imposed on him despite himself because he is not provided with the means of knowing the rules of their construction. Thus, for example, a sociologist may study juvenile delinquency, a social problem par excellence, sanctioned by a long tradition as a socio- logical problem: by means of the most rigorous statistical tech- niques he establishes relations between types of delinquency and the different characteristics of delinquents such as sex, social origin, level of education, employment or unemployment, mem- bership in more or less integrated family milieu, etc.; in so doing he is bound to adopt as his own production an explicatory system which has been objectively imposed on him by the pre-constructed object which he has allowed to be imposed upon himself, if he fails to investigate the institutional conditions that produce delin-

representations in the sphere of culture and the system of mechanisms which such representations conceal and from which they derive their existence and logic, see P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, Les Héritiers, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1964; P. Bour- dieu et al., Un art moyen, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1965; P. Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L'amour de l'art, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1966; P. Bourdieu, "Eléments pour une théorie sociologique de la perception artistique," Revue internationale des sciences sociales, forthcoming.

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quents. Such conditions include institutions and agents that are

responsible for curbing delinquency and identifying delinquents, from the people in the neighborhood where the first complaints are made, up to the judges in the children's courts, passing through police officers and social workers; they include also the values and the conscious or unconscious representations of the "social order" that these "representatives of order" derive from their belonging to given social classes (petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie in this particular case), and that direct their perception and evaluation of the different forms, socially identified, of violation of social norms.

It is against such a substitution of object that Erving Goffman defends himself in his study of what he calls total institutions: he refuses to accept the social definition of insanity according to which the "given" is constructed and describes instead the logic of the process of "alienation" by which a society chooses and pro- duces its "insane" population.15 In order to understand the social conditions that produce the pre-constructed object (psychiatric hospital and mental patient), which a "sociology of mental illness" could only assume as such, it was necessary to tear apart the web of apparent relations that, in the common consciousness, contain madmen and insanity. The series madman, insanity, neurosis, psychiatrist, mental hospital, cure, had to be replaced by the one that it disguises: committed, commitment, forced residence, prison, barracks, concentration camp, institutional alienation.

Briefly, breaking with the ideological representations of insanity, particularly with the humanitarian doctrine that makes up the

façade of the institutions officially in charge of curing it, is one with building up a system of total institutions, a paradoxical grouping of organizations separated for so long that only their declared functions are taken into account. It is sufficient, then, to conceive of each institution (or class of institutions) constitu-

ting the system as so many isomorphic cases of a single group of transformations in order to be able to grasp the invariant char-

15 E. Goffman, Asylums, New York: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1961.

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acteristics which each of them is given by the logic of the total institution. Taken in itself, the mental hospital doubtless dis- guises better than any other institution its relation to the system and the characteristics of its functioning that derive from this fact, thanks especially to the scientific authority of the psychiatric dis- course which expresses its declared functions. Once, however, the series of total institutions has been constructed, the mental hospital displays much more completely than other institutions the logic of ideological camouflage.

In order to escape an idiographic, and therefore ideological, consideration of those cases that have been able to resist any inter- pretation for so long that they are perceived as they "demand" to be, that is in their specificity, science must construct a system which alone can reveal the hidden truth of the case considered because it contains the principle of its own interpretation. For this purpose it must use the hypothesis of analogies among facts claiming to be considered in themselves and for themselves, or between the fact directly studied and the complex of logically possible facts constituting the class of which the particular fact is a part from a sociological viewpoint.16 Max Weber's methodo-

16 Such a probing of the possible side cases, of the "compossibles," imaginary or realized, that constitute one whole structured system, can legitimately seek the aid of the hypothesis of structural analogies between the phenomena under study and some phenomena that have already taken shape in different spheres of social science or of other sciences, starting from the closest ones, linguistics, ethnology or even biology (it is such a procedure that has led to conceiving of the structure of intellectual field by analogy with the structure of the religious field such as can be derived from Max Weber's analysis; cf. "Projet créateur et champ intellectuel"). Such transpositions of concepts and schemes of thought must always be strictly controlled: analogies with the closest spheres are not necessarily the least dangerous (witness the errors produced by concepts loosely introduced from linguistics into ethnology and sociology), and analogies with the farthest ones may prove to have great heuristic value if they are rigorously controlled. Durkheim observed that "analogy is a legitimate form of comparison and (that) comparison is the only practical means at our disposal to make things intelligible." This already suggests the principles of a reflection about the conditions of a regulated usage of analogy. He condemned the attempts simply to infer sociological laws from the laws of biology because they ignore the fact that "if the laws of life are found in society, they have new forms and specific characters." He suggested that the search for partial analogies between the conditions of social organization, established through

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logical analysis about the conditions of the validity of the 'Ideal type," a coherent fiction to be measured against the real and to be defined by defining its own deviation from the real, may help to specify the principles and rules under which such a methodical investigation of possible "side-cases" (compossibles) should be

operated, provided however that some ambiguities be removed.17 By identifying the ideal type with the model, the extreme case, without differentiating clearly the case actually observed from the one obtained through an imaginary extreme, Max Weber tends to use it to indicate both a theoretically privileged case within a constructed group of transformations and the paradig- matical case which may be either a pure fiction obtained through a "unilateral accentuation" (Steigerung) of relevant properties, or an actually observable object (such as a piece of writing by Benjamin Franklin) displaying in the highest degree the largest number of properties of the constructed object. To avoid these

ambiguities, especially when dealing with a really observable fact, the ideal type must be considered not in itself and for itself, like a revealing sample which discloses the truth of the whole collec- tion, but rather as a particular case of the possible, as an element of a group of transformations, by referring it to all possible or real cases of the family of which the ideal type is a privileged case,

a properly sociological analysis, and the conditions of animal organization, could legitimately lead to developing the common features of any organization (E. Durkheim, "Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives," Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, T. VI, May 1898, reprinted in Sociologie et Philosophie, Paris, F. Alean, 1924, 3rd ed., P.U.F., 1963).

17 Doubtless, these ambiguities essentially derive from the tact that Max Weber views the ideal type as "a guide for constructing hypotheses" and that, placing himself within the logic of invention, he is inclined to recognize particular heuristic virtues in given observable cases, hence giving way to a realistic interpreta- tion of the notion of ideal type, in complete opposition to his own theoretical intentions. The same ambiguities are found again in his applied work. Thus, for example, his analysis of religious agents, priest, prophet, sorcerer, can be easily reinterpreted within a structural logic and he himself points out the property that each religious agent owes to the relations binding him to the others and to laymen. The fact remains, however, that lacking a conception of the "religious field" as a system, he does not escape (and his commentators even less) typological thought and Aristotelian definition.

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and therefore taking it as revealing the structure of isomorphic cases. On this condition, the ideal type in the sense of a directly observable case can be employed as rigorously as the fictitious construction (e.g., the pure type of rational conduct, using the most effective means to achieve rationally calculated ends), which is a privileged means for grasping the range of real conducts the ideal type allows to objectivate by objectivating their differential distance from the pure type. Following such a logic, Mauss selected the potlatch as the ' 'paroxysmal form" in the family of the exchanges of total and agonistic nature; or one can view the stu- dent of letters, of bourgeois Parisian origin, and his inclination toward dilettantism as a firm ground upon which to build the model of possible relations between sociological truth concerning the student's condition and its ideological transfiguration.18 One can well understand how the structural approach can find in logical formalization the predestinate means fully to realize it- self: symbols and systems of logic and mathematics allow thought, freed from reference to implicit examples, to push to its very end the investigation, at once mechanical and methodic, of the pos- sible, and to realize the controlled construction of a systematic body of hypotheses encompassing all possible experiences.

The model, formalized or not, is the substitute for experimenta- tion, which is almost always impossible, and provides the means to compare with reality the consequences drawn through such a construction, in a way that is complete just because it is fictitious. As against the mimetic models that reproduce only the phenom- enal properties of the object, instead of restoring its principles of functioning, the analogical or structural models, disregarding ap- pearances through abstraction and methodic comparison, establish an intelligible relation among constructed relations and can be transposed to orders of reality phenomenally very different, sug- gesting by analogy new analogies and giving rise to new construc- tions of objects. These partial theories that formulate the generating and unifying principles of a system of structural homo-

is Cf. P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, Les Héritiers, op. cit., pp. 69-79.

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logies are the systematic realization of a system of relations to be verified or already verified, and demand a procedure of verifica- tion that cannot but be itself systematic. Consciously constructed against the immediate "given/1 they allow the testing against reality of the properties that can be exposed completely, by deduc- tion, thanks to the irreality of such theories. In the same way as the mathematician may find in the definition of a straight line as curve without any curvature the principle of a general theory of curves, so the construction of a pure model allows consideration of different social formations as different realizations of a single group of transformations and brings to light, consequently, hidden

properties that can be revealed only by relating each realization to all the others, that is to say with reference to a complete system of the relations in which the principle of their structural affinity is expressed.

Whether applied to different societies and social classes or to different sub-systems of the same society, the comparative method makes it possible to explain the peculiarity of a phenomenal com-

plex (of its ' 'structure' ' in the sense of a system of relations among

the constitutive elements of a totality) by relating it to other com-

plexes (also defined as systems of relations), by a procedure analo-

gous to that which allows the mathematician "to expose relations

through regulated transformations of formulas/' as Leibniz says.19 The positing of the structure as a system of covariations through which one structure (in the original sense) of a system of relations is changed into another, makes it possible to attribute to the sys- tem under study its own position within the whole complex of

possible cases. Thus, for example, a statistical analysis may estab- lish the structure of the museum public of different countries

(separated by systematic differences), that is, the system of direct or indirect relations among dependent and independent variables such as sex, age, level of education, profession, individual prefer- ences in art, expectations about the organization of museums and

arrangement of works, etc. At this point, however, on pain either

is G. W. Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, Gerhardt, Vol. VII, p. 206.

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of comparing the incomparable or of failing to compare the com-

parable, the analysis cannot be limited to bringing together single relations, ignoring the positional values which each of them owes to its belonging to a particular system of relations. Further, if one does not want to overlook the systematic action exercised upon each relation by the characteristics of each country, from the population structure to policies in matters of culture or education, and if one does not want to be precluded from systematically verifying the effects of such an action, it is necessary to determine the laws of transformation which, systematically applied to one or another of the systems of statistical relations or, more exactly, to the principle of such systems (represented in the particular case by a mathematical model), allows us to discover the structures of all other systems of relations, with the exception of some inde- pendent variables, relatively few and secondary, whose variations are independent of the variables which are linked together.20

The structural approach allows us to bypass the alternative between a way of comparison that brings together cultural traits or statistical indicators detached from the system of relations from whence they derive their value, and an idiography that com- placently stresses the irreducible character of phenomenally dis- tinct complexes. It does so, moreover, without having recourse to artificial classifications, characteristic of the Aristotelian age in social science, or to more or less arbitrary typologies, products of a realistic separation into "types" as composite copies obtained by superimposing images of the "real." A variant may appear as "ideal- typical" in the logic of invention (or exposition) because it leads more directly to the system of cases or to the law of their relations: this remains, however, a necessarily provisional privi- lege. One would hope in vain to find the invariant realized in

20 The model allowing us to explain the structure of the relations defining the museum public and, more exactly, the logic of cultural diffusion, of which the perception of the work of art is a particular case, is presented in P. Bourdieu and A. Darbel, L'amour de Vari, op. cit. The comparative study of the characteristics of publics in different European countries will be added to the second edition of the book (to be published).

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one of the variants, or to grasp immediately, within one or other of these structures, the second order structure, the law of trans- formation as the principle of the system of covariations that lead from one first order structure to another.

Thus, the systematic application of the structural approach brings about a double liberation. In the first place, a break is made with the verbiage about totality inherited from the philo- sophical tradition of the "objective spirit," and with the holistic or "configurationistic" intuitionism which, in the belief that a social system expresses in each of its parts the action of one and the same principle, deems it possible to recapture in a sort of "central intuition" the unitary and unique logic of a culture, and therefore

disregards the methodical study of the different sub-systems and the investigation of their real interrelations. In the second place, a break is made with the hairsplitting hyper-empiricism which is unable to conceive of the synthesis of the "givens" accumulated other than as of a convenient compilation of small facts and of relations detached from their context. Only on condition of re-

capturing in its peculiarities the logic of each system or sub-sys- tem of relations constituting a society (and only rarely coinciding with the "concrete totalities" immediately offered to intuition), can homologies be established that are able to bind the sub-systems of a single society or the corresponding sub-systems of different societies. Whether they are, for example, homologies established between the educational systems of different societies or, within a single society, between different areas in the field of cultural works, they become clear only after each of the compared units, constituted as autonomous systems by an explicit methodological decision, has been subjected to an elaboration able to break down the apparent configurations that too easily provide the "intuition" of a unity of "style." It follows that one cannot fail explicitly and methodically to investigate the relations provisionally set in brackets (e.g., those that bind the educational system to the economic or political system), that is the degree of autonomy of each of the constructed systems. At the same time one must work

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toward building the broadest system able to integrate these sys- tems without losing anything of the specificity of each of them.

The break with the spontaneous philosophy of knowledge of the social world, represented by the decision to give methodologi- cal primacy to objective relations as against the agents entering them and the representations they may form of them, constitutes an inevitable moment in the progress of any science of man. One may rightly feel annoyed by the wonder and fascination presently aroused, especially in France, by the most sophisticated results of an approach long since applied to other sciences; on the other hand, one may be tempted simply to take the opposite view to the fashionable currents of the day. To overcome the former and to avoid the latter, it suffices to remark that the very delay with which this approach took root in anthropological work wit- nesses to the particular strength of the epistemological obstacles that the sciences of man had to overcome in order to elaborate and apply the new system of

' 'rational habits," in Bachelard's words, able to supersede the mechanistic and associationistic un- conscious which leads to conceiving the social world as a collection of separate entities. Yet, the philosophical glosses that today surround structuralism risk transforming the theoretical principles of anthropological knowledge, reactivated or defined in a specific type of practice by a number of scholars, into a "fixist" (fixiste) philosophy of knowledge derived from a reflection upon already established science or from the reflections of those who contribute to science, and even to constitute as an anthropological ideology the anthropological theses actually implied in the methodological principles that any application of the structural approach pro- visionally assumes.

If, on the contrary, one aims at spelling out the principles upon which the structural approach is founded, as expressed in the prac- tice of scholars, and at defining the limits of their validity, one cannot fail to perceive that the moment of objectivation - an in- evitable yet still abstract moment - contains the necessity of its own supersedure. It is because anthropological science cannot

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constitute itself except by constructing its object as a system of objective relations, at the price of bracketing the naive experience of apparent relations, that it still has to build the system able to encompass both the objective sense of conducts organized accord- ing to observable and measurable regularities, and the particular relations that individual agents hold with the regularities objec- tively defining their condition of existence and the objective sense of their conduct - a sense which possesses them because they are dispossessed of it. The renunciation implied by the theory of the system of objective relations is not completely justified except as a preliminary condition of the construction of the theory of the relations between agents and the system of objective relations. The system of third-order relations from which can be discovered the unity of practice, with the representations that orient or ac-

company it, and of the objective structure of the system of rela- tions within which it is realized, allows us to understand lived-

through experience better than the latter understands itself, and at the same time to account for the rationalizations against which it has built itself.

The anthropologist can neither be contented with recapturing and understanding the spontaneous consciousness of the social fact, consciousness that by definition cannot be reflected, nor, even less, with apprehending such a fact in its objective truth, because of his privileged position of an external observer who re- nounces the right to "act the social" in order to think about it. He must reconcile the truth of the system of objective relations and the subjective certainty of those who live them. In describing, for example, the internal contradictions of a system of marriage transactions - contradictions that are not perceived as such in the consciousness of those who objectively carry their burden -

the anthropologist constitutes the common principle of the con- duct and experience of subjects who feel such contradictions un- der the form of the impossibility of getting married; consequently, he obtains the means to discover how the relations objectively defining the differential chances of marriage are realized in and

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through the attitudes that directly condition the capacity to suc- ceed in the competition for marriage.21 The anthropologist gives no credit to the representation the subjects form of their situation and does not take literally the false explanations they give of their conduct; he, on the other hand, takes this representation and these rationalizations seriously enough to try to discover their true foundation and he is not satisfied until he has succeeded in unifying the truth immediately given to intuition and the truth toilsomely acquired by scientific construction. Anthropological science would not perhaps deserve any consideration if it were not its task to restore the agents to the sense of their practice by unify- ing, against the appearances of their irreducible opposition, the truth of the lived-through signification of conduct and the truth of the objective conditions that make such conduct and the ex- perience of it possible and probable.

To give primacy to the study of the relations between objective relations rather than to the study of the relations between the agents and these relations, or to ignore the question of the rela- tionship between these two types of relations, leads to the realism of the structure which, taking the place of the realism of the ele- ment, hypostatizes the systems of objective relations in already constructed totalities, outside the history of the individual or the group. Without falling back into a naive subjectivism or "per- sonalism," one must remember that, ultimately, objective rela- tions do not exist and do not really realize themselves except in and through the system of dispositions of the agents, produced by the internalization of objective conditions. Between the sys- tem of objective regularities and the system of directly observable conducts a mediation always intervenes which is nothing else but the habitus, geometrical locus of determinisms and of an in- dividual determination, of calculable probabilities and of lived- through hopes, of objective future and subjective plans. Thus the habitus of class as a system of organic and mental dispositions and

21 Cf. P. Bourdieu, "Célibat et condition paysanne," Etudes rurales, 506, April- September 1962, pp. 32-136.

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of unconscious schemes of thought, perception and action is what allows the generation, with the well-founded illusion of the creation of unforeseeable novelty or of free improvisation, of all

thoughts, all perceptions and actions in conformity with objective regularities, because it has itself been generated within and by conditions objectively defined by these regularities.22 Only a mechanistic representation of the relations between objective re- lations and agents defined by them may induce one to forget that the habitus, the product of conditioning factors, is the condition for the production of thoughts, perceptions and actions which are not in themselves the direct product of the conditioning factors, though, once realized, they are made intelligible by the very knowledge of such factors or, better, of the productive principle they have produced. Briefly, as a principle of a structured, but not structural, praxis, the habitus - internaliza tion of externality - contains the reason of all objectivation of subjectivity.23

22 About habitus (or ethos) of class as internalization of the objective conditions and mediation between objectively calculable probabilities and subjective hopes, see: P. Bourdieu, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, Paris-La Haye: Mouton, 1962; 2nd part, pp. 36-38; P. Bourdieu, "L'école conservatrice les inégalités devant l'école et devant la culture," Revue française de Sociologie, VII, 1966, pp. 325-347; P. Bourdieu and J. C. Passeron, "L'examen d'une illusion," Revue française de Sociologie, April 1968.

28 Culture, which may be applied to the system of objective regularities as well as to the competence of the agent as a system of internalized models, would be a better term than habitus. However, this overdetermined concept risks being mis- understood and it is difficult to define exhaustively the conditions of its validity.