"The Real is Relational": An Epistemological Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's Generative Structuralism

Abstract

An internal reconstruction and an immanent critique of Bourdieu's generative structuralism is presented. Rather than starting with the concept of "habitus," as is usually done, the article tries to systematically reconstruct Bourdieu's theory by an analysis of the relational logic that permeates his whole work. Tracing the debt Bourdieu's approach owes to Bachelard's rationalism and Cassirer's relationalism, the article examines Bourdieu's epistemological writings of the 1960s and 70s. It tries to make the case that Bourdieu's sociological metascience represents a rationalist version of Bhaskar's critical realism, and enjoins Bourdieu to give heed to the realist turn in the philosophy of the natural and the social sciences. The article shows how Bourdieu's epistemological assumptions are reflected in his primary theoretical constructs of "habitus" and "field." To concretize their discussion, it analyzes Bourdieu's reinterpretation of Weber in his theory of the field of religion and of the young Mannheim in his theory of the scientific field.By means of concepts and symbols we try to make a temporal order of words stand for a relational order of things.-S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key "Entities of the world-relate!" (Emirbayer 1997:312). This could be the motto of a relational sociology. Bourdieu has opted for another one, wich contains an ironic reference to Hegel rather than to Marx. In Méditations pascaliennes, a sociological meditation on the philosophies of our time from Searle to Habermas and Rawls, Bourdieu has described himself as a pascalien (Bourdieu 1997a:9). But I think that insofar as his "generative structuralism" (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990:3) can best be understood as an attempt to systematically transpose the relational conception of the natural sciences to the social sciences-an attempt which takes the form of an original synthesis of sociology (Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and Mauss [Brubaker 1985:747-49], but also Elias, Mannheim, and Goffman), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty), linguistic philosophy (Wittgenstein and Austin) and, last but not least, neo-Kantian epistemology (Bachelard and Cassirer, but also Panofsky and Lévi-Strauss)-one could as well, and maybe even better, describe him as a "bachelardien." 1 Although the influence of Gaston Bachelard on Bourdieu has often escaped the attention of Anglo-American scholars who are not , and two anonymous reviewers for Sociological Theory for their useful comments and constructive criticisms.1 Bourdieu is not a syncretic but a synthetic and heretical thinker. He draws on Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and others but insofar as he critically corrects them, one could as well describe him as an anti-Durkheimian Durkheimian, an anti-Weberian Weberian, or an anti-Marxist Marxist. One could even say that he thinks with Althusser against Althusser and against Habermas with Habermas, but not-and this is probably the only exceptionthat he thinks with Bachelard against Bachelard. well acquainted with the French tradition of the history and ...

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