Abstract
In 1981 the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu moved from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he had spent years conducting empirical research in small teams, to the Collège de France, an academic institution founded in 1530 and one with no obvious parallel in the United States. The Collège consists of a body of approximately 50 professors chosen by their peers from a wide range of disciplinary fields. Practically all of the major French thinkers of the past century—Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name just a few—were on the faculty for significant portions of their careers. The status and resources that come with the appointment are great; the duties few. Of the latter, the main one is the requirement that one delivers a weekly talk on one’s research open not just to students but to the general public—which in Paris tends to be an educated and devoted one. Classification Struggles: Lectures at the Collège de France consists of transcriptions of the seven lectures that Bourdieu delivered during his first year at the Collège, beginning in April of 1982.
From all indications, there is nothing that Bourdieu disliked more than delivering what was essentially a weekly TED talk. Anyone who has viewed Pierre Carles’s 2001 documentary “La sociologie est un sport de combat” will have witnessed how ill at ease Bourdieu was when speaking in front of large academic audiences. And as Patrick Champagne and Julien Duval, who have written an immensely helpful chapter situating Bourdieu’s Collège lectures in the context of both his own work and the French intellectual field (a chapter that is unfortunately placed at the end of the book rather than the beginning; I highly entreat the reader to begin with it), write: “It is certain that Bourdieu dreaded these lectures . . . that were transformed into ‘performances’” (p. 139).
Regardless of his initial unease with performing regularly for the Parisian public, Bourdieu seized the opportunity to usher sociology onto the stage. As Champagne and Duval note, “it was one of the major failures of Émile Durkheim that he was unable, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to bring sociology to the Collège de France” (p. 141). Audiences were accustomed to hearing grand philosophical pronouncements rather than the minutiae of empirical sociological work, but it was precisely the latter that Bourdieu decided to provide during his first five years at the Collège. As he explained to his audience on April 28, 1982: “The paradigm of the lecture . . . is an exercise designed to be impregnable; the professor who delivers it is quite unassailable. Engaging in research is quite the contrary, for . . . it implies laying oneself bare, with all one’s weak points and insecure arguments; since scientific progress by definition requires us to lower our guard and prepare to be criticized” (p. 3).
The seven lectures that Bourdieu gave in 1982 were the first of a five-part series he called a course on “General Sociology.” This first part of the course concerned classification: how social actors create boundaries and thus categories, how these categories acquire a taken-for-granted character, how groups are constructed via boundary-making, and how the authority to speak for a group is delegated. It is telling that Bourdieu considered such classification struggles to be a first premise of a sociological approach more generally. (The following lecture series in the course addressed more familiar concepts such as habitus, capitals, and fields.)
Are the transcripts of these lectures as reproduced in this volume an ideal introduction to Bourdieu’s theory of classification? Probably not. One issue is that the chapters are not titled and organized as concepts or themes but rather chronologically, according to the dates on which they were delivered. (The editors have, for each chapter, included a list of topics covered in that day’s lecture.) While he doesn’t speak entirely extemporaneously, Bourdieu frequently strays from his lecture notes as he spirals around a given subject, thinks aloud through a particular line of argumentation, or pursues a tangential line of thought. While I personally enjoyed traveling with Bourdieu down these paths, the lack of a systematic organization of the materials might prove frustrating for a neophyte.
One way to summarize the key ideas of these lectures is through the frequency of their appearance. There are several that Bourdieu returns to again and again, both during individual lectures and across them. One is that scholarly attempts to classify social phenomena (such as genders or social classes) differ fundamentally from attempts to classify natural (non-human) phenomena, insofar as the former objects of classification are themselves always already engaged in practices of classification. “The difficulty for the sociologist” is hence to be found “in the fact that the social agents he [sic] gets to study have been classified in advance” (p. 18), resulting in an “infinitely spiraling game, where everyone is both classifier and classified, classified by their own classifications” (p. 22). Bourdieu is especially concerned with the dangers inherent in studying social class, whereby social scientists construct their own criteria of classification (income, ownership of the means of production, education, etc.), which may not accord with how social agents classify themselves and one another.
A second key idea to surface repeatedly in Classification Struggles is that the capacity to impose legitimate categories of perception upon others (symbolic power or capital) is a variable. At one extreme is the insult, delivered from one individual to another but without any real institutional power behind it. The word idiot, he points out, in fact derives from the Greek idios, meaning “singular”; an “idiot is someone who . . . insults without being authorized to do so” (p. 14). At the other extreme are those whose classificatory judgments possess a high degree of performativity, that is, the ability to make the labels one applies to others stick. If “‘I order you’ to be what I tell you that you are,” I have behind me an institutional power to nominate, or name, you (as a professor, a traitor, a criminal, and so on). This focus on institutional power cracks open the door to a theory of the state and state power, which Bourdieu begins to address late in this initial lecture series. The lecture of June 2, 1982, for instance, includes a fascinating discussion of how regions come to be established. Here Bourdieu argues that both the natural and social worlds are full of “continuous tissues,” while the power to rule is the power to make “discontinuous cuts” in these tissues. The word region itself, he points out, can be traced back to the word regio, which connoted the ability to erect borders and designate sacred things.
Later in his career Bourdieu would emphasize the uniqueness of “modern” institutions such as scientific and political fields. In this lecture series of 1982, however, he argues that we have made too much of this distinction. “I believe,” he stated on June 9, “that the sociologist has to deal with metaphysical, that is magical realities. Society is constantly making magic, and the great difficulty for the sociologist is . . . being obliged to rely on a science that is hostile to magic, and destroys it” (p. 113). This inaugural lecture series is worth reading if only to catch a glimpse of this magical vision of what sociology can be.