In this first section, before introducing the issue of reflexivity, we would like to briefly discuss a peculiarity of Bourdieusian theory and language. Working with Bourdieu’s concepts is a difficult task, since they demand a relational approach, not a substantialist one. But writing itself leads to substantialism. In order to explain how this problem presents itself, we need to take a brief detour into Gaston Bachelard’s work. Bachelard was one of the luminaries of French philosophy of science in the first half of the 20th century, and he was extremely important in the development of Bourdieu’s ideas about science. As we will show in the third section, Bachelard is also a source of the specific version of reflexivity Bourdieu advocates. Here, we will use him to present how the very interpretation of texts tends to be substantialist unless we take certain precautions. Bachelard’s discussion of the “substantialist obstacle” in science (and we should note that he focuses on the natural sciences) points out that “pre-scientific thought” – for Bachelard, the naive realism and undisciplined thought that is found in, and taught for, most people – grasps perceptual data immediately as substances, with several implicit connotations of that concept: immutability, reality, truth. These unexamined substances become the basis for spurious pre-scientific “explanations” in a naïvely realist mind. A proper scientific approach, however, proceeds otherwise:
- 1 Except for Spinoza (2018), all translations in this article are our own. All quotes by Spinoza are (...)
[Modern science] is realist in a discursive manner because it realises, in a strictly inverse movement as compared to classical realism [...] This is how we can understand that the scientific product is a well-defined particular moment of an objective technique. In order to determine it, we do not rely on a more or less muted, more or less mature substantial activity. We want a well-chosen moment of evolution, and it is that moment that we fix and immobilise in the substance. Seen in this perspective of realisation, we can then say that substance is nothing more than the concretisation of abstract theoretical ideas. Without those theoretical ideas, we could not create substance, since to establish in a permanent manner a property in a well-defined state is indeed to create a substance. (Bachelard, 2011, p. 138)1
- 2 It is important to note that Bourdieu himself was acutely aware of this danger: “I have never been (...)
Bachelard’s point is that ‘substance’ is only meaningful and useful when related to a theory that guides research, instead of being immediately grasped through experience – substances are a moment of the process of science, not its starting point. However, when reading a theoretical text, it is ironically very easy to forget that the concepts being analysed are this “concretisation of abstract theoretical ideas” that Bachelard mentions. Theoretical ideas that are, in a Bourdieusian perspective, relational and should be discussed relationally, but which are all too easily taken as unchanging and unchangeable words that immediately conjure up “definitions” in the reader’s mind, in the unexamined, substantialist way against which Bachelard warns us. This relational perspective can only be achieved as a series of epistemological breaks, which lead to a kind of knowledge of “dialectical relations between (...) objective structures and the structured dispositions in which they are actualised and that tend to reproduce them” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 235). This danger of substantialisation only increases as Bourdieu becomes a “classic” and its very own scientific subfield in the social sciences, as well as his work, are seen as a list of concepts to be plundered in order to check off a doxic list of ‘mandatory references’ in any given sub-field2.
This risk certainly applies when we discuss reflexivity, a notoriously tricky concept – especially since it became a methodological requirement in academic disciplines and sub-disciplines in the social sciences. Once this happens, it becomes something that goes without saying, another tick that must be checked off a list that does not require much reflection at all. It ceases to be a living question that is very much open and which renews itself in every research project.
- 3 Most famously in Otto Neurath’s metaphor of the ship that must continuously reassemble itself while (...)
- 4 Traditionally, the “reflexive Marx” is the “young” one, although the question of whether the “matur (...)
It would be a thankless job to try to trace a history of the concept – we could go back to Socrates’ “know thyself” and find shades and variations of the idea throughout Western philosophy. When it comes to the social sciences and social theory, we find that reflexivity, at least in its most basic definitions (something like “think about what you do as a scientist”, to put it in very simple terms), has been present in one way or another in most theoretical traditions. While it is usually associated with interpretive sociology (either in authors influenced by the later Wittgenstein, the ones influenced by German hermeneutics, or the Weberian tradition), reflexivity is an important issue even for logical positivism3 or Marxism4. In the English-speaking world, authors as diverse as Charles Wright Mills (1959), Robert K. Merton (1973) and Alvin Gouldner (1971) dealt with issues that involved reflexivity.
When it comes to research methods, reflexivity is traditionally associated with qualitative methods and ethnography:
“Ethnography has a reflexive character, which implies that the researcher is a part of the world that she or he studies and is affected by it. (...) Ethnography as a process always consists partly of participant observation and partly of conversation or interview (...). It is the mix of the two, or rather the interface between the two, that leads to reflexivity”. (Boyle, 1994, p. 165)
Both the theoretical and methodological movements led to “reflexivity” becoming an explicit concept in two major ways in the past few decades. First, as exemplified by Steve Woolgar’s (1988, pp. 30-31) analysis of reflexivity in ethnography,
whereas many social scientists agree that much is to be gained by shaking off the idea of observation as a docile record of pre-existing reality, they differ markedly as to the appropriate form of reflexive examination which ensues. Cultural relativism thus “leads to” any of a variety of kinds of reflexivity depending on the social scientist’s conception of representation.
Woolgar points out that once we abandon a positivist/empiricist approach to science in which ethnography is seen as an attempt at perfect correspondence with a pre-existing real world, we unavoidably fall into cultural relativism in which an almost “anything goes” attitude prevails, and this is what must be communicated to readers so they can make up their own minds.
Second, reflexivity is tied up to macro-level processes of modernity, as we can see in Ulrich Beck (1994, p. 2): “This new stage, in which progress can turn into self-destruction, in which one kind of modernisation undercuts and changes another, is what I call the stage of reflexive modernisation”.
Beck is presenting the same movement as Woolgar, but from a different perspective. When “progress can turn into self-destruction”, this also means that we are abandoning the widely accepted positivistic value system in which progress is characterised by endless accumulation of wealth and knowledge in favour of placing science, and the scientist, as just another piece of the process of modernisation – a modernisation that questions its own perspective. In reflexive modernisation, progress is also replaced by a kind of “anything goes”.
Bourdieusian reflexivity is markedly different from all that we have mentioned so far. First, his concepts only make sense when seen related to one another, since sociology is the study of social entities that only exist in their relations. Therefore, a preliminary understanding of reflexivity depends on grasping its relational character. Second, it is necessary to realise that Bourdieu’s whole enterprise, in a way, can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the subject/object divide that has plagued the social sciences, and social philosophy, since Ancient Greece. By “going beyond”, we mean going between – turning a substantive divide into a relation. Reflexivity is fundamental here because, in order to properly analyse the subject/object relation, we must reflexively take into account the social conditions of scientific knowledge and understanding, as related to practical knowledge and understanding. This relation might seem circular, but only if seen as a scholarly (and scholastic) demand for a definition. Rather, we will claim that, in a Wittgensteinian way, we know reflexivity when we use it. So, we will focus on showing how reflexivity operates in a Bourdieusian perspective, instead of simply stating a stable definition of the concept (which, once again, would amount to substantialising it). The common scientific emphasis on definitional sentences fails to take into account Michael Grenfell’s (2019, p. 152) warning about the “double historicisation” of language:
In practice, words are susceptible to a kind of ‘double historicisation’: first, a word is used to represent a certain phenomenon at a particular point in time – one which is often constructed and presented in a way which renders as transparent the social and historical aspects of its construction; and second, by not recognising words as such, that de-historicised form is then subject to further historicisation, as the original form is taken as the basis of fact, from which further work and elaboration is operationalised. In this way, the most innocent word can carry within it a whole set of un-objectified assumptions, interests and meanings, which confuse the reality of representation with the representation of reality.
With that warning in mind, we can see that for Bourdieu (2015b, p. 243), the main scientific problem regarding the relation between the subject and the object is the fact that scientists replace the practical aspect of knowledge with their own, unexamined, scientific one:
I think that one of the fundamental errors of the social sciences (...) [is that] scientific subjects, since they fail to constitute their object as something that includes a different type of “subject/object” relation from the scientific one, project [themselves] into that relation and act as if the practical relation to knowledge had the same nature as the scientific relation to knowledge.
This erroneous attitude, however, is something that is in large part ingrained in the scientific habitus:
It is an absolute epistemological distinction and, if we do not make it, we fall into the fundamental error of all social science, which consists in placing the scientist’s consciousness into the experience of the distanced subject and thus being the subject of the action of those that we simultaneously take as object. (Bourdieu, 2015b, p. 246)
Traditionally, the social sciences fall into either the objectivist end of the spectrum, by placing the scientist completely “outside” the object, in a God-like perspective; or the subjectivist one, in which the scientist pretends to be “inside” the object and to describe the object’s lived experience as if they had full access to it. The very concept of reflexivity in its different guises, in fact, is meant to overcome this distinction, but from a Bourdieusian perspective the standard views of reflexivity fail precisely because they do not take heed of the epistemological warning Bourdieu stresses. Thus, attempts like Woolgar’s or Beck’s are examples of a
false synthesis or false overcoming of this opposition: it is the projection of the scientific subject into the object and the substitution of the relation of scientific knowledge. For instance, the question “what is the social?” is already a question that is not social: to be in the social is precisely not to ask what the social is (...). One of the fundamental errors of the scientific subject is thus to transfer their scientific experience and representations to the supposed consciousness of their objects, which creates questions that the subject who understands in a practical way does not make. (Bourdieu, 2015b, p. 247)
Keeping this epistemological/methodological distinction in mind after all is said and done, is the bedrock of reflexivity in a Bourdieusian sense. Relational analysis hinges on the fact that by changing even a single element of the relation, everything else changes (but not in an automatic/homeostatic way, like in most conceptions of systems theory). By conceiving reflexivity as a consequence of the dialectic between the scientific and the practical view of the world, Bourdieu makes us question both these views in order to better understand them. In the next section, we will focus on analysing how reflexivity appears in La misère du monde, in order to present a new representation as something that differs epistemologically and methodologically from other theories of reflexivity.
We have seen how a Bourdieusian analysis of reflexivity must first take into account all of his theory of practice, beginning with how he envisions the relationship between subject and object. Now, based on an analysis of Bourdieu’s chapter “Comprendre” in La misère du monde (Bourdieu, 2015a, pp. 1389-1447), we will show what a fully-fledged Bourdieusian theory of reflexivity can look like and its implications for scientific research.
While Bourdieu’s work always had a reflexive character, he only began to approach the concept of reflexivity more systematically towards the end of his career. The way that he revaluated themes and data from his early research, in works like Algérie 60 (Bourdieu, 1977) and Le bal des célibataires (Bourdieu, 2002), is clear evidence of scientific reflexivity in action. During the 1980s, even his very first lecture at the Collège de France was a reflexive analysis of what “teaching” means (Bourdieu, 1982), and in works like Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1984a) he analysed the intellectual field of which he himself was part. Of course, towards the end of his life he began to publish more autobiographical texts (first in Méditations pascaliennes (Bourdieu, 2003a), then more fully in the Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Bourdieu, 2004) that should not be read as simply narcissistic reflexive accounts of his life, as the discussion to follow will clarify.
- 5 Some authors, such as Philippe Corcuff (2011, p. 207), have identified the Spinozan source of Bourd (...)
That being said, La misère du monde is a key text towards understanding Bourdieusian reflexivity – first of all because it makes it very clear that the roots of this concept, for Bourdieu, lie not in the interpretive tradition in sociology from Weber and Dilthey, much less in its Marxian or positivist versions, but rather emerge from Spinoza and Bachelard. La misère du monde is quite clear about its Spinozan affiliation5. Its introduction quotes Spinoza’s (2018, p. 472) famous statement from the Political Treatise: “Do not ridicule human actions, do not lament them, do not hate them – but understand them”. Bourdieu (2015a, p. 10) then remarks: “adopting the Spinozan principle would be useless unless the sociologist is able to also supply the means of following it”. This makes it clear that reflexivity in this specific sense is simultaneously an epistemological, a methodological, and also an ethical concern.
The Political Treatise begins by declaring that philosophers, from Plato to More, have been unable to understand human beings because they believe themselves to be speaking from a godlike (objectivist) position:
[Philosophers] believe that they do divine work and reach the summit of wisdom when they have learned to praise, in several ways, a human nature that does not exist anywhere and to vilify with their sayings the one that actually exists. In effect, they conceive men not as they are, but rather as they would like men to be. That is why (...) they have never thought of a politics that could be made into practise. (Spinoza, 2018, p. 471)
Whereas politicians and political writers write from (subjective) experience and are thus much more useful in practice. Machiavelli, in particular, is deeply committed to a scientific and historic analysis of practice, making him the first political writer to signal the possibility of this break with subjectivism. On this basis, Spinoza will then claim to be the first philosopher to attempt to “demonstrate in a sure and certain way, or to deduce from the same condition of human nature, only those things that are perfectly in accord with practice” (Spinoza, 2018, p. 472). Thus, we have the injunction that Bourdieu quotes.
In order to account for Bourdieusian reflexivity, this detour into Spinoza needs to be connected to the Bachelardian epistemology that Bourdieu advocates. The relationship between Bourdieu and Bachelard’s philosophy of science runs very deep indeed, but for the purposes of this text we would like to draw attention to this quotation:
Science, both in its need of completion and in its principle, is absolutely opposed to opinion. If it happens to legitimise opinion in a particular case, that is due to different reasons than the ones that ground opinion; so that opinion, by right, is always wrong. Opinion thinks badly; it does not think: it translates needs into knowledge. By referring to objects by their usefulness, it forbids itself from knowing them. We cannot ground anything on opinion: first of all, we must destroy it. It is the first obstacle to overcome. (...) The scientific mind [esprit] forbids us from having an opinion about questions that we do not understand, about questions that we do not know how to formulate in a clear manner. Before everything else, we need to know how to formulate problems. (...) It is precisely this sense of the problem that distinguishes the true scientific mind. For a scientific mind, all knowledge is the answer to a question. If it has not asked a question, it cannot have scientific knowledge. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed. (Bachelard, 2011, p. 16)
This standpoint that criticises opinion based on primary experience seems to go against what Spinoza is claiming, but in fact the opposite is true, as we will soon demonstrate. How can we connect Bachelard, Spinoza, and reflexivity? This very strange paragraph from “Comprendre”, about how Bourdieu (2015a, pp. 1406-1407) conceives the interview as a research method in La misère du monde, indicates the way:
- 6 We would like to draw attention to a small but very serious mistake in the English translation of t (...)
I will say willingly that the interview can be considered a form of spiritual exercise, which aims to achieve through forgetfulness of self a true conversion of the gaze with which we look at others in the ordinary circumstances of life. The welcoming disposition that makes one more likely to make the interviewee’s problems their own, the ability to take the interviewee and understand them as they are, in their singular necessity, is a kind of intellectual love: a gaze that accepts necessity, in the manner of the “intellectual love of God”, that is, of the natural order, that Spinoza considered the supreme form of knowledge.6
In Spinoza’s Ethics, he lists three kinds of knowledge. The first one is what he calls “opinion, or imagination”, which comes from our sensory experience and memory – and since we are finite and limited beings, it is the only kind of knowledge that can be false. The second kind of knowledge is reason, our “common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things” (these are very general notions, such as “human beings are all thinking beings”, “all bodies have extension”, and so on). The third type, the one that Bourdieu refers to, is “intuitive science”. This type of knowledge proceeds from the adequate idea of the formal essence of some of God’s attributes to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things (Spinoza, 2018, p. 275).
Bourdieu’s focus here is not on God, not even the Spinozan God, who is closer to what we understand as “nature”, but on “necessity” – not the divine, or natural necessity that Spinoza alluded to, but a social one, necessary all the same. Bourdieu follows the same intellectual movement in order to build his approach to understanding the social world. When he proposes three modes of theoretical knowledge (phenomenological, objectivist, and praxeological) that unveil the social conditions of practice (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 234-235), there is a homology with Spinoza, who wants to know the nature of things through their determinations. “Comprendre” ends with a sentence that at first seems rather cryptic:
- 7 And not “objectify”, as the English translation proposes (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 626).
It is only inasmuch as [the sociologist] is able to objectivate7 themselves that they can, while staying in the place that is inexorably granted to them in the social world, transfer themselves in thought to the place where their object is located (which is also, at least to a certain degree, an alter ego) and thus take their point of view, which means to understand that if the sociologist were, as one says, in their place, the sociologist would undoubtedly think and be as they think and are. (Bourdieu, 2015a, p. 1424)
- 8 This whole section, “L’interrogatoire” [‘The Interrogation’], including the very revealing transcri (...)
This sounds extremely deterministic, as some well-known criticisms of Bourdieu would have it. But the point is that the dualism between determinism and free will is another epistemological obstacle, in Bachelard’s sense, that Bourdieu’s theory of practice seeks to overcome. Common sense in many ways bristles at the idea of determinism and takes freedom for granted, since it mixes determinism with finalism and believes that if we say that something is determined, this means that it cannot be otherwise and must be fated to remain in its current condition. As an answer to that, Bourdieu says that taking freedom for granted makes you all the more vulnerable to the necessity of the social world, and allows unspeakable symbolic violence to be inflicted upon the downtrodden. Here is what he remarks when discussing the transcripts of bureaucratic interviews regarding unemployment benefits8:
Undoubtedly, violence reaches its apex when the philosophy of action that underlies the entire questioning leads to a search in intentions and reasons for the principle of all actions of all agents, equally considered masters of their fate, and thus tacitly making the [interviewees] responsible for their misery. The “Why?” questions chanted after every statement about losing jobs, marriage breakups, dropping out of school, health, unemployment – make it as if everything that happened to the interviewee has been the result of free choice. This question for a cleaning lady who dropped out of school when she was 12 is an example: “What was the reason for that?”, and, again, “Because you wanted to or because you were forced to?” They postulate that anyone can and should take charge of their careers and their lives. (Bourdieu 2015a, pp. 1428-1429)
Against that, Bourdieu places sociology as something akin to psychoanalysis. This has very deep roots in his writings, and, again, stems directly from Bachelard: “We will not be able to give the polemical action of scientific reason all its power unless we extend [Bachelard’s] ‘psychoanalysis of the scientific mind’ through an analysis of the social conditions under which sociological work is produced” (Bourdieu, Chamboredon e Passeron, 1983, p. 14). In this sense, the way that Bourdieu conceives of freedom in his theory – as the knowledge of the determinations that restrict practice – is related to Freudian psychoanalysis as interpreted by Bachelard. Therefore, freedom is not seen as a substance – just as there is no determinism as finalism, there is no freedom as absence of determinations –, it is something that must be conquered from necessity through a dialectical process of understanding how necessity operates in the social world through the relations between habitus, field, and capital (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 26). No freedom is guaranteed because it is always mingled in a probabilistic relation with necessity. This is both sociology’s contribution and limitation: “Sociology cannot stop suffering; it allows us to understand why we suffer” (Bourdieu, 2015b, p. 435). And this demands that we accept necessity, but in a relational way. We must strive to know the determinations that make us act, acknowledging them as produced in a specific situation/relation/condition.
The key to this understanding of suffering is reflexivity. This Spinozan/Bachelardian source makes Bourdieu’s reflexivity operate at a different level than the one that is usually meant when reflexivity is discussed, as we saw in the first section. It is clearly not the first, basic level of the scientific subject simply self-analysing themselves as subjects, as Bourdieu (2017, p. 34, our emphasis) says scathingly:
Reflexive analysis is often practiced, but people mistake reflexivity for narcissism. Reflexive analysis as I practice it happens with as little narcissism as possible, because it makes us discover things we would not like to know: it does not discover a singular libido, but rather the fact that part of what we think is related to the positions that we occupy in the social space.
The second level of reflexivity involves the scientific subject placing himself as an object related to other objects – someone who has his own interests and capital configuration, in Bourdieusian terms. This level is the one in which both Woolgar’s relativism and Beck’s disembedding and re-embedding happens. But it can also be read as deterministic, since here there is no subject, only “objects” – indeed, this is how several of Bourdieu’s critics misunderstand his reflexivity. The ethnographical technique of participant observation relies on this level of reflexivity as well.
In his famous introduction to Bourdieu’s theory of practice in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Loïc Wacquant dubbed Bourdieu’s reflexivity “epistemic reflexivity” in an attempt to distinguish it from other definitions of the concept and bring it to a different level that we will call the third level of reflexivity. According to Wacquant (in Bourdieu e Wacquant, 1992, p. 46),
Bourdieu’s concern for reflexivity, like his social theory, is (...) embedded in, and turned toward, scientific practice. It fastens not upon the private person of the sociologist in her idiosyncratic intimacy but on the concatenations of acts and operations she effectuates as part of her work and on the collective unconscious inscribed in them. (...) Epistemic reflexivity invites intellectuals to recognise and to work to neutralise the specific determinisms to which their innermost thoughts are subjected and it informs a conception of the craft of research designed to strengthen its epistemological moorings.
This means that the subject is not just an object, but an object in a scientific and/or intellectual field which can be very different from the fields in which the research objects find themselves. Scientific practice depends on, and creates, a field in which individuals operate according to different logics, interests, and points of view regarding the everyday world – and this clash is nowhere clearer than in the situation of research:
For instance, the fact that [the scientist] studies kinship relations, not in order to find a better marriage for his daughter, but to understand what kind of marriage [he is dealing with] creates an effect of essential distortion between the interviewer and the interviewee: people do not think about the problems of marriage in that way; they only think in that way in the presence of the scientist. (Bourdieu, 2015b, p. 91)
This distortion, where the scientist projects their own interests into their objects, is what Wacquant (in Bourdieu e Wacquant, 1992, p. 39) calls “the intellectualist bias, which entices us to construe the world as a spectacle, as a set of significations to be interpreted rather than as concrete problems to be solved practically”, and what Bourdieu (2003a, p. 81), in later works, would call the “scholastic bias”:
The scholastic view avoids a methodical interrogation about the difference between the theoretical and the practical points of view, a difference that imposes itself, outside any intention of pure speculation, during the use of the most concrete research operations in the social sciences – doing an interview, describing a practice, establishing a genealogy etc.
This scholastic bias, of course, pertains directly to Bourdieu’s overcoming of the dualism between subject and object, as sketched in the first section of this paper.
- 9 “Accepting the necessity” of practice absolutely does not mean, nor entail, a value judgment of agr (...)
In La misère du monde, we can glimpse a further, fourth, level of reflexivity that has mostly gone unnoticed – it is the reflexivity that sees the object as a subject who also has a point of view regarding the scientific subject. Seeing the object as a subject means dropping the scholastic bias and accepting the necessity of the logic of practice that the object/subject lives in, and deals with9. This fourth level of reflexivity has three main consequences that affect several parts of scientific research.
- 10 Incidentally, despite what some critics claim, Bourdieu never really stopped using the concept of “ (...)
The first one is that it solves the apparent contradiction some critics mentioned between Bourdieu’s criticism of “spontaneous sociology” and a supposed “newer” respect shown in La misère du monde for the narratives offered by the interviewees. Interviewees’ accounts need to be accepted, respected, and protected as accounts of the specific logic of practice that acts in and through their discourse, but they cannot be taken as scientific statements placed into a foreign scientific field in which the interviewees, as subjects, are not positioned. Scientific work is up to the scientist, the sociologist, not up to the interviewees – but it can only be properly undertaken if the scientist understands their objects as subjects (as Bourdieu [2013, p. 298] says, pithily: “those that believe that we can do sociology by placing a microphone in front of an “actor” are mistaken”). Therefore, a criticism of the supposedly “sociological” statements of interviewees can perfectly coexist with respecting their points of view10.
- 11 It is worth mentioning that this acknowledgement of the practical logic of the object as a subject (...)
The second consequence is precisely that once we overcome the scholastic bias through vigilance and no longer view our data as supposedly scientific statements from objects, but rather as practical statements from subjects, we can do justice to Spinoza’s precept about understanding human actions: if we are not vigilant about scholastic bias, then we will be tempted to treat our objects’ statements as opinions, which can be ridiculed, lamented, hated – something that, as Bachelard says, “thinks badly”. But once these statements are seen as necessitated by the practical logic of the subjects’ position in social space related to habitus, field, and capital, then we can see them as they are and accept them as knowledge, practical knowledge, which can be studied scientifically11 – and we can also make good on Bachelard’s principle that knowledge is constructed from clearly formulated problems based on abstraction from experience, and not on experience itself. This is where Bachelard and Spinoza meet.
The third consequence, derived from the others, is that this level of reflexivity is the only one that can minimise the symbolic violence that the scientist, the scientific discourse, and the research situation, can inflict on the objects/subjects. The more the scientist knows about the conditions in which, for instance, an interview happens and about the person they are talking to, where they are positioned, and where the scientist is positioned, the greater the chance to actually understand what is happening and to treat the interviewee with respect, in a non-violent way, acknowledging the conditions that produce their statements and encouraging the interviewee to say what they say. There is nothing in Bourdieu’s account of reflexivity that suggests that it should only be applied during qualitative research. On the contrary, Bourdieusian reflexivity is an integral part of any and all research endeavour in science, no matter its methods. If it is not conceived relationally and reflexively, even a very strict quantitative survey will produce unacknowledged research artefacts that can be rather violent in a symbolic way.
Otherwise, as we mentioned in the first section, the scientist will be “the subject of the action of those that we simultaneously take as object” – the “fundamental error of social science”, which, when all is said and done, amounts to erasing the object’s point of view as a subject, ignoring the fourth level of reflexivity. This is the point in which sociology can become socio-analysis and can help the scientist, the object/subject, and the readers/audience to see and understand social suffering and symbolic violence and perhaps, through social and political action, take steps to change that state of affairs.
Between “Comprendre” and the “Post-script” in La misère du monde, there is a page taken up by a quote from a letter by Wittgenstein (2008, p. 370, in Bourdieu, 2015a, p. 1448) that was sadly omitted in the English translation:
I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc., and if it does not impr[ove] your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any (...) journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for [their] own ends.
We could say that this is another way of stating what a fully-fledged account of Bourdieusian reflexivity is about.
In conclusion, we would like to go back to an issue that we mentioned briefly in the first section: the charge that Bourdieusian reflexivity leads to a circular, infinite regress not unlike the hermeneutic circle. This has been pointed out by some academics, even when they are supportive of Bourdieu’s concept: “it may be questioned whether a fully-fledged reflexive research trajectory is even possible, as there is always room for more reflexive thought” (Salö, 2018, p. 32). In a way, this is only a danger if we take reflexivity itself as a substantialist concept – only by looking at it in that way can we state that we can add “more reflexive thought”. But if we take reflexivity, as we described it, as a relational attitude to scientific practice, as changing the problem’s position both epistemologically and methodologically, we can overcome the hindrance of the supposed circularity of regress: “sociologists must convert reflexivity into a constitutive disposition of their scientific habitus, i.e. a reflex reflexivity, able to act not ex post on the opus operatum but a priori, on the modus operandi” (Bourdieu 2001, p. 174). As we said, we know reflexivity when we use it, in a Wittgensteinian sense.
The other important factor that is both cause and consequence of this relational disposition is the fact that reflexivity is a collective enterprise, as acknowledged by some commentators:
Bourdieu considered that reflexivity cannot be an exercise carried out individually and that it should be a common and shared project. This explains why, alongside the findings and theorizing of his own research publications, he was actively developing a “school of thought” strategy via the publication of specific academic journals such as the Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, multilingual translations, independent publishing and, eventually, direct interventions in public debates. (Deer, 2012, p. 206)
- 12 The other is to treat scientific knowledge as “historical transcendental” knowledge, an analysis th (...)
Incidentally, collective reflexivity is also one of the conditions for science to avoid falling into both the trap of cultural relativism’s “anything goes” that Woolgar thought unavoidable and Beck’s portrayal of science as just another piece of a modernisation process that is out of control12. Here is Bourdieu’s (2001, p. 178-179) full formulation of the principle of collective reflexivity:
The sociologically equipped epistemological vigilance that every researcher can employ by themselves would certainly be reinforced by the generalisation of the reflexivity imperative and the disclosure of the indispensable tools in order to follow it. This is the only thing that could institute reflexivity as a common law of the field, which will then find itself dedicated to a sociological critique of everyone by everyone that is able to intensify and strengthen the effects of the epistemological critique of everyone by everyone.
In this paper, we have seen how Bourdieusian reflexivity differs from other formulations of the concept due to its focus on a relational approach that goes beyond the dualism between object and subject. While this approach takes into account both these traditional themes in Western scientific and philosophical thought, it is not limited by them and aims to reposition and transcend this dualism by focusing on the relation that they point towards. Finally, we showed how reflexivity for Bourdieu stems from his readings of Spinoza and Bachelard and entails a set of levels of reflexivity that allows researchers to relationally analyse their objects/subjects in a way that generates scientific statements, while causing the least possible violence to them. In this way, reflexivity is not an afterthought or a consequence of using Bourdieu’s framework – rather, it is an essential part of it, since it allows Bourdieu’s sociology to achieve one of its main goals: an epistemological repositioning of the dualisms between individual and society, subject and object. Reflexively, they are the same thing, seen from different points of view, in constantly moving relationships of structural causality. One of our goals in this paper was to make this clear.
Bourdieu passed away before he could take his reflexive project even further towards his stated collective goal, both scientifically and politically, through what he called “the Realpolitik of reason” (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 229). His view of reflexivity is certainly much more demanding than most other conceptions – both at a scientific and a personal level. As he himself acknowledged:
This conversion of the whole person that goes well beyond all the demands of the most demanding methodological treatises has certainly been at the beginning of a theoretical conversion that has allowed me to re-appropriate the practical relationship with the world more fully than through the still too distant phenomenological analyses. (Bourdieu, 2003b, p. 56).
This “conversion” is what Bourdieu called, in other occasions, metanoia: “The task is to produce, if not a ‘new person’, then at least a ‘new gaze’, a sociological eye. And this cannot be done without a genuine conversion, a metanoia, a mental revolution, a transformation of one’s entire vision of the social world” (Bourdieu e Wacquant 1992, p. 251).
- 13 There are several instances of this connection, such as: “the agents’ symbolic power, as a power to (...)
We must remember that for Bourdieu, even the word “theory” should be taken in its etymological sense of “to observe” (theorein)13. Again, we have here the “conversion of the gaze” required by the “spiritual exercise” Bourdieu mentioned in La misère du monde. This “slow initiatory journey” (Bourdieu, 2003b: 53) that is (and was caused by) the metanoia, at times cannot be grasped from Bourdieu’s published books, which, as opus operatum, can obscure the modus operandi. This is why this paper has relied heavily on the recently published transcriptions of Bourdieu’s courses at the Collège de France, and his interviews and conferences – in which we can better observe the thought processes involved as they happen, despite, of course, all the limitations of transcriptions. As he says during one of these lessons: “interrogating the interrogation, this is what I call the principle of reflexivity” (Bourdieu, 2017, p. 28). We believe these courses are an invaluable resource for researchers that seek not simply to understand Bourdieu’s thoughts, but also to go beyond him and to apply to their own practice in the 21st century the concepts, and the way of doing things, that Bourdieu developed throughout his life as an attempt to grant us eyes.
We would like to thank Michael Grenfell for his useful comments on a previous version of this article.
- Receção: 15.02.2022
- Aprovação: 06.06.2022