Sociological Analysis and Socio-Political Change: Juxtaposing Elements of the Work of Bourdieu,Passeron and Lyotard 1

Introduction

In June, 2003, I organized a conference at my university which was entitled: ‘Social Science Beyond Bourdieu’. This, of course, was only just over a year after Bourdieu's death. The guest of honour at the conference was Jean-Claude Passeron. I remember that he began his keynote address by reflecting on the title of the conference, asking himself whether he should consider himself as ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘alongside’ or ‘beyond’ Bourdieu. He had only shortly before published his obituary of Bourdieu, which he called ‘Mort d'un ami, disparition d'un penseur’ [death of a friend, disappearance of a thinker] (Passeron, 2002).

The clear implication was that Passeron considered that the passing of Bourdieu signified the passing of the mode of thinking which Bourdieu represented. His death marked the end of the totalizing sociologism which Raymond Aron had associated with the legacy of Durkheim and had castigated – in favour, instead, of the tradition established by Weber. Passeron was, therefore, making two kinds of associated judgement. He was suggesting that the historical moment of Bourdieu's project had now passed and, secondly, that sociology should accept its position as one of the social sciences rather than as the social science, a meta-narrative capable of explaining cultural, economic, political or educational behaviour. To subject this view to scrutiny, I want to examine the development of Bourdieu's thinking in its historical context. Of course, by taking this historical approach I am tacitly myself taking a position on the status of social scientific explanation which can be situated with reference to the conflicting positions of Bourdieu and Passeron.

In the process, I shall also attempt to advance a position which benefits from the philosophical insights in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. I shall suggest that Bourdieu responded to the critiques of sociology current at the time of the ‘May events’ of 1968, particularly those of Althusser and his followers, that the discipline was an instrument of bourgeois political domination, by adapting his ‘objective’ social anthropological analyses of Algerian social organization so that they might become the bases for participative, subjective, socio-political action. Thereafter, Bourdieu's sociological analyses were integrally related to his socio-political intentions, and his work became vulnerable to the kind of criticism made during his lifetime by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux in her Le savant et la politique. Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu [The scientist and politics. Essay on the sociological terrorism of Pierre Bourdieu] (Verdès-Leroux, 1998).

The nature of the integral relationship between Bourdieu's sociological research and his socialist politics was fundamentally Durkheimian, an attempt to revive the social function of social science that had been assumed in the political development of the 3^rd Republic. By contrast, Passeron was more inclined to sympathize with the position outlined by the mentor whom Bourdieu and Passeron shared – Raymond Aron. It was in 1959, shortly before he had appointed Passeron to be his research assistant at the Sorbonne and Bourdieu to be the secretary of his research group, the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, that Aron published, with a long introduction, the first French translations of Weber's famous essays on ‘Science as a vocation’ and ‘Politics as a vocation’ in Le savant et le politique [the scientist and the politician] (Weber, int. Aron, 1959). Aron insisted that social science should impinge on political practice, but only on condition that science develops in apolitical independence within an autonomous academic context. Passeron's subsequent attempt to define sociolinguistically the boundaries between explanatory discourses in the disciplines of social science was an endeavour which was politically committed in a Weberian manner and, consequently, in opposition to Bourdieu's inclination to reduce intellectual to social distinction.

I suggest that Bourdieu's emphases of agency as an explanatory tool for understanding interactions between people in society and, reflexively, for understanding the social effects of his own analytic labour, were both related to an underlying desire maieutically ² to bring about the creation of an egalitarian, participative social democracy. There was, in other words, a hidden political agenda which was in control of his social and sociological dialogism. Philosophically, perhaps, this was a manifestation of the early influence of Leibniz which enabled him to see apparently random encounters as contributory to the final actualization of an originally pre-defined teleology. Through the inter-generational operation of the ‘habitus’, however, the teleology appeared to be a historical ‘grand narrative’. I argue, therefore, that although Bourdieu's emphasis of ‘inter-subjectivity’ in his advocacy of ‘socio-analytic encounter’ was phenomenological, it was linked, in theory and practice, to a traditional, modernist attachment to the transformative political prospects of social movements.

Contemporaneously, Jean-François Lyotard explored the implications of the Husserlian legacy in a way which rejected historical grand narratives and provided a philosophical underpinning for his recognition that ‘information’ was replacing ‘knowledge’ and that, consequently, there was a crisis of legitimation which was affecting institutions such as families, universities, and nation-states. Apart from writing ‘fables’, Lyotard chose to pursue the consequences of his insights in the field of philosophy where they became esoteric contributions to academic debate rather more than politically engaged actions. To avoid heading in a similar direction, I ground the general arguments that follow within the institutions specifically affecting education, both in terms of Bourdieu's writings and in respect of the crisis to which Lyotard refers.

My concluding contention is that many of Lyotard's observations have proved to be accurate or to be predictions which have been fulfilled. With Bourdieu, we find ourselves trying to practise social science within a political sphere which has currently made its conceptual apparatus moribund. We have to guard against making allegiance to Bourdieu's reflexivity subliminally into a device for restoring the structuralist straitjacket from which he could not escape. Rather we have to use Bourdieu's reflexive method to sociologize Lyotard's ‘différend’ so as to establish a socially interactive sociological consciousness as the basis for a dialogistic politics.

The work of Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1960s

Most of the research of Bourdieu which is normally considered to contribute to the ‘sociology of education’ was undertaken in the 1960s. I am thinking, of course, of the research undertaken in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron which led to the publication of Les Héritiers in 1964 (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964, 1979) and of La Reproduction. Eléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement in 1970 (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970, 1977), but also of articles such as ‘Langage et rapport au langage dans la situation pédagogique’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1965, 1994), ‘Les étudiants et la langue d'enseignement’ (Bourdieu, Passeron and de Saint Martin, 1965, 1994), ‘L’école conservatrice, les inégalités devant l'école et devant la culture’ (Bourdieu, 1966, 1974), ‘La comparabilité des systèmes d'enseignement’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1967), ‘Systèmes d'enseignement et systèmes de pensée’ (Bourdieu, 1967, 1971), ‘L'examen d'une illusion’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1968) and ‘Reproduction culturelle et reproduction sociale’ (Bourdieu, 1971, 1973). It is pertinent to my argument to emphasize that the two main texts were published in English translation in 1979 and 1977 (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979; and Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977); the first two articles were assembled late in the day in English translation in Academic Discourse, published by Polity Press in 1994 (Bourdieu, Passeron and de Saint Martin, 1994); while the others were all published in English in the 1970s, in collections associated with the ‘new directions for the sociology of education’ movement initiated by M.F.D. Young's collection of essays published as Knowledge and Control (Young, (ed.), 1971), with the exception of ‘La comparabilité des systèmes d'enseignement’ and ‘L'examen d'une illusion’, which have never been translated.

We can say that the researches of Bourdieu and his colleagues in this period were essentially structuralist, even though Bourdieu had contributed an article to a special number of Les Temps Modernes of 1966 devoted to ‘The problems of structuralism’ in which he began to formulate the idea that structures are constructed by agents (‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’, Bourdieu, 1966, 1971). They were structuralist in the sense that the researchers contended that they were disclosing what was really happening in education irrespective of the perceptions of the participants. This disclosure was happening at two levels. In the first place, educational procedures operated as if curriculum content were culturally neutral, as if the absolute competence or intelligence of students could be measured in terms of their capacity to understand or reproduce the knowledge transmitted to them without reference to the differentiated extents to which they had previously been provided with the necessary conceptual apparatus by their prior social and cultural backgrounds. This méconnaissance operating in classrooms and lecture theatres was only the immediate instrument of the systemic méconnaissance disclosed by Bourdieu and Passeron in their researches. Not only did they expose pedagogical self-deceit but they also argued that the educational system colluded in the self-deception of the state in that it perpetuated social privilege whilst pretending to found life opportunities on the recognition of culturally neutral merit.

I want to elaborate further on some of the assumptions or mind-sets on which the educational researches of Bourdieu and Passeron seem to have been predicated in the 1960s, and I shall then explore the ways in which their work diverged after 1972.

Underlying assumptions of the work of Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1960s

Bourdieu and Passeron were in agreement ideologically in opposing two features of the socio-political situation in France in the mid-1960s. Although Passeron was only associated a little with the research which led to the publications of Un art moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965 (Bourdieu, Boltanski, Castel and Chamboredon, 1965, 1990) and L'amour de l'art, les musées d'art et leur public in 1966 (Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper, 1966, 1990), he would have been supportive of the attempt to deploy sociological research to challenge the cultural policies of Général de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. Whilst in office in the second half of the 1960s, Malraux inaugurated Maisons de la Culture which were designed to bring a national high culture to the whole population and in so doing, as he said when opening the fifth Maison in Amiens in 1966, to eradicate ‘the hideous word Province’ (quoted in Kedward, 2005: 408). In as much as Malraux's innovations were an attempt to secure the rassemblement of the French people culturally in formal imitation of the attempts of the Third Republic to standardize the French population educationally through the imposition of a centrally controlled curriculum, Bourdieu and Passeron were united in opposing state centrism and recommending provincial values.

They were equally united in opposing enthusiasm for the perceived benefits of an emerging mass culture or mass media culture. In 1963, they co-authored a scathing critique of ‘massmediologues’ entitled ‘Sociologues des mythologies et mythologies de sociologues’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1963), targeting, in particular, Edgar Morin's L'Esprit du Temps (Morin, 1962), arguing that mass media discourse advanced a myth of a new age and of a transformed humanity. In one of their less vituperative sentences, for instance, Bourdieu and Passeron said of mass media discourse that

… installed in the order of mythic reason it is able to announce that “the time has come” and that, precedent-less mutation, homo-loquens is transforming himself into homo-videns. (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1963: 1015).

In short, Bourdieu and Passeron were both, instinctively, defenders of the indigenous cultures of their provincial origins – Bourdieu of the Béarn near to the French/Spanish border and Passeron of the Alpes-Maritimes, inland from Nice – against both state and mass culture.

Bourdieu and Passeron were both concerned philosophically about the status of their sociological findings, afraid that they were betraying their indigenous cultures by adopting a research methodology which might be thought to be an instrument of state control. Whilst the educational research of the early 1960s was generating the sequence of books and articles I have described, they collaborated with Jean-Claude Chamboredon in producing Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, 1968, 1991), and, together, wrote an article, published in English and not in French, entitled ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1967b). Le métier de sociologue was sub-titled: ‘préambules épistémologiques’ [epistemological preliminaries]. Bourdieu and Passeron argued that the legacy of the 19th century was that there were two competing philosophies of social science. One, derived from positivism, sought to impose the model of the natural sciences on the social sciences, while the other, reflected in the predominantly Germanic reaction to positivism, sought to emphasize that the social sciences have to acknowledge that they are dealing with participating people rather than inert physical objects and are, therefore, necessarily humanistic, involving hermeneutics. Bourdieu and Passeron contended that it must be possible to develop an epistemology of the social sciences sui generis which is neither scientistic by false analogy with the natural sciences nor humanistic, after the fashion of Geistesgeschichte or Kulturgeschichte. The jointly authored article of 1967 attempted to clarify the nature of the proposed middle way by reference to an account of the tensions in contemporary French social science between, on the one hand, the neo-positivist revival in American sociology as exemplified by Lazarsfeld and, on the other, the humanist, libertarian revival which followed from the affinity between existentialism and resistance politics.

I can summarize briefly some of the other assumptions of the joint research undertaken by Bourdieu and Passeron in the 1960s.

Firstly, there was a deep-seated philosophical attachment to Husserl's phenomenology, probably mediated most of all by the influence of the work of Merleau-Ponty. In Bourdieu's case, the legacy of Husserl was modified by his love/hate relationship with the thought of Heidegger, emphasizing ontology. The consequence of this phenomenological influence was that the work of Bourdieu and Passeron showed little interest in the referential content of the curriculum. They analysed the processes of pedagogic transmission without showing any interest in the truth claims of the knowledge that was transmitted educationally. Although Husserl's phenomenology was rooted in realism through his concept of ‘intentionality’, Bourdieu and Passeron's work seemed to have an affinity with social constructivism. This seemed to be most apparent in the emphasis in La reproduction on ‘arbitrariness’, in other words on the way in which the curriculum is historically contingent rather than a reflection of absolute scientific truths. This was compounded by the fact that the interviews and questionnaires on which Les héritiers and La reproduction were based were issued to students of Philosophy and Sociology. In the Centre de Sociologie Européenne at the time Claude Grignon carried out research on technology students, but the concentration of Bourdieu and Passeron on subjects in the humanities and social sciences meant that their socio-centric findings were a function of their choice of objects of enquiry.

Secondly, the methodology adopted by Bourdieu and Passeron presupposed a social structure in which family allegiances remained dominant. Simultaneously, Bourdieu's ‘Célibat et condition paysanne’ of 1962 (Bourdieu, 1962, republished in Bourdieu, 2002, 2006), in which he analysed his own native Béarn, borrowed substantially from the legacy of Le Play's studies of the family, and his early anthropological studies of the social structure of Algerian tribes deployed Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis of genealogies in order to analyse matrimonial exchanges. The assumption of the research for Les héritiers was that the identity of students, confronted by an imposed curriculum, could be established through scrutiny of their family backgrounds. The emphasis of the habitus was that it was the internalized disposition derived from formation within a traditional nuclear family.

Thirdly, and relatedly, the methodology of the formative educational researches of the 1960s presupposed existing gender relations. Alongside ‘Les étudiants et leurs études’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964a) on which Les Héritiers was based, Passeron did write a research report on ‘Les étudiantes’ [women students] (Passeron, 1963), but the questionnaires for the surveys for Les Héritiers only asked about the occupations of fathers and grandfathers. The discussion of their findings contained within Les Héritiers emphasized the social psychological differences between male and female students, positing the notion that women students were more passive and acquiescent than their male counterparts.

A further factor in the early educational research was that it was essentially dualist. Bourdieu has written that he commenced a study of de Saussure's linguistics. He discarded it and was subsequently embarrassed by it. He quickly rejected the notion that our parole is a reflection of a pre-existent langue. It went along with his phenomenological orientation to reject the notion that thoughts or actions are the enactment of a priori dispositions and this was precisely why he attacked Chomsky's theory of generative grammar as fundamentally Cartesian. Nevertheless, the concept of habitus was formulated within a dualist framework. Our actions are softly predetermined by our inherited dispositions. Our strategic actions are the modifications of a structured set of predispositions. Although Bourdieu denied that these dispositions were a priori because they were socially constructed rather than psychologically absolute, nevertheless the form of his conceptualization appeared to be dualist. This sense was reinforced by the formative dualism of the relationship between metropolitan French social anthropology and the indigenous cultures of observed Algerian tribes. Colonialism seemed to have imposed a dualism. Even the famous ‘three modes of theoretical knowledge’ formulated between Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique and Outline of a Theory of Practice in the 1970s, in which Bourdieu advocated an epistemological break between primary experiential knowledge and objectivist scientific knowledge was predicated on a functional dualism in which agency and explanation might enter into a creative encounter. Bourdieu never denied that his post-structuralism was dependent on structuralism. ³

Finally, Bourdieu and Passeron shared an interest in, and an uncertainty about, the logical status of social scientific explanation. In La reproduction, they tried to generate ‘propositions’ as if these might be regarded as universally valid conceptual tools rather than as themselves contingent interventions in contingent circumstances. This was to be a major source of opposition between Bourdieu and Passeron.

Divergence in the work of Bourdieu and Passeron from the 1970s

After the publication of Le métier de sociologue, which also coincided with the events of May 1968, Bourdieu and Passeron began to go their separate ways in developing their views of the way in which the middle way should be secured. As we all know, Bourdieu first articulated what could be called his ‘post-structuralist’ position in an article in English – ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ (Bourdieu, 1973) – which anticipated the transition from the anti-structuralist presentation of Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique (Bourdieu, 1972) to the post-structuralist presentation of its ‘translation’ as Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu, 1977). Bourdieu sought to reconcile an acknowledgement that social behaviour is the product of the agency of individuals with an acknowledgement also that it can be the object of scientistic observation, by making a differentiation between ‘primary’, ‘experiential’ knowledge and ‘constructed’ ‘objective’ knowledge. To become ‘science’, knowledge has to objectify experience in accordance with the discreet rules of different sciences, but, equally, we have to accept that these rules are themselves social constructs rather than categorally autonomous and a priori modes of knowing. By subjecting scientific objectifications to sociological analysis, as a result of a second ‘epistemogical break’, we become aware of the extent to which social science is grounded in ‘life-world’ experience and is in an equal dialectical relationship with other discursive practices within the ‘life-world’.

In short, in spite of the hostility towards existentialist humanism expressed by Bourdieu and Passeron in ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1967b), Bourdieu was prepared to deploy neo-positivist social science discourse as a scientistic device to liberate humanistic agency, or, at the least, to insist that the language of scientific explanation has no privileged truth claim but is just one amongst competing language games – one which derives its power and influence only from the social recognition bestowed on it rather than from its intrinsic value. My use of the expression ‘life-world’ has been deliberate. One way to re-state what I have just been saying is to suggest that Bourdieu's work was influenced by Husserl's phenomenology. Bourdieu shared the anti-psychologistic orientation of Husserl's early Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1900–1, 1970) and he came under the influence both of Heidegger's ontology and of the work of the late Husserl, which was itself influenced by Heidegger. Hence we can say that Bourdieu's use of scientific logic was a means to the end of disclosing ontological reality. Bourdieu articulated a scientific theory of the relationship between agency and structure in culture and society but, more importantly, he situated that scientific theory as itself a kind of agency. His theory of society also constituted a theory of his theoretical engagement within society. Science offered functional rather than intrinsic objectivity. Scientific action and scientific authority were as much dependent on méconnaissance as were the pedagogic action and authority analysed in La reproduction.

Passeron sought a different kind of resolution. Right from the early years of their collaboration when both Bourdieu and Passeron carried out research on the implications of the spread of photography as a popular cultural form, Passeron had been interested sociologically in the distribution of emergent photographic discourses – ones which, relative to social class, developed the capacity to autonomize visual judgements which could be said to be aesthetic rather than moral. By contrast, Bourdieu was more interested in the extent to which the aestheticization of photographic criticism was a direct reflection of the position-taking of social agents – their motivations to join photographic clubs and to distinguish their practice from everyday photographic activity. Bourdieu tried to acknowledge the importance of linguistic formulations by describing his approach as (hyphenated) ‘socio-logical’ rather than merely ‘sociological’, but his approach was more inclined towards the analysis of ontological adjustments whereas Passeron's sociology was sociolinguistic, concerned with the logic of social scientific explanation. Passeron resisted any suggestion that his logical orientation was necessarily idealist and, for instance, deliberately sub-titled his subsequent book Le raisonnement sociologique, with a directly oppositional reference to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, emphasizing instead the need for a ‘non-Popperian space of natural reasoning’ (Passeron, 1991) or, as he changed it in the revised edition, for ‘a non-Popperian space for argument’ (Passeron, 2006). Passeron was as ideologically committed as Bourdieu to resisting the cultural domination of the socially dominant and, similarly, as committed to the view that social science is practised within society rather than in some spatial and conceptual detachment from it, but his was a linguistic reflexivity that did not logically impinge upon his personal social trajectory whereas Bourdieu's was an ontological reflexivity which meant that his intellectual and social trajectories were inextricably connected or, perhaps, existentially integrated. Bourdieu's social mobility was the objective correlative of his concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’. His life-trajectory generated the concepts which explained it. There was a self-fulfilling circularity between his Bildung, his personality formation, and the theory of pedagogic communication which was predicated on the humanistic assumption that the acquisition of transmitted knowledge modifies the self, or, to put this in Bourdieusian terms, that the habitus acts as a conduit which collapses the dualistic separations of mind and body, subjective and objective.

Bourdieu's work became inseparable from his social mission. Passeron's work remained autonomously distinct, to be deployed in pursuit of a comparable mission. During the latter part of the 1970s, Passeron wrote a doctoral thesis which was based on his teaching activities with doctoral students at the University of Nantes where, a decade earlier, he had established the Department of Sociology. The thesis, entitled Les mots de la sociologie, published in 1980 (Passeron, 1980), had little currency, so little that Passeron included several chapters from it in his Le raisonnement sociologique (Passeron, 1991). In Le métier de sociologue, Bourdieu and Passeron had agreed, as we have seen, that it should be possible to define an epistemology of the social sciences without resorting either to imitation of positivism or hermeneutics. Following Bachelard, they were agreed that the new scientific spirit which had emerged at the time of Einstein's theory of relativity entailed the development of an epistemology based upon constantly changing scientific practice rather than on the evaluation of the static correspondence of scientific theories with reality. As a consequence, Bourdieu and Passeron (and Chamboredon) had been able to agree that the way forward would be ‘to subject scientific practice to a reflection which, unlike the classical philosophy of knowledge, is applied not to science that has been done – true science, for which one has to establish the conditions of possibility and coherence or the claims to legitimacy – but to science in progress’. (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, 1991: 8). The unarticulated disagreement – which meant that the proposed succeeding volumes of Le métier de sociologue were never written – related to the way in which this reflection was effected with a view to providing a handbook for research students in the social sciences in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. The first half of the book offered an account of Bachelard's formula whereby, in all sciences, ‘the scientific fact is won, constructed, and confirmed’ (Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, 1991: 11). The second half of the book provided extracts from the work of some of the founding fathers of sociology, notably of Durkheim and Weber, which were designed to demonstrate that the practice of these researchers illustrated Bachelard's formula in action and showed that the achievement of scientific rigour in sociology was dependent on the exercise of a common methodological procedure and independent of ideological difference. In effect, Le métier de sociologue sought to offer Bachelard's formula as an up-to-date equivalent of the ‘primary philosophy’ of Comte, who had supposed that all phenomena would be explicable scientifically by becoming amenable to the same positivistic analysis.

Bourdieu, Passeron and Lyotard, 1979–80. The challenge to sociology of postmodernism

So far I have been concentrating on some of the assumptions underlying the work of the 1960s for which Bourdieu is most famous. I want to jump to about 1979/80 to revisit some of these assumptions. I choose these dates because it was in 1979 that Bourdieu published La distinction (Bourdieu, 1979, 1986) and Lyotard published La condition postmoderne (Lyotard, 1979, 1985). In 1980, Passeron produced his Les mots de la sociologie.

My argument is that, philosophically, Bourdieu and Lyotard had much in common as a result of their common interest in the work of Husserl as well as their common view that their experience of the Algerian war of independence had discredited the Marxist explanation of social change. Lyotard's La Phénoménologie was published in 1954 (Lyotard, 1954, 1991) in the same paperback series of Presses Universitaires de France – Que Sais-je – as was Bourdieu's Sociologie de l'Algérie of 1958 (Bourdieu, 1958, 1962). Lyotard's text was reprinted nearly 20 times during the second half of the 20th century and has remained a standard short introduction to phenomenology. Lyotard argued that discussion of the historical meaning of phenomenology could be pursued indefinitely since it is not definable once for all but is constantly in movement. The second part of his text was a consideration of phenomenology and the human sciences, in which he discussed in separate chapters its relation to psychology, sociology and history. Lyotard taught in the philosophy department at the experimental University of Paris 8 during the 1970s when Passeron was head of the department of sociology there.

It was explicitly as a philosopher that he wrote his report on knowledge. The report was presented to the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec and it was dedicated to the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie of the Université de Paris VIII at, as Lyotard put it, ‘this very postmodern moment that finds the University nearing what may be its end, while the Institute may just be beginning’. (Lyotard, 1985: xxv). The source of Lyotard's conception of the postmodern condition was a phenomenological skepticism about the referentiality of knowledge and, hence, a recognition that information exchange has destroyed the traditional assumption that the transmission of knowledge potentially performs a moral and humanist function. Philosophically, Lyotard had also added an interest in the work of Wittgenstein to his phenomenological orientation. As we all know, the consequence was that Lyotard felt able to describe a new condition of society in which there were in operation competing language games and in which the idea of grand explanatory narratives had collapsed. He described the ‘mercantilization of knowledge’ and the implications which this would have for the authority of the state in legitimizing knowledge.

I don't want to go into further detail about Lyotard's analysis of the postmodern condition. My point in referring to Lyotard is to suggest that La condition postmoderne set Bourdieu a problem. I have no evidence whether Bourdieu engaged intellectually with Lyotard's book. I have not encountered any references in Bourdieu's work to Lyotard's writings, but I think it is useful to regard La distinction either as a response to La condition postmoderne or as Bourdieu's attempt to conceptualize differently the situation portrayed by Lyotard. Briefly, I think the difficulty for Bourdieu was that Lyotard's diagnosis of the time followed logically from philosophical positions which he shared with him. However, Lyotard's account of postmodernity legitimated philosophically the modish acceptance of mass media discourse which Bourdieu and Passeron had attacked in 1964. Lyotard's Discours, figure of 1971 (Lyotard, 1971, 2010) also seemed to legitimate philosophically the independence of visual expression from cognition which, again, had been heralded by the ‘massmedialogues’.

As Bourdieu often stated, he was an ‘oblate’, someone who was emotionally loyal to the system within which he had been educated in spite of his awareness of its shortcomings. He needed a conceptual system which would enable him to sustain his loyalty to the social process of his own formation and yet acknowledge the notion of rootless contingency to which he had been intellectually driven by that formation. La distinction is a text which sought to reconcile modernism with postmodernism by positing a confrontation between a modernist habitus and contingent, postmodern ‘fields’. It is significant that it was in 1979 that Bourdieu revisited the concept of ‘cultural capital’, writing ‘Les trois états du capital culturel’ (Bourdieu, 1979) in which he attempted to differentiate between three forms of cultural capital, which he called the ‘incorporated’, the ‘objectivated’ and the ‘institutionalized’ states. The first of these seemed to be indistinguishable from the habitus and, hence, intrinsically modernist; the second seemed to be a fluid state in which cultural goods acquired value in an exchange market and, hence, postmodernist; and the third seemed to anticipate a post-postmodernity in which market values would be consolidated through institutionalization.

It was at this period, I think, that Bourdieu found himself trying to work with the conceptual framework which had brought him a reputation and, incidentally, appointment to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, whilst becoming increasingly aware that Lyotard's account of the postmodern condition was rapidly becoming actualized. He became increasingly aware that changes in society were necessarily challenging the conceptualizations which he had developed in the status quo ante. Briefly to recapitulate in relation to his earlier assumptions, it was, for instance, becoming clear that the institution of the family was in collapse and, equally, that there had been a revolution in gender relations. The structural/agency dualism no longer seemed viable nor the dualistic relationship between the scientific observer and the observed. The premises of the research of the 1960s no longer applied but, nevertheless, the concepts which had been generated by that research were still current in the market of ideas and had become a part of the apparatus of sociological enquiry.

Responses to the postmodern challenge

Bourdieu reacted to this crisis in slightly contradictory ways. On the one hand, he increasingly situated himself as agent within his conceptualization of the world. In other words, he developed a theory of practice which reflected his personal attempt to reconcile his indigenous culture with his acquired intellectual culture and then he situated himself within his own construct, presenting himself as one social agent amongst a population of agents rather than as the detached scientific observer of the agency of others. His social mission and his conceptualizations became mutually supportive and mutually constitutive. He embraced the contingency of his social participation.

As his texts became available internationally in translation, particularly in English, through the efforts of Polity Press from 1984 onwards, Bourdieu struggled to keep control of his own ‘griffe’, his label or logo, desperately wanting to retain the integral relationship between his actions and his concepts; but, increasingly, he found that his work was subject to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. He was fighting for modernist meaning in a postmodern market of intellectual exchange which was indifferent to any referential meaning and only interested in commodifying and exploiting his concepts. Hence his turn towards direct action and direct communication through his own publishing label, Raisons d'Agir, in the last decade of his life. On the other hand, however, Bourdieu was always tempted to insist on the universal validity of the concepts which had been developed contingently. Rather unconvincingly, he attempted to justify, in the opening pages of La Noblesse d'état (Bourdieu, 1989, 1996), his use of old research findings and data. It was not that he believed that his findings had a-temporal, a priori universality. Rather, his view of his mission as a social agent was, in a rather Kantian way, that the transmission of his particularity would contribute to the universification of values through the reflexivity of socio-analytic encounter between citizens of society and of the world. His conceptual endeavour was, therefore, inextricably linked with his socio-political vision, which involved the institutionalization of society on the basis of social relations rather than on the basis of political, legal or economic regulation. As he wrote, ‘tout est social’ (Bourdieu, 1992), ‘everything is social,’ and his ideal society was one that resurrected what he believed he had witnessed in the gentilitial democracy of traditional Kabyle social organization. It was always the case, therefore, that pedagogical communication was, for Bourdieu, an instrument for the achievement of social harmony rather than for the transmission of knowledge, a mechanism by which members of states might constitute the systems within which they lived.

In the terms outlined by Aron in respect of Durkheim, Bourdieu turned out to be a totalizing intellectual, committed to an all-embracing sociologism rather than to the pursuit of a circumscribed sociology with limited explanatory boundaries. He was not interested in the sociology of education as such but only in as much as educational institutions constituted one mechanism for the transmission of values within society, which had to be analysed in totality.

Passeron had always disagreed with the way in which Bourdieu appropriated the meaning of their jointly authored La reproduction. The original French text of 1970 was sub-titled: Eléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement [elements for a theory of the educational system], but Bourdieu rapidly produced an article entitled ‘Reproduction culturelle et reproduction sociale’ [social and cultural reproduction] (Bourdieu, 1971, 1973) which imposed the idea that the original text was establishing that cultural reproduction had no autonomy but was only the concealed manifestation of social position-taking. Passeron had always argued that cultural reproduction could be analysed sociologically without insisting that the one form of reproduction was ‘reducible’ to the other. It followed that Passeron had no sympathy for the way in which Bourdieu proceeded to live the correlation between his intellectual and social trajectories. In Les mots de la sociologie (Passeron, 1980), Passeron sought to analyse sociologically the language used by sociologists, and he subjected the use he and Bourdieu had made of the concepts of cultural capital and habitus to scrutiny. Similarly, with Claude Grignon, Passeron published several times during the 1980s a debate of 1982, finally published in 1989 under the title of Le savant et le populaire (Passeron and Grignon, 1989) in which he tacitly argued that Bourdieu had inappropriately transferred concepts developed in a colonial situation to metropolitan France without adequately reflecting on the differences between ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ research. Passeron constantly argued that the rules of different disciplines in the human sciences are constituted contingently and can only be understood through the analysis of their research practices rather than by seeking to formulate idealist logics of scientific discovery, but he has also refused to allow sociological research to become identical with missionary social action. ⁴

Of course, it was part of Bourdieu's totalizing sociological argument that philosophical discourse possessed no intrinsic autonomy. It is not always sufficiently realized that Lyotard struggled philosophically to develop an intellectual and ethical position which would respond adequately to the postmodern condition which he had identified. In Au juste (1979, 1985), in his contribution to La Faculté de Juger (1982–1985, Derrida, Descombes, Kortion, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1985) and in Le différend (1983, 1988) he attempted to formulate the basis for legitimation in the recognition of difference rather than through the imposition of pre-existing dominant narratives. Much of his discussion followed from a close consideration of Kant's Critiques, particularly The Critique of Judgement. Again, it is significant that Bourdieu included a section on Kant's Critique of Judgement within La distinction and that, indeed, the sub-title of La distinction deliberately connotes Kant's text: Critique sociale du jugement. Lyotard had argued in La phénoménologie that, logically, phenomenology had constantly to recognize the grounds of its own existence in the ‘life-world’, but he chose, nevertheless, to articulate a blueprint for social dialogue within postmodernity from within the field of philosophy. Lyotard equally argued that the implication of phenomenological thinking was that sociology should also constantly maintain a relation with the experiential base of its conceptualizations. Bourdieu tried to do this by advocating a reflexive sociology and, by this means, he did in effect seek to operationalize Lyotard's ‘différend’ sociologically rather than philosophically. ⁵

Concluding comments

I think it is clear that Lyotard's postmodern condition has been actualized in many of the aspects of contemporary society. In particular, for instance, the internet has actualized the contemporary dominance of information exchange over knowledge transmission. Everywhere we have indications of the collapse of legitimation as government policy-makers are in debate with scientific advisors and where committees of enquiry constantly question the validity of previous committees of enquiry.

In my analysis I have tried to consider some of the relations between the thinking of Bourdieu, Passeron and Lyotard. Specifically, I have suggested that the sociology of education that was attributed to Bourdieu and Passeron developed in a historical context which quickly became a world which had been lost by the 1980s and is certainly a world which is no longer that of the generations born since 1980. In going on to describe how Bourdieu attempted to identify his subsequent sociological research with his socio-political mission, I have detailed how Passeron reacted to the changing circumstances by continuing to develop an epistemology of the practice undertaken in discrete disciplines within the social sciences – thus rejecting Bourdieu's attempt to transform sociology into a meta-narrative capable of explaining all aspects of social reality. Finally, I have commented on the ambivalence of the putative relationship between the thought of Bourdieu and Lyotard, suggesting that Bourdieu's work might now stimulate a response to the collapse of legitimation by enabling a sociological implementation of the philosophical ideas contained in Le différend. This would free Bourdieu's notion of agency from the incubus of the totalizing Durkheimian legacy, allowing sociology to inform small narratives, shaking off its association with the 19th century desire to generate a grand narrative of society.

To move ‘beyond Bourdieu’ might, therefore, involve us in continuing Bourdieu's own attempt to revise his work of the 1960s to accommodate the tangible social changes occurring from the 1980s. The choice before us is stark and is inevitably connected with our perception of the choice before sociology as a discipline. We can choose to follow the modernist Bourdieu and deploy his conceptual apparatus in a way which, in appearance, uses Bourdieu counter-culturally, but, in reality, only offers that critique from within academic institutions subservient to government funding and to the managerial intentions of dominant politicians. This, perhaps, is to follow the line taken by Passeron – disengaging ‘Bourdieusian’ sociological analysis from the reflexivity of Bourdieu's personal project. Or we can accept the loss of legitimacy of academic sociology and of academic institutions by seeking to adapt Bourdieu's philosophical sociology to make a contribution to the ways in which contemporary social issues present themselves, embracing the forms of in dividualization characteristic of western democracies, such as the personalization agenda in social policy.

The choice can, perhaps, be stated politically and, of course, it is part of the contemporary debate whether discourse on these issues is ‘political’ or ‘social’. Bourdieu tried to hang on to the grand narrative of French republican socialism, fighting against the incursions of neo-liberalism. I remember him warning me as early as 1997 that Tony Blair was the most dangerous man in the world. Realpolitik seems to suggest that a form of postmodern neo-liberalism is, however, now triumphant and that institutions within which instrumental sociology is now taught are themselves trapped in the concomitant market of intellectual distinction, removed from practical social function. To go beyond Bourdieu in a way that does not betray his vision, we have to try to find ways to encourage in the whole population opportunities for socio-analytic encounter which emphasize the social democratic possibilities of the exchange of small narratives without treating these as subordinate to the pre-defined agenda of any prior grand narrative.