By AFRANIO CATANI*
Commentary on Pierre Bourdieu's book
1.
Part of Self-analysis outline was written between October and December 2001 in the hospital, although Pierre Bourdieu had been working on the text for years. It was conceived from his last course at the France secondary school, as a developed and reworked version of the final chapter of Science of science and reflexivity (2001). It is a touching testimony, with concise, moving and sharp language. Previously published in Germany (2002), it came out in France in 2004.
In the same way that he had prepared in 1982, when he joined the France secondary school, One Class about the class, where extreme reflexivity set the tone, in this course he submitted himself, as a final challenge, “to the exercise of reflexivity that had constituted throughout his life as a researcher one of the necessary requirements for scientific research”. In the introduction to the Brazilian edition, Sergio Miceli writes that Pierre Bourdieu used the word “sketch” in Outline of a theory of practice (1972), considered “the main work of the affirmative stage of his intellectual project”, in which he settled accounts with structuralism, tested hypotheses regarding the congruence of sources and materials, “finishing off the initiatory journey by linking the experiences of Béarn to those of fieldwork in Algeria, and a major challenge to the theories and models of kinship that were then hegemonic in anthropology” (p. 19).
2.
The work introduced a long digression on the modes of knowledge, especially “that which is raised by praxis, which is at the root of the concept of habitus”, which would shape “a sociology centered on practical reason, a mark that would distinguish it from both interactionist and structuralist currents” (Miceli, 2005, p. 19).
Pierre Bourdieu writes that in his effort to explain and understand himself, he will rely on “the fragments of objectification of myself that I have left along the way, throughout my research, and I will try to deepen and even systematize them here” (p. 39).
To justify the positions that marked his career, he carries out an analysis of the French intellectual field in the 1950s, when he completed his philosophy studies at École Normal Superior and also his own upbringing, characterized by academic success and modest social origins: his father was a postman in a village in southwestern France. His early works explore the uprooting of his origins – his family lived in a rural community in the Béarn region – and the necessary familiarization with the social spaces of adoption in Paris. He has stated in interviews that this forced familiarization even led him to lose his strong accent – it was only at the age of 11, at the Pau high school, that he stopped speaking only Gascon.
From 1951 to 1954 he was a student at École Normal Superior studying philosophy, a time when it was the dominant discipline, with the intellectual field dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre. He understands that “the shock of 1968” was decisive for the philosophers who entered the 1940s and 1950s to confront the problem of power and politics – he cites the paradigmatic cases of Deleuze and Foucault (p. 42).
In addition to the intellectually dominant current, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre, there were others, among which Martial Gueroult, Jules Vuillemin, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Alexandre Koyré, Éric Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty stood out. The magazine Critical, directed by Georges Bataille and Éric Weil, by providing access to an international and transdisciplinary culture, “allowed us to escape the cloistering effect exerted by any elite school” (p. 47).
He attacks the positions of Jean-Paul Sartre, talks about his mentor Raymond Aron, his sympathy for Georges Canguilhem and his fellow philosophers of his generation, Jean-Claude Pariente, Henry Joly and Louis Marin. He reconstructs the space of possibilities that opened up before him in this period of transition between philosophy and sociology. Georges Gurvitch, Jean Stoetzel and Raymond Aron were prominent in this discipline, in addition to those who were on the rise: Alain Touraine, Jean-Daniel Reynaud and Jean-René Tréanton (sociology of work); Viviane Isambert-Jamati (sociology of education); François-André Isambert (sociology of religion); Henri Mendras, Paul Henry Chombart de Lauwe and Joffre Dumazedier dedicated themselves, respectively, to rural, urban and leisure sociologies (p. 62-63).
There were few magazines (Revue Française de Sociologie, Les Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, Sociologie du Travail e Rural Studies), but nothing was so motivating, to the point of writing that “scientific life was somewhere else” (p. 62), praising the action of Fernand Braudel and the great influence exerted by the magazine The man, led by Lévi-Strauss, occupying a dominant position in the French academic field (p. 68).
He dedicates several pages to the period spent in Algeria, from the mid-1950s, when he began his military service, where he carried out his first field research on Kabyle society and published Sociology from Algeria (1958). He returned to Paris and became Aron's assistant, after teaching philosophy and sociology at the Faculty of Letters in Algiers. He began a successful career, converting to the social sciences, as an ethnologist and sociologist, at the time of a war of liberation that, for him, marked a decisive break with his school experience (p. 71).
Despite the disagreements he had with Lévi-Strauss, he acknowledges that he, along with Braudel and Aron, guaranteed him entry, at a very young age, into the École Pratique des Hautes Études (p. 74). He published other works on Kabylia and Béarn, the region where he was born, in Studies Rural ( Annals and Modern Times.
3.
It presents the research developed in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, which consolidated his reputation, in addition to autobiographical elements and family information responsible for the formation of his habitus primary school. His father was the son of a sharecropper and, at around the age of 30 (when Pierre was born), he became a postal worker, later promoted to postman-collector; he spent his entire life employed in a village near Pau. “My childhood experience as a defector, the son of a defector, had a significant impact on the formation of my dispositions towards the social world” (p. 109). Very close to his primary school classmates (children of small farmers, artisans or merchants), he had with them “almost everything in common, except academic success, which made me stand out” (p. 110).
The passages about his father and his political and social positions are touching. His mother came from a “large peasant family” on his mother’s side, and faced her parents’ desire “to make a marriage perceived as a disastrous alliance” (p. 111). As an only child, his experience of boarding school at the Lycées in Pau (1941-1947) and at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1948-1951) in Paris are seen as a “terrible school of social realism, where everything has already been made present, due to the needs of the struggle for life” (p. 115).
He talks about the cold winter, the embarrassment of using the bathrooms, the admonitions, the struggle to get his share and keep his place, the readiness to give a slap if necessary. His autobiographical narrative takes up the argument developed in As rules da (1992): “fiction and sociology are interchangeable, due to the fact that they have the social world as a reference” (Miceli, 2005, p. 18).
He received more than 300 “suspensions” and “reprimands” throughout his schooling. He lived in anguish: “I was 11 or 12 years old, with no one I could trust or even understand” (p. 119). “I lived my boarding life in a kind of obsessive rage […] Flaubert was not entirely wrong in thinking that, as he writes in Memoirs de a madman, 'he who has known boarding school knows, at the age of twelve, almost everything in life” (p. 120).
He talks about the difficulties he faced with his classmates in the preparatory class at Louis-le-Grand and how he started playing rugby with his boarding school friends to prevent his academic success from alienating him from the so-called virile community of the sports team, “the only place (…) of true solidarity, much more solid and direct than that which exists in the school world, in the common struggle for victory, in mutual support in case of fights, or in reciprocal admiration for achievements” (p. 123). The classroom “divides by hierarchizing”; the boarding school “isolates by atomizing”.
4.
There are tasty pages about your entry into Middle School of France and his understanding that “fiction and sociology are interchangeable, due to the fact that they have the social world as a reference” (Miceli, 2005, p. 18). Returning to what he wrote before, through the evocation of the historical conditions in which his work was produced, he managed to “assume the author’s point of view”, as Gustave Flaubert said. This implies “placing oneself in thought” exactly “in the place that, as a writer, painter and worker or office employee, each of them occupies in the social world” (p. 134).
Sergio Miceli points out Pierre Bourdieu's silence “about his marriage, his children, the important women in his life”, saying that class modesty prevented him from doing so: “he did not have the readiness to habitus required for such self-complacency, which would have enabled him to prepare a hazy version of his affective experience, similar to that conveyed, for example, in the memorial narratives of Sartre or Leiris, so much to the delight of learned aesthetes” (Miceli, 2005, p. 18).
In favor of the author's sociological work, I conclude with a phrase by Ricardo Piglia that happily illustrates the process of self-analysis developed by Bourdieu: “Criticism is the modern form of autobiography. A person writes his life when he believes he is writing his readings (…) The critic is the one who finds his life within the texts he reads” (2004, p. 117).
*Afranio Catani is a senior professor at the Faculty of Education at USP. Author of, among other books, Origin and destiny: thinking about Bourdieu's reflexive sociology (Letter Market).
Reference
Pierre Bourdieu. Self-analysis outline. Translation: Sergio Miceli. New York, New York, 2005, 144 pages. [https://amzn.to/3EG2Qar]
REFERENCES
Ricardo Piglia. Short Forms (translation: José Marcos Mariani de Macedo). New York: Routledge, 2004.
Sergio Miceli. Rationalized emotion. In: Bourdieu, P. Self-analysis outline. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005, p. 7-20.
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