Deyan Deyanov

MODERN REASON: THE MAGIC OF DISENCHANTMENT^*

(On Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic revolution)

KING. Why do you put labels on everything to justify your feelings?

BECKET. Because, without labels, the world would have no shape, my prince.

KING. Is it so important for the world to have a shape?

BECKET. It’s essential, my prince, otherwise we can’t know what we’re doing there.

Jean Anouilh, Becket, or The Honour of God

At the outset, I would like to state that the genre of what follows is really an afterword, not a preface; it appeals to those who have already read the book, have tried to think with Bourdieu and even think Bourdieu in a Bourdivine way. But, although tempting, to think sociologically – and according to Bourdieu’s own sociology – the symbolic revolution that Bourdieu has provoked in sociology requires methodological efforts to which even his faithful pupils or well-intended critics are not inclined. Such a strategy must start from his possession by the sociological illusio (for which it is worth dying), i.e. from recognizing all that the sociological field requires to stay sociological (even when you revolutionize it), and hence from the dim feeling of deep complicity with the adversaries (sociologists resemble Bourdieu’s beloved monks in the sculpture in Auch who fight for the abbot’s staff). Then the turn comes of the positions that Bourdieu takes on the neuralgic problems swarming in that field since the 60s, his sociological choices: from the overcoming of false oppositions in sociology (such as those between the objectivism of structuralists and the subjectivism of phenomenology) – through the critique of the equally false borders between sociology and the other social sciences such as ethnology and history – to the emblematic formula of thinking with and against a particular thinker (be it Marx, Weber, or Durkheim), and hence to the seemingly unimportant detail to whom he refers (explicitly or silently) and to whom he does not.

Having in mind that these choices are a function of his sociological habitus, and it is defined first of all by his position in the sociological field and his trajectory (the sequence of positions that he has occupied in the field), this would allow us the chance to extract his habitus, to identify his position, to trace his trajectory. And this would mean to construct theoretically the field itself in its consecutive states, to establish the social conditions of possibility of a reflexive sociology that objectivates the objectivizing subject, to identify those privileged positions from which such an objectivation becomes possible. An afterword, obviously, could not suffice for such a rethinking of Bourdieu’s symbolic revolution. This is why I will restrict myself – in thinking with him and against him (i.e. ‘through him’) – to extracting from his critical sociology of modernity¹ what is, in my view, the essence of his symbolic revolution: a new genealogy of Western rationalism. This genealogy, both inheriting and revolutionizing Weber’s as well as Foucault’s genealogies, relies on the critique of theoretical reason² and on the theory of practical logic (i.e. on what we call the praxeological turn in logic).³

1. Formulating the problems

In an article of 1976, preceding by several years ‘Le Sens pratique’ and bearing the same title, Bourdieu states: ‘Therefore, we must recognize to practice a logic which is not that of logic, in order not to allow ourselves to require from it more logic than it can provide, and not to be thus doomed to extricating forcefully inconsistencies away from it or to imposing on it a forced consistency’ (Bourdieu 1976: 53). In the book itself, Bourdieu proposes – under the title of ‘critique of theoretical reason’ – a kind of canonic version of his theoretical objective (Bourdieu 1980a), and in 1983, in his lecture on codification, he returns to the same theme, facing the problems of formalization and of logical form (Bourdieu 1987: 94-105). Between the article and the book Bourdieu writes ‘Ce que parler veut dire’ where in criticizing Austin he proposes, without using this formulation, a performative logic of acts of naming (cf. Bourdieu 1982). By that, he puts new emphases in his theory of practical logic, but the relation of this new version to the previous one remains unclarified. To clarify it, I will rely on what I have some time ago called the strategy of mirroring the big books of Bourdieu in his savage thinking: a thinking during talking (or of writing in the way one talks), a thinking abandoned to the performative magic of naming problems for which sociologists, although already dimly perceiving them, still have no names. This savage thinking, condensed in short, mentally tense fragments (whose genre is that of ‘preliminary notes’, ‘said things’, articles which would be tamed only years later in his big books, etc.), gives a chance for a new reading of these big books.

Behind this mental writing of Bourdieu of the early 80s, one can, in my view, perceive two problems before his praxeology (i.e. before his theory of practice and of the habitus as practical sense), and hence before the theory of practical logic. These are problems that stand out when it turns away from the Kabyle house and faces modern societies and their formal-rationally codified practices.⁴ They stand out against the background of the ever-assumed but problematized only in 1980, in the article ‘Le Mort saisit le vif’, ontological complicity between the habitus and the field, or, what is the same for Bourdieu, between the two states of history, ‘history in an incorporated state, having become habitus’ and ‘history in an objectivized state, accumulated with time in things, buildings, monuments, books […]’ (Bourdieu 1980b: 6). There is this ontological complicity, Bourdieu generalizes, when ‘the same history haunts the habitus and the habitat, the dispositions and the position, the king and his court, […]’, it is ‘the doxic relation to the native world […] which the practical world establishes, […] in which the (appropriated by history) body appropriates […] the things inhabited by this same history’ (Bourdieu 1980b: 6-7). To that, we must add something that he does not say: it is this ontological complicity that is also the social condition of possibility of practical logic. Therefore: what is it that, in the modern, formal-rationally codified societies, throws the shadow of doubt on ontological complicity (and hence on practical logic)?

1) First of all, this is the problem: how is the ontological complicity of the habitus of the agent (who, as far as being an agent, is not a homo oeconomicus or a Weberian juridical robot even in modern societies) possible with a formal-rational code – a textbook of logic or grammar, a juridical law etc. – and with the field codified by it? And further: do the disruptions in the ontological complicity between the habitus and the field in the modern and modernizing societies, to which Bourdieu himself continually comes upon, undermine his theory or are just puzzles that it can solve (cf. Martuccelli 1999: 109-141)?⁵ Here we can summarize: how, in the modern society where tradition does not dominate, is generally possible the force of the tradition that this ontological complicity presumes?

2) In ‘Ce que parler veut dire’ Bourdieu says: ‘Those who, like Max Weber, formulate the magic or charismatic law […] in opposition to the rational law based on calculability and predictability, forget that the most strictly rational law is nothing else than an act of social magic that works’; and adds: ‘Legal discourse is a creating talk which creates what it pronounces. It is the limit aimed at by all performative utterances […] – it is the divine word, the word of divine light which – similarly to the intuitus originarius which Kant ascribes to God – creates what it speaks’ (Bourdieu 1982: 20-21). Therefore, the following problem is: how is the ontological complicity of the habitus of the modern charismatic, of the prophet of formal rationalization, of the magician of disenchantment, possible with that forma-rational code which he has not yet created? And how is charismatic domination – under the form of formally rationalizing codification – generally possible in modern societies where ‘rationalization and rational order revolutionize ‘from outside; while charisma […] exerts its revolutionizing force ‘from within’ – through a sudden transformation of the spirit of the dominated’ (Weber 1985: 657-658)?⁶

It depends on the solvability of these problems in Bourdieu’s sociology of modernity whether, through his praxeology, a new genealogy of Western rationalism is possible. Before considering them, however, I will sketch out the canonic version of the theory of practical logic.

2. Practical logic and the ‘logic of logicians’

(a digression)

Bourdieu calls the ‘effect of theoretical neutralization’ (Bourdieu 1976: 52) the effect that is due to the position of the theoretician – a position which, whether its occupier is aware of that or not, neutralizes his practical interests (one has in mind here both his position in the field of science and the fact that it is a position precisely in the scientific field). This is why, along with all other things, the reflexivity of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology consists also in the requirement of a methodological control over the effect of theoretical neutralization (as a field effect) under the form of a ‘theory of the non-coincidence of theory and practice’. As we shall see, if not subjected to such a methodological control, the effect of neutralization will obliterate the incommensurability of the incommensurable practical worlds (and by that, as we shall see, the incommensurability of their logics),⁷ deploying them in one plane – the plane of theorizing. Thus the ethnologist (or sociologist)⁸ gains access to the ‘logic of the system which would escape a partial and non-continuous gaze, but in the same time he has all chances to ignore the change of status that he imposes on practice and its products, and together with that to become eager to seek for solutions of problems that practice does not raise and cannot raise, instead of asking himself whether the characteristic of practice is not the fact that it excludes these questions’ (Bourdieu 1976: 52).

It is the absence of a theory of the non-coincidence of theory and practice, says Bourdieu in relation to Levy-Strauss, that tempts us to replace the practical logic of gift exchangers by what he calls the ‘structural truth of exchange’ (cf. ‘the logic of the system’); and the exchange itself of gifts, he adds, would become impossible, should that structural truth come to the open and destroy the practical logic of the exchange (f. Bourdieu 1987: 34). Bourdieu’s argument is no doubt applicable everywhere in the social and human sciences, where one forgets that the theoretical construction is not ‘a generative formula that allows to reproduce the essential of the practices treated as opus operatum, [that] it is not the generative principle of practice, not a modus operandi’ (Bourdieu 1980a: 26) – cf. e.g. how in his experiments Piaget imputes operations, borrowed from the algebra of logic, to the children who he studies.

But what is practical logic? And – if this is not just a metaphor – what is properly logical in it? According to one aphorism on practical logic, bearing the distinctive traces of Bourdieu’s writing, we ‘should not seek in the products of the habitus more logic than there is: the logic of practice is in being logical to the degree in which, if one is logical, one would cease to be practical.’ (Bourdieu 1987: 97-98). This aphorism, however, uncritically assumes the logic of logicians (of ‘formal logicians’) as a scale of measurement; while the problem is, rather, that if logicality exceeds the measure, one stops being not only practical but also logical (in the own measure of practical logic). By that, Bourdieu misses, let me say again, the problem of incommensurabilty between logics – between the logic of logicians as well as between the practical logics themselves;⁹ the declared multiplicity of logics, corresponding to the multiplicity of fields, remains a good methodological wish, a methodological aphorism, rather than drawing the outlines of a research program. I think that it is to a large extent because of missing the problem of incommensurability that Bourdieu, despite some subtle logical insights (such as e.g. the problem of practical induction, of the universe in a practical state¹⁰ etc.), does not thematize precisely what should give practical logic the character of logic: logical form, logical inference, the function of logical laws in that inference etc.

This is why, when in 1980 in his book ‘Le Sens pratique’ Bourdieu proposes a ‘theory of theoretical logic and of practical logic’ (Bourdieu 1980a: 155) which ‘must be conscious of the transformation to which these games of theoretical writing will put practical logic through the simple fact of explication, […] a transformation that leads from the operations mastered in a practical state to the formal operations that are isomorphous to them’ (Bourdieu 1980a: 156), he neither thematizes the problem of the logical form of the logic of practice,¹¹ nor undertakes to trace this transformation through the opposition, essential to reflexive sociology, between opus operatum and modus operandi.¹² Thus he – despite being aware that there is such a transformation – does not say what it consists in; this is why we must, very succinctly, trace the transformation leading from the operations mastered in a practical state to formal operations, i.e. from the operations of practical logic to those in the logic of logicians, and rethink it through this opposition. It is here that we can be helped by the strategy of return from Bourdieu’s big books to his savage thinking.

3. Landmarks to the solution of problems

Three years after ‘Le Sens pratique’, when in his lecture on codification he turns to formalization and logical form, Bourdieu again does not formulate theoretically either that the operations in a practical state have their logical form, or the obvious consequence that this form – being a form of living thinking, being in a practical state – is in its very essence implicit and is only made explicit by the logic of logicians.¹³ Moreover, the theory of codification (and hence of formalization) which he proposes – in a dialog in absentia with Weber – applies also to law, and grammar, and mathematics, and not only to logic;¹⁴ this is why he accuses logicians, linguists, lawyers, and even ‘the ethnologists inclined to juridism’ (Bourdieu 1987: 95) of something which I would designate as fetishism of codified form. Bourdieu returns from a new perspective to the problem of transformation: there is here a ‘change of ontological status which is done in the transition from the linguistic schemes, mastered in a practical state, to a certain code, a certain grammar, through a work of codification, which is a juridical work’ (Bourdieu 1987: 98). This is why ‘formalization, understood in the sense of logic or mathematics as well as in the legal sense, is something that allows the transition from a logic immersed in the particular case to a logic independent of the particular case’ (Bourdieu 1987: 102); this is why it ‘provides the calculability and predictability beyond individual variations and temporary fluctuations’ (Bourdieu 1987: 102); this is why in law, and logic, and mathematics one needs to establish ‘formal, general laws based on general explicit principles and expressed so as to provide answers valid for all cases and for everybody (for every x)’ (Bourdieu 1987: 102).¹⁵ Thus: as far as he theorizes on form, Bourdieu has in mind the fetishicized codified form, and as far as he has in mind the form in a practical state, he does not theorize on it.

Thinking through Bourdieu, I can summarize the above as follows: a) operations in practical state are operations of bestowing form, i.e. of turning logical form from a modus operandi into an opus operatum; b) formalization – as an operation in the theoretical practice of the professional logician – is an extraction of the so objectivated logical form and its codification (which also means ‘re-objectivation’) into logical codes like Aristotle’s ‘Analytics’, like ‘Principia Mathematica’ of Russell and Whitehead,¹⁶ or like a textbook of logic; c) once codified, logical form begins to exert its symbolic power and – becoming incorporated again and normalizing the habitus,¹⁷ turning from an opus operatum into a modus operandi – to force us to apply the code¹⁸ through formal operations (of which it is still hard to say that they are isomorphous to the original operations in a practical state). Thus, when he states that ‘the force of the form, the vis formae of which spoke the Ancients, is a purely symbolic force which allows the form to be exerted fully, in doing so as not to be recognized as a force and in striving to be recognized, approved, accepted, through the fact that it presents itself under the appearance of universality – of reason or of morals’ (Bourdieu 1987: 103), Bourdieu has in mind the codified logical form and not the one which is in a practical state.

But, I would like to add, this force of the form (through the normalization of the habitus, achieved in its exercise), in forcing us to apply the code in practice – precisely because of the appearance of universality, i.e. the absence of universal access to the universal – is a social condition of possibility both of the ontological complicity between habituses and fields in modern societies and of the disruptions in this complicity. Ontological complicity in those who are heirs of the practical logic from which ‘logical codes’ were extracted and who have ‘hereditary logical capitals’; and disruptions in this complicity in those to whom logical codification has been socially imposed (and whose practical logics – even after the normalization of their habituses – sound like ‘logical dialects’). Thus, in the modern and modernizing societies – I must generalize very simplistically – there are agents who calculate and predict but there also those who are, rather, calculable and predictable and who pay the price for the Weberian ‘universal rationalization of life’. If I were not simplifying, the problem no doubt would come out far more difficult: normalization procedures in the modern school are always oriented to the agent’s acquiring some degree of ontological complicity with the field in which he is an agent.¹⁹ This is why the initial opposition is between the ontological complicity that goes with easiness, i.e. the distinctive one,²⁰ and the compulsory, I would even say coercive, ontological complicity. For those for whom it is compulsory, who think in a logical dialect, who cannot calculate and predict the unstable conjunctures of the field in which they are agents, this complicity is far more labile, i.e. pregnant with disruptions. For those for whom it goes with easiness, it is more stable, but they are not primarily safe from bankruptcy, i.e. they only have greater chances to avoid disruptions.²¹

To digress: someone could – in following Bourdieu’s idea of a book on a theory of fields that ‘could be called “multiplicity of worlds’” and ‘end by a meditation on the multiplicity of logics’ (Bourdieu 1987: 32) – accuse me that here, despite my previous insistence, I may lose precisely the incommensurability between the logics of the political, juridical economic etc. practices. This is no doubt correct, but I think that such a temporary simplification need not worry us, since to the degree to which the practical logics of the political, legal, economic etc. fields are – as Weber would say – formally rationalized, they are isomorphic, i.e. commensurable: they are always practical logics, I will say it again, which provide the ‘calculability and predictability beyond individual variations and temporary fluctuations’ (Bourdieu 1987: 102).²²

Here I can already pas from those who apply the code to the modern codifiers.²³ The problem was: how is the ontological complicity possible of the habitus of the modern charismatic, of the prophet of formal rationalization, of the magician of disenchantment, with that formal-rational code which he has not yet created? I.e.: how is that successful act of social magic possible in which a law, based on calculability and predictability, emerges (cf. Bourdieu 1982: 20-21)? First of all, here we must turn to Bourdieu’s critique toward Austin and toward what I called the performative logic of the acts of naming as a logic of heterodox or heretic discourse (a problem that he does not at all think through the theory of practical logic²⁴). Bourdieu says: ‘The efficiency of heretic discourse does not reside in the magic of force immanent to language, as Austin’s ‘illocutionary force’ or in the person of its author like Weber’s ‘charisma’ […], but, rather, in the dialectic between authorization and authorized language’ Bourdieu 1982: 152) ; and adds that this dialectic effect can be achieved in the labour of enunciation, as well as in ‘the labour of dramatization, particularly visible in exemplary prophecy, which alone is capable of destroying the self-evident truths of the doxa, and in the transgression which is indispensable in order to name the unnameable’ (Bourdieu 1982: 152). Where, then, does the ontological complicity come from between the prophet and what he prophesizes? And here Bourdieu – maybe without being aware – simultaneously brings in a quite unexpected form the problem of truth back into Austin’s theory of infelicities in perormative acts, resurrects Plato’s theory of true names from Cratylus, and interprets, in a Heideggerian manner, truth as revelation: ‘Symbolic power is the power to do things with words. But only if it is true, i.e. adequate to things, the description makes the things. In this sense, symbolic power is the power of consecration and of revelation, the power to consecrate and reveal things which already exist’ (Bourdieu 1987: 164).

Thus, to give true names to the unnameable in fact means to be in an ontological complicity with it; only that this is a very peculiar ontological complicity – one in which it is not the incorporated state of history, the habitus, that is a function of its objectivized state, of the habitat, but just the opposite – one in which not the dispositions are functions of the positions in the field, but just the opposite – one in which no longer ‘the dead seizes the living’ but the living takes a grip of the dead (cf. Bourdieu 1980b). Actually, as early as in his article problematizing ontological complicity, Bourdieu is clearly aware that there are positions whose limits are not pre-given but which ‘reside paradoxically in the freedom which they leave to their occupants’ to introduce into these positions ‘completely freely their limits, […] the incorporated necessity which is constitutive to their habituses’ (Bourdieu 1980b: 9). Here, the ontological complicity is no longer between the king and his court, the boss and his enterprise or the bishop and his diocese (cf. Bourdieu 1980b: 6), but between Galileo and the cardinals crowded around his telescope, Napoleon and his empire, Beethoven and the concert halls, or Pasteur and France which is not yet pasteurized.²⁵ Or, said otherwise, in the heretic discourse the ontological complicity is not pre-given, the heresiarch gives the name but between his gift and the counter-gift – the recognition that recognizes the name as true – there is a time interval which bears insecurity (cf. Bourdieu 1994: 179).²⁶ This is why Weber says that the charisma is labile and that it must be confirmed and recognized and that otherwise the charismatic will lose it and ‘feel abandoned by his God like Jesus on the cross’. Therefore, the authorization of authorized language – when it does happen – always happens post factum.

I can already return to the modern codifiers, to the prophets of reason, to the magicians of disenchantment, and raise the question: who are they and what does their magic consist in – the logicians, grammarians and lawyers who, on their dusty writing desks, codify logic grammar and law? Here I must go back to the distinction that I made between: a) operations of bestowing form (formal rational, although not yet extracted in a code), of turning logical, legal etc. forms from modus operandi into opus operatum, i.e. of practical formalization, from b) formalization – as it is conceived in ‘the logic of logicians’ – as an operation of extraction of the form so objectivized into a code which then will be applied. Following this distinction, I can say: the real modern codifiers – the magicians of disenchantment, the prophets of reason – are not those who extract the formal-rational codes but those who give to the agents in the fields of the modern differentiated societies new formal-rational codes in a practical state and by that codify the uncodifiable, creating the social conditions of possibility of what we usually call codification. But they must be true codes of the uncodifiable, in order to be in ontological complicity with it. I can summarize very laconically: the practical logic of formal rationalization cannot itself be formally rational.²⁷

REFERENCES:

Bourdieu, P. 1976. Le Sens pratique. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1.

Bourdieu, P. 1980a. Le Sens pratique. Paris, Les Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, P. 1980b. Le mort saisit le vif. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 32/33.

Bourdieu, P. 1982. Ce que parler veut dire: l’ economie des echanges linguistiques. Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard.

Bourdieu, P. 1986. La force di droit. Elements pour une sociologie du champ juridique. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 64.

Bourdieu, P. 1987. Choses dites. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Bourdieu, P. 1994. Raisons pratiques. Sur la theorie de l’action. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Calhoun, C. 1995. Critical Social Theory. Culture, History and the Challenge of History. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell.

Coulter, J. 1991. Logic: Ethnomethodology and the Logic of Language. In: Button, G. (ed.). Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press.

Deyanov, D. 2003. Wittgenstein and Bourdieu: Language Games and Practical Logic. In: Wittgensteins ‘Werkzeugkasten’. Wienna: BFIO.

Koev, K. 2003. Elementary Forms of Everyday Life (in Bulgarian; with a summary in English). Sofia: Prosveta.

Martuccelli, D. 1999. Sociologies de la modernite. Paris: Gallimard.

Petkov, T. 1998. Communicative Acts: Austin, Bourdieu and Practical Logic. In: Mitev, P.-E. (ed.). The Bulgarian Transition: Chalendges and Cognition. Sofia: Bulgarian Sociological Association.

Wacquant, L. 1996. Reading Bourdieu’s “Capital”. In: International Journal of Conteporary Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 2.

Wacquant, L. 1999. The Double-edged Sword of Reason. The Scholar’s Predicament and the Sociologist’s Mission. In: European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 2, No. 1.

Weber, M. 1985. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebek).