Bourdieu’s ‘Post-structuralist’ Critique

Pierre Bourdieu, on the other hand, has criticised that the operation of necessary logic as structural principle in Levi-Strauss’ works implies that this logic exists a priori and universally—that this logic would be ‘objec­tive’, that is, outside the observer (Bourdieu 2004, 62).

Bourdieu hence delves into that part of Saussure’s linguistics which Levi-Strauss has left aside, namely the question of by which social pro­cesses a sound-image becomes connected to a concept. Bourdieu would argue that the necessary connection Levi-Strauss asserts between mother love and patricide is only conceivable on the grounds of a social process that assigns specific social roles to individuals. The concept ‘mother’ only gains meaning through the social hierarchy, established in processes of struggle and domination, that assigns women a specific place in society as mothers. The myth is a discursive practice that consolidates such mean­ing; it is, hence, part of the process of constructing the social structure in which ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’ exist, and in which they compete for their son’s and for the mother’s love.

In Jackson’s terms, Bourdieu’s critique is formulated from a mind­world monist and reflexivist point of view. Jackson’s distinction between mind-world monist views, which assume that observers and their concepts and categories are part of the same world they are observing, and the dualist mind-world view that assumes that observers can take an ‘objec­tive’ outsider position, is helpful to refute the first criticism made against Levi-Strauss’ structuralism. As Jackson argues, the dualist mind-world view assumes that any statement about the ‘real’ world can be verified or falsified against ‘real’ facts. Underlying structures are, hence, not real for they cannot be tested or falsified.

Yet, Jackson continues, the claim that it would be possible to ascertain objective principles of inquiry is shallow. Pushing the argument of the last foundational principle of analysis to its logical end, one has to admit that whatever principle is used, it is ideational, culturally, and socially deter­mined. An objectifying view on an analytical object simply excludes, by epistemological fiat, the question of its social, cultural, and ideational ori­gins, but it does not answer it (Jackson 2011, 14). This approach chokes once it has to explain how we, the audience of a discourse, can be sure that we understand what the words uttered mean beyond their purely functional provision of data and information.

Practically, such a claim would require the observer to analyse all myths available on earth and to human knowledge in order to induce their regu­larities and derive the ordering principles. Obviously, this is impossible. And yet it is less the practical impossibility of objectively accounting for every potential and possible myth that is decisive for the refutation of the objectivity claim, although the impracticalities involved are already a strong indicator of how weak the objectivity claim is.

Bourdieu’s criticism of structuralism takes the danger of arbitrariness in the interpretation of structures seriously but gives a very different answer. In order to avoid this risk, the inquiry needs to undertake a foundational analysis of the social structures that enabled the paradigmatic structure of a myth, or more generally an authoritative narration. Neglecting the social construction of the principled logic applied to structuralist analysis and ignoring how narratives are acted out in practice risk not only stepping out of the mind-world monist perspective but also reproducing cliches and prejudice rather than offering tools of analysis. It is imperative to include the ‘self’ in the analysis that produces, reproduces, and uses interpretive logic.

Bourdieu’s critique answers the question of how the analytical princi­ples can be justified by displacing the question from the linguistic analysis to a social analysis of the knowledge structures that underfeed a discourse, or a myth in this case. He argues that the categories used in a discourse, including a myth, can be analysed by examining the actors who repro­duce authoritatively these categories and make them widely acceptable.

More specifically, when we talk about categories that inform political decisions, we need to be aware that their validity stems only from the authority with which the social distinctions expressed in these categories are validated:

Struggle is hence at the core of the construction of the (social, ethnic, sexual etc.) class: there is no group which is not simultaneously the site of struggle over the legitimate principle that should be imposed for the constructing of this kind of group, and there is no way to attribute qualities, whether sex or age, education or wealth, which will not serve as divisive grounds and for proper political struggles (Bourdieu 1982, 153, my translation).

Bourdieu retains structuralism as method, yet with an important change to its application. While Levi-Strauss focussed on the comparison of nar­rations and the structural analysis of these, Bourdieu took the expression ‘going into the field’ more literally and took into account how people lived the rites, taboos, rules, and myths that ordered their lives. In the foreword of ‘Ze sens pratique¹, Bourdieu describes how he came to shift his scrutiny from discourses to practices (Bourdieu 1980). Seeking the perfect struc­tural balance in his observations of the rural Kabyl society of the 1950s, Bourdieu struggled to make sense of widely differing ways individuals lived the rituals, rules, norms, and codes of their community. The practices were often in contradiction with the prescriptions that structural analy­sis of the community’s narratives provided. For example, the structural analysis of kinship would assign a particularly important place to the elder fatherly brother of a family; in practice, it might well be that the family had no contact whatsoever with the fatherly uncle but, on the contrary, a very close and good contact with the mother’s younger brother.

Once one treats language as autonomous object, one accepts the radical sep­aration Saussure operated between internal and external linguistics, between the sciences of language and the sciences of the social uses of language; once one adheres to this separation, one is doomed to seek the power of words in words themselves, there where it is not to be found (Bourdieu 1982, 103, my translation).

Power can only be found in social structures. For the analysis of social structures, however, Bourdieu retained the principle of a structural analy­sis based on antagonistic relationships between elements. As he explains himself, the title of his major work ‘La Distinction¹ plays on the double meaning of the social practice of distinction and the structuralist principle of analysing differentials (Eribon and Collin 1988). The aim of Bourdieu’s analysis is, indeed, very different from Levi-Strauss’ objective. Levi-Strauss seeks the principles of structuration for systems of symbols, which can be expressed in practices (rituals) as well as words; Bourdieu seeks the principles of structuration for social systems of material and symbolic dif­ferentiation, and most notably of systems of social power.