Introduction : Bourdieu and the literary field

Pierre Bourdieu’s range as a thinker was extremely wide, and it would be misleading to present him primarily as a literary theorist. Trained as a philosopher, he became the leading French sociologist of his generation, and brought under the spotlight of his ‘critical sociology’ a whole series of institutional and discursive universes (education, art, linguistics, public administration, politics, philosophy, journalism, economics and others). Far from representing an intellectual dispersal, these manifold objects of enquiry allowed him to develop and refine a comprehensive theory of social process and power-relations based on distinctive concepts such as ‘field’, ‘habitus’, variously conceived notions of ‘capital’, and ‘illusio’ (all these concepts and others will be explicated and assessed in this issue). Yet Bourdieu’s analyses were scarcely ever received as neutral descriptions within the fields which he analysed. Bourdieu’s abiding agenda was to show how the discursive presuppositions and institutional logics at work in such fields carried but also masked certain social logics that a ‘critical sociology’ could disclose. Coupled with the inveterately combative drive seldom absent from Bourdieu’s objectifying analyses—and even setting aside the misprisions to which an external analyst is inevitably subject—this helps explain the resistance which his work recurrently provoked. In this respect, Bourdieu’s forays into the world of literary studies and his reception therein can be seen as part of a wider pattern

The habitus and the critique of the present. A Wittgensteinian reading of Bourdieu’s social theory

I tackle some major criticisms addressed to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus by foregrounding its affinities with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of rule-following. To this end, I first clarify the character of the habitus as a theoretical device, and then elucidate what features of Wittgenstein’s analysis Bourdieu found of interest from a methodological viewpoint. To vindicate this reading, I contend that Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following was meant to unearth the internal connection between rules and the performative activities whereby rules are brought into life. By portraying rules as tools that allow agents to stabilize and renegotiate practices, I illustrate the active role social agents play in the production of shared accounts of practices. I conclude by showing that, if viewed through this prism, the habitus proves to be meant to provide guidance on how social theory helps historicize and denaturalize the social world

Bourdieusian Reflections on Language: Unavoidable Conditions of the Real Speech Situation

The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of language. Although he has dedicated a significant part of his work to the study of language and even though his analysis of language has been extensively discussed in the literature, almost no attention has been paid to the factthat Bourdieu’s account of language is based on a number of ontological presuppositions, that is, on a set of universal assumptions about the very nature of language. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by offering a detailed overview of 10 key features which, from a Bourdieusian point of view, can be regarded as inherent in language. On the basis of this enquiry,the study seeks todemonstrate that——contraryto commonbelief——there is not only a Bourdieusian sociology of language but also a Bourdieusian philosophy of language, which provides a useful theoretical framework for examining the unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on the flaws and limitations of Bourdieu’s approach to language