I think, it's my biggest problem with her works. As Bourdieu wrote something about museums and musem-going I was aware about his ideas before I read my first Ernaux's book. And I just can't see there (in the reality of her texts, or in my perception of this reality of texts) something really Bourdieusian.
Weird. To me she is
drenched in Bourdieu!
From my French Quarto edition of her selected works, published in Le Monde on Bourdieu's death in 2002 (dashed-off translation; please excuse the frightful gallicisms).
Grief
The way in which the death of Pierre Bourdieu was announced and commented upon in the media, on January 24, at midday, has been instructive. A couple of minutes at the end of the telecast, insistance — as if it were this incongrous conjoining, unthinkable now, of these two words — on the "engaged intellectual". Above all, the
tone of the journalists was very revealing: of distant respect, of removed and stereotyped hommage. Evidently, beyond the resentment they may have felt towards the man who had denounced the rules of the media game, Pierre Bourdieu was not one of their own. And the gap seemed immense between the clichèd recitals and the grief that, at the same time, invaded thousands of people, researchers and students, but also men and women from everywhere, for whom the discovery of the works of Pierre Bourdieu was a pivotal moment in their perception of the world and in their lives.
To read in the 70s
Les Héritiers, La Reproduction, later
La Distinction, was — still is — to feel a violent ontological shock. I'm using the word ontological on purpose: that which one thought was is no longer the same, the vision one had of one's self and others in society rips apart, one's place, one's tastes, nothing is natural any more, nothing just goes without saying in the functioning of the things that seem the most ordinary in one's life. And if one is issued from the socially dominated classes, the intellectual agreement one finds with the rigorous analysis of Bourdieu is is overlaid with a feeling of
lived obviousness, of the veracity of theory in some way validated by experience: one cannot, for example, deny the reality of symbolic violence when one, and one's kin, have been subjected to it.
I have sometimes compared the effect of my first reading of Bourdieu to that of the
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, 15 years before: the irruption of an irreversible awareness, here on the condition of women, there on the structure of the social world. A painful irruption, but followed by a particular joy and strength, a feeling of deliverance and of shattered solitude. And it's still sad and mysterious to me that Bourdieu's work, synonymous for me with liberation and "reasons to act" in the world, could have been perceived as submission to social determisms. It has always seemed to me on the contrary that, bringing to light the hidden mechanisms of social reproduction, by rendering objective the beliefs and processes of domination interiorised by individuals without them knowing, Bourdieu's critical sociology defatalises existence. By analysing the conditions of production of literary and artistic works, the battlefields from which they emerge, Bourdieu is not destroying art, not reducing it in any way, he is simply desacralising it, he remakes it into something better than a religion, a complex human activity. And Bourdieu's texts have been to me an encouragement to persevere in my writing venture, to speak, among other things, that which is socially suppressed.
The refusal opposed, sometimes with extreme violence, to Bourdieu's sociology, stems, it seems to me, from his method and the language to which it is bound. Coming from philosophy, Bourdieu broke with the abstract manipulation of concepts which founds it — the beautiful, the good, freedom, society — and gave them concretely, scientifically studied content. He unveiled what meant
in reality the beautiful when one is a farmer or a professor, freedom if one lives in the cité des Trois Mille [poor & predominantly PoC French suburb], explained why individuals exclude themselves from that which, murkily, excludes them anyway. Like in philosophy and, in the best of cases, literature, it is always and again about the human condition, but not one man in general, individuals as they are inscribed in the social world. And if a discourse that is airily above things, abstract, or prophetic, bothers no one, it is not the same when one tells the overwhelming percentage of children issued from intellectually or economically dominant milieux in the prestigious schools, when one reveals in a rigorous way the strategies of power, here and now both in the universities (
Homo Academicus) and in the media. A question of language, substituting, for example, "milieux, people, modest means", and "upper classes" with "dominated" and "dominating", that changes everything: instead of the euphemising and quasi-natural expression of hierarchies, it makes the objective reality of social relations apparent. Bourdieu's work, as painstaking as Pascal's in destroying appearances, in revealing the game, the illusion, the social imaginary, could only encounter resistance in so far as it contains the ferment of subversion, leads to changing the world, the misery of which is shown in the work, his best-known, that he oversaw with his research team [viz.,
La Misère du monde].
If, with Sartre's death, I may have had the feeling that something was over, integrated, that his ideas would be active no longer, that he was tipping into History, I do not feel the same with Pierre Bourdieu. If we are so many to feel grief at his loss — I dare, which I rarely do, to say "we", because of the fraternal wave that spread spontaneously on the announcement of his death — we are also many who believe that the influence of his discoveries, his concepts and his works will not stop its spread. As it was the case for Rousseau, of whom someone I can't remember said reprovingly, in his time, that his writing made the poor man proud.
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