Social Semiotics: To Cite This Article: Tony Schirato & Jen Webb (2002) Bourdieu's Notion of Reflexive Knowledge

This article was downloaded by: [Universidad de Sevilla]
On: 03 December 2014, At: 01:09

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Social Semiotics
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20
Bourdieu's Notion of Reflexive

Knowledge
Tony Schirato & Jen Webb
Published online: 25 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Tony Schirato & Jen Webb (2002) Bourdieu's Notion of Reflexive Knowledge,
Social Semiotics, 12:3, 255-268, DOI: 10.1080/10350330216373
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330216373
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Social Semiotics, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2002
Bourdieu’s Notion of Reflexive Knowledge

TONY SCHIRATO AND JEN WEBB
This article addresses Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the principal logics under which human
beings negotiate fields and engage in practice: either practical or reflexive knowledge.
Bourdieu argues that reflexivity is capable of being taught and learned, and consciously
Downloaded by [Universidad de Sevilla] at 01:09 03 December 2014
incorporated into different levels of praxis. We describe and analyse the paths Bourdieu
takes in arriving at this notion via both the usual suspects associated with his body of theory
(field, habitus, illusio, capital) and the theoretical specificities associated with reflexive
knowledge—most importantly, the distinction made between science, practical reason and
the ‘scholastic point of view’. Drawing particularly on his recent (translated) works
Weight of the World and Pascalian Meditations, we extend his discussion of agency as
it relates to habitus, the objectivities engendered by fields, and the ‘game’ of social
intercourse.
There are, for Bourdieu, two principal logics under which human beings negotiate
fields and engage in practice: that is through the application, variously, of practical
or reflexive knowledge. Practical knowledge (le sens pratique) refers to a ‘feel for the
game’, while reflexivity—or reflexive knowledge—is an extension and development
of this practical sense away from automatic or habituated practice to a more aware
and evaluative relation to oneself and one’s contexts. Where the practical sense
develops as a consequence of experience and practice (in the sense of repetition),
Bourdieu argues that reflexivity is capable of being taught and learned, and con-
sciously incorporated into different levels of praxis. Practical and reflexive knowl-
edge are terms familiar to readers of his work; we intend to contextualise and
evaluate them further with a particular focus on his notion of reflexivity in a critical
discussion of its strengths and limitations. We describe and analyse the paths
Bourdieu takes in arriving at this notion via both the usual suspects associated with
his body of theory (field, habitus, illusio, capital) and the theoretical specificities
associated with reflexive knowledge—most importantly, the distinction made be-
tween science, practical reason and the ‘scholastic point of view’.
We start, though, as does Bourdieu, from an understanding of human agency,
since whether we are considering reflexive or practical knowledge, human beings are
the active agents. Bourdieu’s understanding of agency is that it takes place in, is
produced in, and is inextricably bound up with, the world. He specifically rejects the
idea of a knowing, transcendental consciousness (along the lines of the Cartesian
cogito) somehow able to free itself from its history, social trajectories, and circum-
stances of thought. All activity and knowledge—this includes both disinterested
ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/02/030255-14  2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1035033022000082317
256 T. Schirato and J. Webb
scientific or scholarly work and the most tacit (and therefore virtually unconscious)
physical movements or personal dispositions—are always informed by a relationship
between the agents’ history and how this history has been incorporated, on the one
hand, and their context or circumstances (both in a general sense and ‘of the
moment’), on the other. In other words, agency is always the result of a coming
together of the habitus and the specific cultural fields and contexts in which agents
‘find themselves’, in both senses of the expression.
If this sounds too restrictive an explanation of human activity, agency without
agency in a sense, then it should be pointed out that for Bourdieu the habitus is
extraordinarily productive and adaptive. He defines the habitus as ‘the durably
installed generative principle of regulated improvisations … [that produces] prac-
tices’ (Bourdieu 1991: 78), but he emphasises that though the habitus is durable,
circumstances and contexts are not necessarily receptive to, or in tune with, it. The
inevitable misfit between habitus and field constitutes the basis of the various
negotiations and improvisations that subjects are forced into if they are to function
effectively within or across different fields. Such negotiations and improvisations are
the product of two different forms of understanding, and serve to bring about
change in the habitus itself by sidestepping its ‘automatic’ responses in the interests
of a more competent navigation of a particular context. These understandings
operate through one of two epistemological types that determine and explicate the
extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural
fields: practical and reflexive knowledge.
The first, practical sense or the logic of practice, is the ability to comprehend and
negotiate cultural fields which Bourdieu, in this regard, refers to as ‘games’, in the
sense that there is always a game being played out between agents and the always
changing objectivities of cultural fields. Knowledge of how to play this game
encompasses literacy with respect to the various discourses, genres, capital, written
and unwritten rules, values and imperatives that inform and determine agents’
practices, and that are themselves continuously being transformed by those agents
and their practices. Such knowledge allows agents to make sense of what is
happening around them and to make decisions as to how the game should be
played—in other words, to determine which practices, discourses, moves or forms of
capital are appropriate to the moment. This practical reason doesn’t displace or
negate the influence of the habitus, but it does allow the habitus to be ‘put on hold’,
to a certain extent, so that subjects can negotiate fields and contexts.
The point that Bourdieu makes is that while the habitus is incorporated into the
subject (is constitutive, in fact, of the subject) as a set of values and bodily
dispositions derived from that subject’s cultural trajectory, the process by which an
agent is incorporated into a cultural field (taking on its world view(s), its values,
logics and activities) necessarily requires an adjustment to its conditions. It hence
constitutes part of the ongoing (de/re)formation of the habitus. Such incorporation
demands that the agent comes to accept the game of the field on its own terms,
relatively unquestioningly, a condition Bourdieu designates as illusio, or ‘the fact of
being caught up in and by the game, of believing … that playing is worth the effort’
(1998: 76).
Bourdieu’s Notion of Reflexive Knowledge 257
This is one of the most obvious manifestations of both the productive power of the
habitus (in epistemological terms), and the limits it places on a subject’s freedom of
thought and action. For Bourdieu, the field is the subject, to a certain extent. He
writes, ‘I am in the world because the world encompasses me’ (2000: 135), in
reference to a process that is both restrictive and reproductive, a process in which
the world is rendered comprehensible because it has impressed itself on us. Such
Foucaldian disciplining of body and mind by the (physical and social) world is,
however, a two-way process with an epistemological consequence. Though ‘the
world encompasses me’:
I, as a thing for which there are things, comprehend this world. And I do
so … because it encompasses me and comprehends me; it is through this
material inclusion—often unnoticed and repressed—and what follows from
it, the incorporation of social structures in the form of dispositional

structures … that I acquire a practical knowledge and control of the en-
compassing space. (2000: 130)
Such ‘practical knowledge’, which is at least potentially the consequence of our
immersion in the world (and of our commitment to the illusio of specific cultural
fields and their institutionalised point of view), is manifested as a non-reflexive form
of literacy which Bourdieu compares to a sportsperson’s ‘feel for the game’
(Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 81). Any good players in a particular sport will
understand the rules that define the game, and their relation to the moment, and
understand these not just in theoretical terms, but as part of the habitus. It is a
knowledge held as much in the body as in the conscious mind. The way in which
literacy of the game translates into practical activity can be seen in the fact (pointed
out so often by sports journalists) that champions always know where things are, and
anticipate where to be on the playing field. This is usually explained in terms of
natural (and therefore, more or less inexplicable) properties—such as recourse to the
category of genius, or a non-reflexive ‘pure’ (natural) skill—but such an explanation
fails to take into account that every game is effectively a (tacit) semiotic exercise,
based on practical knowledge.
When journalists, for instance, note with incredulity that great cricket batsmen
appear to be getting into position to play a shot before the ball is bowled, they run
into an apparent contradiction whereby great champions supposedly embody the
truth, principles and dictums of sport (such as, ‘play each ball on its merits’), and
yet their practices appear to contradict those principles; Don Bradman, for instance,
often made his mind up about which shot to play before bowlers released the ball.
What journalists fail to comprehend is that a Bradman will have read the signs long
before the ball is released. The semiotics of a bowler’s body during the run to the
crease, patterns of deliveries, the history of a bowler’s response to specific circum-
stances, the state of the game at the moment: all these signs are available to the
literate cricketer because s/he has incorporated the (long- and short-term, specific
and general) history of the game. The notion that great players have more time than
ordinary players is essentially true, but the time that is gained is before anything
happens, or at least before it happens to the relatively illiterate eye.
Practical knowledge of this sort is, for Bourdieu, largely unreflexive. The agent/
player incorporates the history of the game/cultural field into her or his self, but that
incorporation functions, simultaneously, as a delimitation. The player knows what
the game or the field knows, but can’t know what is foreclosed within the institution-
alised points of view. The ‘enchanted’ relation to the game, or illusio, not only
(re)produces knowledge as the ‘vision and division’ of the world; it also produces a
(tacit) self-interested ignorance or illiteracy:
Once one has accepted the viewpoint that is constitutive of a field, one can
no longer take an external viewpoint on it. The ‘nomos’, a ‘thesis’ which,
because it is never put forward as such, cannot be contradicted, has no
antithesis. As a legitimate principle of division which can be applied to all
the fundamental aspects of experience, defining the thinkable and the
unthinkable, the prescribed and the proscribed, it must remain unthought.

Being the matrix of all the pertinent questions, it cannot produce the
questions that call it into question. (Bourdieu 2000: 97)
In order to overcome this enchantment/ignorance, the relation to a field that makes
its conditions unquestionable, we must turn to Bourdieu’s second epistemological
type—reflexive knowledge—which involves the development of a reflexive relation to
the habitus, to demands and influences exerted by cultural fields, and to one’s own
practices within those fields.
In referencing the notion of reflexive knowledge, Bourdieu is drawing on a
genealogy that begins with the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant’s writings on
‘reflective judgement’, is developed by philosophers such as Spinoza and Wittgen-
stein, and is extended by Foucault, before being variously applied in the writings of
cultural, psychoanalytical and risk society theorists. Kant’s initiation of the term lays
down the definitional frameworks; in The Critique of Judgement (§.IV) he describes
the difference between judgement per se and its reflective form, writing that:
Judgement in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained
under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given,
then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determi-
nant. … If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be
found for it, then the judgement is simply reflective. (1973: 18)
That is to say, reflective judgement is what enables us to make sense of the
unknown, the unexpected, and from the application of this judgement, learn more
about the world. The acquisition of such knowledge is important in Kant’s thesis—
as he writes in the same section, reflective judgement is ‘compelled to ascend from
the particular in nature to the universal’, and thus it is a starting point for what
Foucault sees as the heart of the Enlightenment project: critical reflection.
‘Thought’, Foucault writes, ‘is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by
which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as
a problem’ (1997: xxxv). Though Foucault had reservations about the politics that
had been practised in the name of the Enlightenment, he was of the opinion that it
provided something that was extremely useful—the notion of critique, an investiga-
tion into what we are, and what else we might be. In other words, what Foucault
took from Kant and the Enlightenment was ‘an attitude, an ethos … in which the
critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the
limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’
(Foucault 1997: 319).
For risk society theorists such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, this same
reflective critique produces a single attitude that is the characteristic of modernity—
the tendency to make rational/conscious choices. This is not, for Giddens, some-
thing we do consistently. Most of the time, he argues, we do not reflect consciously
on our actions and choices because we need not or cannot: our agency incorporates
‘all the things that we know as social actors, and must know, to make social life
happen, but to which we cannot necessarily give discursive form’ (Giddens 1984:
59)—that is, something like Bourdieu’s practical knowledge, or Michael Polanyi’s

tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1983). Discursive consciousness, or discursive knowl-
edge—which is loosely akin to Bourdieu’s reflexive knowledge—is something we
apply only when our practical or tacit knowledge of the world is insufficient. It is
through this ability, Giddens argues, that we moderns make history rather than
simply being acted upon by it. We are reflexive agents, in this perspective, because
we can provide rational justification for our actions and choices. And the focus of
this notion of discursive reflexivity is the production of what Giddens calls ‘clever
people’, those fitted to meet the needs of global, neo-liberal capitalism, developing
the skills (reflexive attitudes and technical abilities) they need ‘to engage with the
wider world [and] to survive in it’ (1994: 7).
This is a long way from the notion Bourdieu has developed, and one to which
Slavoj Žižek (1999) applies a strong critique. He argues that this version of
reflexivity doesn’t provide the freedom to craft oneself as a work of art (Foucault’s
version of the point of reflexivity) or as an ethical being (Benedict de Spinoza’s
version). Rather, Žižek writes, the risk society theory of reflexivity sees everything
simply rendered open to personal decisions, so that: ‘Things which once seemed
self-evident—how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction,
how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself—have now been “colonised”
by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on’
(Žižek 1999). And this, he writes, produces a society characterised by chaos and
self-justification, one where skinheads can explain in sociological or psychoanalytical
terms their tendency to choose hatred and violence (under the ‘know thyself’ logic),
without feeling any compulsion to change their practice.
Bourdieu’s notion of reflexivity is not this risk society (or postmodern society)
approach that sees the practice as concerned with how individuals make decisions
about who to date, what to eat or what it means to be ‘moral’. He draws, rather, on
a directly Enlightenment (Kantian) attitude that focuses on research and critique,
rejects essentialising theories, and values the taking up of a specifically ‘historicising’
perspective when it comes to analysing claims to, and notions of, truth and
knowledge. But for Bourdieu, the issue of reflexivity is not simply a scholastic or
philosophical question abstracted from the world; rather, it is a problem that informs
his own practices as a sociologist and academic, and can be understood as the set of
practices and dispositions which allow thought space outside ‘the limitations of
thought’. This is not a straightforward approach to research; David Swartz questions

whether a genuinely reflexive attitude is possible in any social research, writing that:
Since Bourdieu argues that his theory of symbolic power and violence
applies to all forms of symbolic representation, he faces a critical dilemma
in developing a sociological practice designed to expose the hidden forms
of symbolic power: how can one practice a social science—itself a symbolic
enterprise—and yet not reproduce the effects of social distinction Bourdieu
so vigorously denounces? If, as he argues, all symbolic systems—including
science itself—embody power relations, and all practices—including intel-
lectual practices—are interested, how is it possible to construct a social
science that will not be yet another form of symbolic violence? (Swartz
1997: 270)
But reflexivity, for Bourdieu, is one way of confronting this problem directly,
because it is oriented towards the limitations of the habitus. These arise firstly from
our social and cultural origins and categories (generation, class, religion, gender,
ethnicity); then from our position in whatever field(s) we are located (e.g. as
anthropologist, journalist, politician); and finally from what Bourdieu refers to as an
intellectual bias, that is, a tendency for subjects from certain fields to abstract
practices from their contexts, and see them as ideas to be contemplated, rather than
problems to be addressed or solved (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 39).
Interestingly, some critics have taken Bourdieu to task for what they perceive as
his own intellectual bias—an intellectualised overemphasis on the reproductive
dimensions of power within and across everyday life—and as a corollary his inability
to appreciate the extent to which agency is available to, and exercised by, subjects
at what Bourdieu would call the level of practical knowledge. Scott Lash, for
instance, suggests that ‘[t]he primacy of reproduction’ and the ‘pessimism regarding
social transformation’ that pervades Bourdieu’s work ‘inhibits adequate reflexivity in
the sociologist’ (Lash, in Calhoun et al. 1993: 210). Other critics have accused
Bourdieu of confining a capacity for reflexive knowledge to the field of sociology or
the academy. Mitchell Aboulafia argues, for instance, that while Bourdieu ‘raises the
question of the place of reflexivity in daily life’, his ‘rhetorical task is to downplay its
importance’ (Aboulafia, in Shusterman 1999: 160). But, in fact, Bourdieu associates
a disposition towards reflexivity with a variety of fields and groups, including
intellectuals (Bourdieu 1993: 44), literature and the sciences (Bourdieu & Wacquant
1992: 175), history (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 90) and art (Bourdieu & Haacke
1995: 1). Reflexivity is therefore not, for Bourdieu, associated with one privileged
field, but rather is potentially available within any field that disposes its subjects
towards ‘the systematic exploration of the unthought categories of thought which
delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:
40). And the taking up of a reflexive attitude should not be understood as the effect
of some kind of Pauline conversion, nor is it even, strictly speaking, something that
is obtained by the subject; rather, if the field ‘is’ the subject to a large extent, then
any reflexive relation to the doxa and illusio of the field must be a constitutive part
of that field.
The conditions which bring about, or at least dispose participants in a field

towards, reflexivity arise (ironically) from the very same processes—involving the
habitus and illusio—that delimit thought in the first place. Subjects in and of a field
are shaped, constrained and disposed towards thoughts and actions through their
immersion in, and their incorporation of, the procedures, rituals, mechanisms,
capital, explicit and implicit rules, and values of the field. In the fields that Bourdieu
identifies or associates generally with a larger scientific field, the rules, procedures
and capital are (at least theoretically) oriented towards reflexivity; or, as he would
suggest, in the scientific field it is incumbent upon subjects to think and act in a
reflexive manner.
The logic goes something like this: in every field agents compete with one another
for recognition, position and capital. In the scientific field the main means of
achieving these aims is through the production of knowledge. Unlike most other
fields, the scientific field is relatively autonomous, and as a consequence the truth or
validity claims of what is produced as knowledge are subject to peer review. Those
peers, being of the field, are ‘believers’, complicit with regard to the values and
dispositions of science. In science, for instance, evaluation is predicated on agreed
procedures (say, refereeing processes) and means of verification (forms of legiti-
mated analysis, rules for carrying out quantitative and qualitative research). But it is
important to bear in mind that these procedures and principles are not fetishised in
the scientific field: they have no value of themselves, but only with regard to their
being accepted, at any one moment, by the field.
In contrast to this, Bourdieu points out (2000: 113) that while various non-sci-
entific fields (he cites religion and politics) are similarly characterised by a tacit
agreement between subjects as to what constitutes the objective reality of the field,
agents in those fields do not necessarily agree on the principles, procedures and
means of verification. What is unique to the scientific field, Bourdieu writes, is that
competition for the accumulation of capital is predicated upon the production of
knowledge that is disposed to interrogate its own claims to truth and objectivity,
both individually and with regard to the field as a whole. This rationale and
disinterested ‘interestedness’ is only possible, he argues, because the scientific field
is relatively autonomous, and therefore not subject to domination by the fields of
power, politics or business (2000: 111). If this were not the case, then criteria for
success would shift from the production of knowledge acknowledged, sanctioned
and legitimated by peers, to other criteria (such as commercial possibilities, or the
extent to which the work was politically useful) determined both outside the field
and without regard to peer evaluation.
An example of how this process is played out in practice can be seen in Bourdieu’s
reference to the ways in which social scientists are more or less required to turn ‘the
instruments of knowledge that they produce against themselves’ (2000: 121). As we
have seen, Bourdieu defines reflexivity as an interrogation of the three types of
limitations—of social position, of field, and of the scholastic point of view—that are
constitutive of knowledge itself. For instance, I can ask certain questions of people
only because it is ‘self-evident’ (at least to, say, a male anthropologist) that these
questions (say, about cultural rituals, or the genesis of social classificatory systems)
are important; or again, I can only follow up these questions, and turn my research
into knowledge, if I accept, tacitly, that the instruments I use (observation, surveys,
focus groups) are legitimate mechanisms for the production of objectivities. And of
course the field in which I work has to accept and believe with me. But at the same
time the reflexive disposition of the scientific field requires me to incorporate myself
and the positions from which I think and act into the research process; if I don’t,
then others in the field will—to my (intellectual) detriment.
The (social) sciences’ attempts to account for and negotiate their involvement in
the production of knowledge is both demonstrated and articulated in Bourdieu et
al.’s The Weight of the World (1999). Under Bourdieu’s direction, a team of
researchers spent three years interviewing predominantly lower class and/or migrant
men and women in France about the conditions of their everyday lives. The
interviews were then transcribed and written up more or less as a series of short
stories. The main point of the research was to come to, and articulate, an under-
standing of the conditions and factors which produced the ‘pain and misery’ of
everyday life, but Bourdieu was also attempting to communicate ‘the simultaneously
practical and theoretical problems that emerge from the particular interaction
between the interviewer and the person being questioned’ (1999: 607).
The Weight of the World constitutes an attempt to get beyond the problems
associated with positivism, such as accounting for how the genesis and basis
of interviewers’ questions, and the situation of the interview itself (location,
time, differences of understanding), work to construct rather than elicit the
responses of those being interviewed. According to Bourdieu, the care and rigour
evident in the interviewing process allowed the researchers to be more sympathetic
and empathic interviewers; this, along with offering the interviewees an ‘absolutely
exceptional situation for communication, free from the usual constraints
(particularly of time)’ (1999: 614), enabled the interviewees to ‘grasp this situation
as an exceptional opportunity offered to them to testify, to make themselves
heard, to carry their experience over from the private to the public sphere’ (1999:
615).
This transformation of private testimony into public knowledge constitutes an
example of scientific reflexivity, precisely because what was both considered and
included in the textual (re)production of oral testimony was the process of that
reproduction. In other words, The Weight of the World put into circulation narratives
about the everyday lives of underprivileged groups, but a central part of the research
was an attempt to free those narratives from the predispositions, mechanisms,
discourses and points of view of the researchers themselves. The process of scientific
reflexivity hardly stops there; the field itself (sociology specifically, but the social
sciences more generally) is necessarily disposed both to take on board the issues and
problems identified in The Weight of the World, and to subject the book and the
methods employed in it to critique. Even when the field, or at least sections of it, are
completely given over to the reproductive and largely unreflexive tendencies that
Bourdieu associates with what he calls ‘instrumental positivism’, the fact that the
mediation of social knowledge has been placed on the table means that it cannot be
ignored by researchers. More importantly, it becomes—at least potentially—the
focus for future research and for competition among researchers in their quest for
cultural capital.
Such research is potentially available to be taken up by the field because, despite
what Bourdieu writes about the interconnectedness between knowledge and compe-
tition within a field disposing subjects towards reflexivity, in practice this does not
necessarily occur. Bourdieu himself makes this point, via the insertion of what we
might call a ‘Gricean coda’, in Pascalian Meditations (2000), the book where he most
rigorously and strongly posits an almost exclusive connection between reflexivity and
the scientific field. Writing about the ‘universality of strategies of universalization’,
specifically with regard to Grice’s cooperative principle of communication, Bourdieu
makes the following very important observation:
It is no doubt true that logic is embedded in a social relationship of
regulated debate, made possible by reference to common markers or, more

precisely, in a rational exchange based on the adoption of the same point
of view by all participants, which is constitutive of their membership of that
universe and therefore both of the divergences and the convergences that
are expressed there. But this does not mean that the ‘ideal speech situ-
ation’ … establishes itself everywhere and always by its own force. And the
same Grice who set out the ‘cooperative principle’ … observes that it is
constantly flouted … In other words, Grice’s maxim, far from being a
sociological law accounting for the actual behaviour of real speakers really
engaged in a conversation, is in fact a kind of implicit presupposition of all
conversation, a specific variant of the principle of reciprocity, which,
though it is constantly transgressed, can be invoked at any time, as a
reminder of the tacitly accepted rule or an implicit reference to what a
conversation has to be in order to be a real dialogue. (Bourdieu 2000: 122)
The point to be taken from this invoking and explication of Grice’s cooperative
principle is that Bourdieu’s description of the scientific field as a site of the
institutionalising of a reflexive disposition is not meant to function as a description
or explanation of (all) practices within the field; rather, it simply points to what the
field says it is.
We can turn again to the sporting field for an example of the difference between
what a field says it is and how agents in fact operate within it. Soccer players, for
instance, are generally familiar with all the rules of the game, both written and
unwritten. They are also aware of various circumstances that influence or determine
how a referee will enforce the rules, or which rules will be emphasised or ignored:
for instance, a home team is more likely to be awarded penalties, or referees might
have received a directive to stamp out tackles from behind, but to go easy on minor
offences. Bourdieu would agree that players take all these contexts and circum-
stances into account on the field. Players from the home side, knowing that the
referee is being influenced by the home crowd, might be inclined to ‘dive’ (that is,
fall over) in the penalty area at the slightest touch from an opposing player. Players
from the away side would know this, and would go out of their way to avoid any kind
of contact. In other words, a game is going on within the game which is not
reducible to the objective rules of the game, and players have to use their cultural
literacy to negotiate a context which is never officially articulated. The habitus of the
players incorporates these fluctuations (that rules may be codified, but are always
changing) and contradictions (that the game is never what it officially says it is), and
allows the players to respond practically and appropriately.
What remains at issue, however, is the extent to which players can move outside
the habitus. Bourdieu’s point would be that if the referee awarded an unjust penalty
(say, because of crowd pressure), the team that benefited might react in a number
of ways (unabashed joy, subdued celebrations), but they could never react in a way
that was outside the habitus—say, by foregoing the penalty, deliberately kicking the
ball wide of the posts, appealing to the crowd to be fair and equitable in their
barracking, or admonishing the player who had dived. For Bourdieu, the habitus of
the players, strongly informed by a competitive ethos, would render such behaviour
unthinkable. It could be argued, on the other hand, that such behaviour was
inarticulable rather than unthinkable; for instance, the penalty taker could move
beyond the delimitations of the habitus by deliberately missing the penalty without
letting anyone know what was really happening. Bourdieu might reply that this was
simply a case of one aspect of the player’s habitus kicking in to override other
dispositions—the player might be deeply religious, which could override competi-
tiveness. But Bourdieu (or anybody else, for that matter) can never really explicate
practice, a position countenanced by his own statement that resistance ‘takes the
most unexpected forms, to the point of remaining more or less invisible to the
cultivated eye’ (1990: 155).
We can develop an argument—using another football example—to contest
Bourdieu’s assertion regarding the overriding (and, with regard to reflexive practice,
the necessarily delimiting) efficacy of illusio, practical reason and the mechanisms of
cultural fields in producing their subjects. The field of sport is a long way from the
institutionalised reflexivity that Bourdieu attributes to science, not least because as
a well-integrated part of the fields of business and the mass media, it lacks any real
sense of, or claim to, autonomy. And yet just as Bourdieu points out that the claim
of dispositional reflexivity is based on certain Gricean principles that the scientific
field and its subjects need both to acknowledge and perform adherence to, so too
sport has its own principles (such as fair play, commitment to the team, love of the
game) that continue to live a life even after the transformation of sport into big
business. There are two closely related examples of this that occurred in English
football in the 2000–2001 season. In the first instance, in a cup game between
Arsenal and Sheffield United, an Arsenal player was injured, and a Sheffield player
kicked the ball out to stop the game so he could be treated. When the game resumed
an Arsenal player threw the ball back to the opposition, but one of his own team
members intercepted the ball and crossed to another team-mate, who had ‘no
choice’ but to score. At the end of the game the Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger
apologised, and offered Sheffield United a replay, which they accepted. A few
months later in a game involving West Ham, the opposition keeper was badly
injured. A West Ham player crossed the ball to his striker Paolo di Canio who,
instead of heading into the unguarded net, caught the ball and pointed to the
injured player. In both cases the logic of a field dominated by the principles of
business (success, self-interest, competitiveness) was rejected in favour of a set of
residual principles (clustered around the notion of fair play) which were thought to
be more or less extinct.
How does this contribute to the question of the relationship between reflexivity,
practical logic and illusio? What it demonstrates is that no field is ever completely
‘spoken’ by its doxa. Every field (and not just science) is, to some extent, at least
potentially informed by an alternative set of principles on which agents can draw
when disputes arise over what is considered proper or legitimate activity. So while
practical knowledge, as Bourdieu argues, cannot go beyond literacy with regard to
the workings of a particular field, part of the literacy of any agent of that field would
necessarily accommodate the fact that the field was not, and never could be, fully
itself. In other words, while agents are committed to performances that are in
accordance with the doxa and capital of a field, they will also be aware at some level
that this context is contingent and open to negotiation. It could be argued, then, that
the illusio that seems to underwrite the practice of agents in a field refers not so
much to an actuality of consciousness as a performance of the actuality of conscious-
ness. And the fact that a field is always subject to the vicissitudes of both internal
and external pressures means that the literacy Bourdieu identifies in practical
knowledge must be informed, at least potentially, by an awareness of the game that
goes into making the game.
The question to be asked, then, is to what extent the opening up of a gap between
the habitus and everyday vicissitudes, or between the habitus and the objectivities of
social and cultural life (say, values or forms of capital explicitly or implicitly
designated within a cultural field), constitutes the basis for some kind of reflexive
knowledge. There are two basic objections to answering this question with a
straightforward affirmation. Firstly, even though social and cultural realities may
continually outstrip or elude the habitus, it is, as Bourdieu points out, both durable
and possessed of an almost infinite generative capacity. Let us return to our football
examples for a moment: footballers may have acquired, as part of their habitus, a
deep-seated attachment to the principles of football, or more generally ‘sporting’
behaviour. In other words, a ‘true sportsperson’ will adhere, in words, actions and
thoughts, to the kinds of values demonstrated by Arsene Wenger (in agreeing to a
replay) and Paolo di Canio (in refusing to take advantage of an injured opponent).
Now of course the values exhibited by these two were, as we pointed out earlier,
virtually extinct—the fact that what they did elicited such widespread comment and
praise demonstrates this. Their behaviour was the exception which proves the rule
that the field of sport in fact operates under commercial (non-)principles; agents
within the field (managers, players, spectators, journalists) typically operate, on a
practical level, without regard to sporting principles, while maintaining only a
discursive commitment to those principles. These principles can always
(re)surface—as they did with Wenger and di Canio—but in some ways this merely
demonstrates that they only live on as an afterthought, as a reminder of what the
field once thought it was.
The second objection to the argument that the gap between habitus and the
objectivities the field necessarily encourages reflexivity is that, as Bourdieu points

out, agents negotiate these gaps as something to be ‘paved over’. There is, generally
speaking, no capital involved in incorporating the (potential) reflexive knowledge
into the habitus, or allowing it to inform practice, and so no incentive to (re)form
the habitus. Wenger and di Canio acquired capital from their actions not because of
any reflexivity on their part about the state of the field, but precisely because they
allowed the field and its subjects limited access to a nostalgic attachment to
something (sporting behaviour) that had ceased to play any practical role in the field.
Rather than generating reflexive knowledge, Wenger and di Canio’s behaviour
worked against thought simply because, as Bourdieu would put it, there was nothing
in the field (no institutional logics, no forms of capital) that would dispose subjects
to reflexivity.
But if agents generally pave over the gaps between habitus and practice that might
otherwise generate reflexive thought, then we have to ask how reflexive knowledge
emerges. For Bourdieu, as we pointed out above, reflexivity is tied up with the
question of cultural fields, not just in terms of the limitations imposed by illusio and
practical knowledge, but also because subjects (and any dispositions they have with
regard to reflexivity) are produced by and through fields. It is those fields which tend
to encourage and reward a reflexive habitus through the institutionalising of a
reflexive disposition in ‘mechanisms of training, dialogue, and critical evaluation’
(Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 41) which have the potential to produce reflexive
knowledge and reflexive subjects.
Two conditions are necessary for fields to produce such tendencies: firstly, a
degree of autonomy (because the field cannot be completely dominated by the field
of power, or fields of politics or business), and, secondly, and as a corollary, a
disposition to produce knowledge that is not necessarily in the interests of, or that
serves, hegemonic fields. These criteria can be located precisely in those fields which
are informed by a scholastic point of view which, ironically, Bourdieu accuses of
standing in the way of knowledge. This is partly because of the tendency of
scholars/academics to abstract issues and treat them as if they had no consequences
or practical dimension, and also because it replaces the point of view of actual
practitioners in the field with that of scholars. Much as economic forecasting tends
to model its outcomes on the ideal practice of an ideal economist (thereby ignoring
the random and whimsical approaches to economic choices so often made by
shoppers), so too within the human sciences there is a tendency which consists in
putting ‘a scholar inside the machine, in picturing all social agents in the image of
the scientist’ (1998: 133). At the same time, however, it is precisely their distancing
both from hegemonic fields and from the practices they research that allows scholars
to reflect on the ‘unthought categories of thought’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:
40), that is, to reflect beyond the immediate concerns associated with any praxis.
They are able, therefore, ‘to accede to metadiscourse on the practice of discourse’
(Bourdieu 1998: 131), which Bourdieu argues is the fallacy of skhole, but which also
provides the reason for the field to develop and make use of the mechanisms of
‘training, dialogue and critical evaluation’ that work to institutionalise reflexivity.
The point here is that it is precisely the scholastic point of view, and its accession
to metadiscourse (and the meta-tendency more generally) which brings into being
the pursuit and valuing of both knowledge and the conditions and limitations of
knowledge. In the study of history, for instance, it is the immanent tendency of the
field to subject everything, including the texts of history and historiography, to a
historicising analysis that targets both ‘the privilege of a knowing subject arbitrarily
excluded from the effect of objecification’ (2000: 119), and the conditions (disposi-
tions and values, including the scholastic point of view) that produce the subject and
knowledge itself. But this is only possible because, as Bourdieu points out, the
distanced and disinterested ethos of (at least parts of) the field are reproduced
through the interested, competitive ethos which capitalises the production of
reflexive knowledge.
There is another reason why fields characterised by the scholastic point of view,
and the conditions associated with it, tend to produce subjects disposed towards
reflexivity. Autonomy (with regard to hegemonic fields) is a sign that a field has no
practical contribution to make to the field(s) of power; that is, the process of
bracketing off the world in one’s research causes the field(s) of power, in most cases,
to act reciprocally, and bracket off the research. This more or less complete
disengagement with power works to increase the likelihood of a reflexive disposition,
because whereas subjects in hegemonic fields are required, as Nietzsche points out,
to maintain an (unconscious) ignorance about the status and conditions of their
work (for instance, the politician who speaks for or represents ‘the people’ can only
do so on condition that they take the claims he makes seriously, and do not subject
them to analysis), there is no such stake in the scholastic game—and consequently,
nowhere near the same prohibition regarding self-analysis.
Bourdieu’s notion of reflexivity provides us with something which is both a
practical tool (of research, analysis, critique), and at the same time something which
can be taught and learned. And this consideration of Bourdieu’s work enables us to
identify the specific grounds—the mechanisms, conditions, logics, and cultural
ethos—that dispose agents to recontextualise their practical knowledge (regarding,
say, the negotiation of fields) as reflexive knowledge (that is, the conditions, and
limitations, associated with such practices). We made the point earlier that the
condition of a legitimate performance in some fields is partly dependent on a kind
of ‘bad faith’, an unconscious displacement of the conditions and motivations of
action—for instance, self-interest disguised as duty. But at the same time it is clear
that a more reflexive (and therefore flexible) relation to one’s thoughts, actions and
knowledge provides the possibility of three epistemological advantages. First, it
enhances agents’ practical literacy; that is to say, it allows them to map the limits of
the game that is the field, and to adjust their practices accordingly. As a corollary,
it provides agents with some kind of distance from the process (and the conse-
quences) of being produced and spoken ‘by the field’. The second advantage is that
reflexivity, as a transposable form of knowledge, provides agents with the basis for
negotiating cross-cultural contexts, not only across societies and cultures but across,
and on occasions even within, cultural fields. Third, and finally, it provides agents
with both a disposition towards and the means of effecting communication as
improvisation. If reflexivity takes away some of the comforts associated with a
naturalised habitus and practical knowledge, at the same time it provides a means of
moving beyond what the subject already knows on a practical level, and offers the
advantages of the application of transposable knowledge.
University of Canberra
References
Bourdieu P 1990 In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology M Adamson (trans)
Stanford Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu P 1991 Language and Symbolic Power JB Thompson (ed) G Raymond & M Adamson
(trans) Cambridge Polity Press.
Bourdieu P 1993 The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature R Johnson (ed)
Cambridge Polity Press.
Bourdieu P 1998 Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action Cambridge Polity Press.
Bourdieu P 2000 Pascalian Meditations R Nice (trans) Cambridge Polity Press.
Bourdieu P, A Accardo et al. 1999 The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society
Stanford Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu P & H Haacke 1995 Free Exchange Cambridge Polity Press.
Bourdieu P & L Wacquant 1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology Cambridge Polity Press.
Calhoun C et al. (eds) 1993 Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives Cambridge Polity Press.
Foucault M 1997 Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1 P Rabinow (ed) London
Penguin.
Giddens A 1984 Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social
Analysis Berkeley University of California Press.
Giddens A 1994 Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics Stanford Stanford University
Press.
Kant I 1973 The Critique of Judgement JC Meredith (trans) Oxford Clarendon Press.
Polanyi M 1983 The Tacit Dimension Gloucester MA Doubleday.
Shusterman R (ed) 1999 Bourdieu: A Critical Reader Oxford Blackwell.
Swartz D 1997 Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu Chicago University of Chicago
Press.
Žižek S 1999 ‘You may!’, London Review of Books 21 (6) 18 March 2002 (http://www.lrb.co.uk/
v21/n06/zize2106.htm) accessed 2 August 2002.

Social Semiotics: To Cite This Article: Tony Schirato & Jen Webb (2002) Bourdieu's Notion of Reflexive Knowledge

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Social Semiotics: To Cite This Article: Tony Schirato & Jen Webb (2002) Bourdieu's Notion of Reflexive Knowledge

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Universidad de Sevilla]

On: 03 December 2014, At: 01:09

Bourdieu's Notion of Reflexive

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330216373

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Bourdieu’s Notion of Reflexive Knowledge

it, the incorporation of social structures in the form of dispositional

unthinkable, the prescribed and the proscribed, it must remain unthought.

59)—that is, something like Bourdieu’s practical knowledge, or Michael Polanyi’s

thought’. This is not a straightforward approach to research; David Swartz questions

The conditions which bring about, or at least dispose participants in a field

regulated debate, made possible by reference to common markers or, more

objectivities the field necessarily encourages reflexivity is that, as Bourdieu points

You might also like