A sociological self-experiment

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A sociological self-experiment is the title of a book by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu , the first edition of which was published in 2002 as a German translation by Stephan Egger. The French original Esquisse pour une auto-analyze was only published as a book in 2004. Bourdieu had understood the text as an “anti-autobiography” and described his intellectual career in the French scientific community in the context of “participatory objectification ”.

Publication history

Bourdieu finished his farewell lecture at the College de France on March 28, 2001 with a sociological self-analysis . A few months later the text was published together with the previous ones of the last Bourdieu lecture as Science de la science et réflexivité . Bourdieu developed this text into a sociological self- experiment. In the summer of 2001 he decided to first publish the text in a German version and then, with some time lag, in the French original. The text had the working title Esquisse allemande . According to Franz Schultheis , Bourdieu placed significantly more trust in the German readership and their less biased perception of his work. In France he was exposed to considerable criticism from academia and the media in view of his “relentless disenchantment, especially of the intellectual world”. He feared that with such a text he would expose himself to further distortions and reversals of his intentions. Nevertheless, Bourdieu sent some copies of the French-language manuscript with the note "ne pas faire circuler" (German: "do not circulate"). One of the recipients was Didier Eribon , who was then editor at Nouvel Observateur .

After Bourdieu's death on January 23, 2002, an excerpt from the manuscript was published in the Nouvel Observateur , which had been selected by Eribon and presented as an intellectual testament. This completely contradicted Bourdieu's intention, who had expressly not understood the script as an autobiography. Schultheis describes the publication in the Nouvel Observateur not only as “unlawful”, but also as “unforgivable”, because the text was “put in a completely opposite light to the express intentions of the author for reasons of cheap gimmickry, and his perception was heavily burdened and under pretense a legitimate right of representation when Bourdieu's "legacy" sold. "

The book was then published, as requested by Bourdieu, first in a German translation (2002) and two years later in the French original.

content

Bourdieu follows the maxim in the book: “ To understand first of all means to understand the field with which and against which one develops.” Therefore, he begins his analysis not with a look at his first years and the social world of his childhood, but with the detailed one Description of the intellectual field through which he has moved since he began studying philosophy at the École normal supérieure . Only in the last quarter of the book does he focus on the influences of his social origin.

In the introduction he remarks that his decisions in the academic field resulted primarily from “intellectual refusals and aversions.” After sharing the worldview of the French philosopher of normality in the 1950s for a short time, which led from Sartre to completion but also in pathological dimensions had been, he turned from the arrogance of the philosopher as a "total intellectual" and the more realistic social sciences, but nevertheless finished his philosophical training with Georges Canguilhem , where he discovered a relationship of habitus . Bourdieu also had a long and intimate relationship with Raymond Aron , another of the greats of the academic field in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Shortly before the Colonels' coup, Aron enabled him to return from Algeria by making him his assistant at the Sorbonne , for which Bourdieu was grateful for a lifetime. In addition, few people would have recognized him so early and so unconditionally. Nevertheless, it came to a break because Aron (to whom the philosophy of sociology, as was customary in the academic field of the time, was superordinate) was not prepared to supervise Bourdieu's results from his Algerian field research as a dissertation. Aron said: "That would be unworthy of you." Bourdieu rates this statement as a perfect form of symbolic violence .

Bourdieu comments that the French philosophy of the time left the social world absent, ignored and repressed. Political interference is reduced to petitions, manifestos and declarations related to the most adventurous issues. As a result, the authors of the declarations increased their reputation. At the same time those "who devote themselves to the direct exploration of social reality would be a little despised ..."

The description of his field research in Algeria, which he carried out first as a simple soldier alongside his service and later as an assistant for philosophy at the University of Algiers , occupies a large space in the book. For him, his Algerian experiences marked a decisive break with the scholarly view of things and demystified his view of the intellectual. Looking back, he recognizes "that I came to ethnology and sociology not least because of my fundamental rejection of the scholastic view as the basis of pride, a social distance that I never liked and that is undoubtedly closely related to a certain social origin." In ethnology, at least in that embodied by Claude Lévi-Strauss , he still sees too great a distance from the social world. He also attributes this to Michel Foucault , who was a lecturer at the Collège de France at the height of his career .

Although Bourdieu appropriated the techniques of empirical social research , he refused in the 1960s to take part in the courses Paul Lazarsfeld held at the Sorbonne "before the assembled French sociology". He counts Lazarsfeld along with Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton to the triumvirate that has made a myriad of mutilations and distortions in the social sciences, especially in the statements of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim .

In the last quarter of the text, Bourdieu describes how his small-town social origins as the son of a petty postal worker and a mother from a wealthy peasant family, as well as his boarding school life (that reminded him of Goffman's asylum ) created "a split habitus dominated by tensions and contradictions" . He created distances for him that determined his life: "Distance from the great game of French intellectuals", "Distance from the great game of professorial exercise of power" and "Distance also in the field of politics and culture from all elitism and populism".

reception

In a self- experiment , Bruno Hildenbrand recognizes the “description of an observation by the observer” and reads between the lines how Bourdieu, who had to fight his way up from simple circumstances, celebrates his outsider position.

York-Gothart Mix thinks that Bourdieu's self-description is actually not an autobiography of a scholar of the “universally recognized educational aristocracy of France”, but a career description that deliberately opposes the “sophisticated and academic form” and drastically mapped university customs as variants “of a semi-mafioso Game "attacked. It is by no means, as the Nouvel Observateur would have us believe, the intellectual testament of the great sociologist and European Bourdieu.

expenditure

  • Pierre Bourdieu: A sociological self-experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-518-12311-4 (first edition in German translation).
  • Pierre Bourdieu: Esquisse pour une auto-analysis . Paris, Raisons d'agir series , Paris 2004, ISBN 2-912107-19-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on the history of the publication is based on the afterword by Franz Schultheis in Pierre Bourdieu: A sociological self-experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, pp. 133–151.
  2. ^ Pierre Bourdieu: Esquisse pour une auto-analyze . In: Science de la science et réflexivité , Éditions Raisons d'Agir, Paris 2001, SS 184–220.
  3. ^ A b Franz Schultheis , epilogue, In: Pierre Bourdieu, Ein sociological self-experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, pp. 133–151, here p. 135.
  4. ^ Franz Schultheis , epilogue, In: Pierre Bourdieu, Ein sociologischer Selbstversuch . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, pp. 133–151, here p. 148.
  5. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 11.
  6. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 10.
  7. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 30 f.
  8. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 42.
  9. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 45.
  10. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 50.
  11. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 83.
  12. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, from p. 95.
  13. ↑ Erving Goffman : Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates. Chicago 1961
  14. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, SS 113.
  15. ↑ Pierre Bourdieu, A Sociological Self-Experiment . Translated by Stephan Egger, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2002, p. 121.
  16. ↑ Bruno Hildenbrand , comments on Pierre Bourdieu's “Self- Experiment ” In: systemmagazin. Online journal for systemic developments , March 6, 2005.
  17. ↑ York-Gothart Mix , intellectuals and anti-intellectuals. Pierre Bourdieu and his sociological self-experiment . In: literaturkritik.de, May 5, 2003.