Page 156 - Cultural Theory

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••• Framing Bourdieu •••

limited freedom so as to modify those social structures which have historically
succeeded in achieving some trans-historical objective status. It was this positive side
of the agency/structure dualism rather than the oppressed, mind-controlled dimen-
sion emphasized by the Thomas Bernhard quote, that Bourdieu explored in
‘Intellectual field and creative project’ which he first published in 1966 in an issue of
Les Temps Modernes devoted to the ‘problems of structuralism’. Individual artists or
thinkers do not produce in a vacuum, but the contexts of their productivity are
explicable sociologically. However, Bourdieu was not interested in constructing ret-
rospectively sociologies of knowledge, art or literature which would explain produc-
tivity ex post facto. The problem of this kind of structuralism was that it superimposed
a model of structural explanation on the actual agency/structure struggles of past
producers. For Bourdieu, ‘creative projects’ are not autonomous projects but, instead,
projects which necessarily are located within ‘intellectual fields’ of reception which,
in part, are constitutive of the creativity. In other words, any writer or thinker oper-
ates with a set of inscribed impulses to write and think which are the products of
early upbringing or formative education. Equally, however, the act of writing is not
one of free expression of this intrinsic inheritance. Intellectual production is a con-
stant negotiation or compromise between the impulse to be ‘self’-expressive and the
need to communicate meaningfully within a common discourse that has acquired
some objective standing. The relationship between intellectual field and creative pro-
ject is reciprocal while, also, the two elements are infinitely variable or contingent.

The Ambivalent Function of the Intellectual Field in Bourdieu’s
Practice: Algerian Analyses and the Discourse of Acculturation

Bourdieu’s position was fundamentally ambivalent because he wanted to insist that
our thoughts are partly conditioned by those of our predecessors or teachers while
also wanting to insist that in recognizing this situation we are empowered to exercise
some limited freedom to ‘play the field’ which constrains us. This was the basis for
Bourdieu’s ambiguity in relation to Cultural Theory. From his very first published
work, Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958), Bourdieu was interested in culture and cultural
adaptation. It could be said that it was always his personal creative project to under-
stand acculturation processes. This project derived initially from his philosophical
training at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Clearly influenced by his reading of
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu’s interest was related to
Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1962 [1936]) and was an attempt, follow-
ing Heidegger, to introduce a temporal dimension into descriptive phenomenology.
The problem of acculturation was an extension of the problem of inter-subjectivity
for existential phenomenology. In an interview of 1985, Bourdieu said of his early
fieldwork in Algeria that it arose out of his research ‘into the “phenomenology of
emotional life”, or more exactly into the temporal structures of emotional experi-
ence’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 6–7). Bourdieu’s early difficulty, however, was to locate his
project within an established intellectual field.
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