Some notes on methodology in Pierre Bourdieu’s «The Weight of the World»

Lorenza Boninu, Department of Political and Social Sciences,University of Pisa

lboninu@gmail.com

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The hermeneutic interview according Bourdieu.

The polemic against methodological rigidity.

The meaning of relational perspective and the reflexivity.

The political outcomes of Bourdieu’s approach.

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Bourdieu’s complex epistemology

leads to

political engagement as a coherent effect of the sociologist’s trajectory in the academic field.

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researcher's deep involvement in the issue;

active and methodical listening;

hybrid method in building and explaining the space of different points of view;

awareness of the work of construction done by science (reflexivity);

researcher's extensive knowledge of the matter.

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For the social researchers the hermeneutic interview is a tool of meticulous investigation.

For the interviewees the hermenuetic interview is a way of getting conscious of the social mechanisms that influence the seemingly most natural speech.

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References to literary models

References to philosophy

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Following the lead of novelists such as Faulkner, Joyce or Woolf,

we must relinquish the single, central, dominant, in a word, quasi-

divine, point of view that is all too easily adopted by observers –

and by readers too, at least to the extent they do not feel personally involved.

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We must work instead with the multiple perspectives that

correspond to the multiplicity of coexisting, and sometimes directly

competing, points of view.

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Social science, with its specificity, is the common horizon for these suggestions to be justified, in so far as they contribute to the explanation of the empirical data.

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The social researcher will be able to connect the humble and indispensable fieldwork

with a multiplicity of theoretical contributions.

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The refusal of «a methodology more scientist than scientific».

The rejection of the unscientific bias of «the advocates of mystic union» .

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It needs to carefully evaluate the consequences of the unequal positions in the social field of both the interviewer and the interviewee.

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Only the reflexivity synonymous with method, but a reflex reflexivity based on a craft, on a sociological "feel" or "eye,"

allows one to perceive and monitor on the spot, as the interview is actually taking place, the effects of the social structure

within which it is occurring.

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About the theoretical foundations of sociology.

About the symbolic violence of the linguistic mechanisms working in the social relationships, notably in sociological field.

About the possibilities of real resistence against the world shaped by neoliberal doxa (strategic functions of the so-called collective intellectual).

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The social scholar should be able to cross the oppressive, narrow boundaries among the

disciplines, so as to move towards a «rational utopianism» with the capacity of factually

affecting the social world.

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The false neutrality of science is grounded on a reductive and trivialising claim of objectivity.

The opinion polls or the news reports often

overlook the «effect of imposition» of common sense, that is a social construct, not natural at all.

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Sociology, as a scientific enterprise,

should struggle against the illusion of immediate knowledge, by the mean of a constant practice of reflexivity.

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It is and endless struggle towards the truth. The truth of the social world is the object of

struggles in the social world and in the sociological world which is committed to producing the truth of the social world, the struggle for the truth of the social world is necessarily endless (And social science will never come to the end of the effort to impose itself as a science).

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Conducting an interview will have a double effect: on the interviewers' side, it is a true «spiritual

exercise that, through forgetfulness of self, aims at a true conversion of the way we look at other people in the ordinary circumstances of life»;

on the interviewees' side it gives «an exceptional opportunity to testify, to make themselves heard, to carry their experience over from the private to the public sphere».

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The Weight of the World is a social denouncement…

… but it also unveils the unconscious way the social conditioning works, shaping even the individuals deepest beliefs.

The interviews in The Weight of the World mean to restore the possibility of self expressing for those who are subjects to neoliberal doxa, without manipulating their words and feelings.

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According Bourdieu, when the sociologist publicly takes the field, he repeats the Socratic action to unveil, through maieutic inquiry, the truth under social appearances.

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Only by this kind of maieutic activity and the

awareness (of the limits and the possibilities) that follows it, the committed intellectuals will be able to accomplish the true «Realpolitik of Reason”»,

i.e. to generalize the access to the universal.

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Any political program that fails to take full

advantage of the possibilities for action (minimal though they may be) that science

can help uncover, can be considered guilty of nonassistance to a person in danger.

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Science can have nothing to do with the totalizing excess of a dogmatic rationalism, at

one extreme, or with the aesthete's resignation to nihilistic irrationality, at the other. It is content with the partial and temporary truths that it can conquer against the common perception and the intellectual doxa, truths able to secure the only

rational means for using fully the margin of maneuver left to liberty, that is to political

action»

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Bourdieu P., Leçon sur la leçon, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982. Id., Für eine Realpolitik der Vernunft, in S. Müller-Rolli (edited by), Das Bildungswesen der Zukunft, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta,

1987. Id., The Corporativism of the Universal. The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World, in «Telos», 81 (1989). Id., Vive la crise! For heterodoxy in social science, in «Theory and Society», XVII, 5 (1988). Id. (sous la direction de), La Misère du monde, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1993 [Engl. transl., The Weight of the World. Social

Suffering in Contemporary Society, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999]. Id., Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1994. Id., Méditations pascaliennes. Eléments pour une philosophie négative, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Id., Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale, Paris, Éditions Liber, 1998. Id., Contre-feux 2. Pour un mouvement social européen, Paris, Édition Raison d’Agir, 2001. Id.., Science de la science et réflexivité: cours du Collège de France 2000-2001, Paris, Éditions Raison d’Agir, 2001 [Engl.

transl., Science of Science and Rflexivity, Cambridge, The University of Chicago Press and Polity Press, 2004]. Id., Interventions politiques (1961-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, Marseille,

Agone, 2002. Id., Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Paris, Éditions Raisons d’Agir, 2004. Id., Id., Chamboredon J.-C., Le métier de sociologue, Paris, Mouton, 1967. Id., Wacquant L., Réponses. Pour une anthropologie réflexive, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992 [Engl. transl., An Invitation to

Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992]. Id, Chartier R. Le sociologue et l’historien, Paris, Agone, 2010. Id., Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France (1989-1992), Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2012.

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Thank you!

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