The first one deals with Marx’s concept of consciousness and, especially, false consciousness. It’s rightly pointed out that Bourdieu prefers not to talk about consciousness as something only going on in the mind, but about habitus, encompassing much more than that, namely the physical aspect of our existence that cannot be separated from the way we think about things.

This concept is interesting as the language Bourdieu uses is entirely physical. Opacity, inertia, and bodies are all words that refer to the physical world, concepts that are used in sciences and observations like Physics. Here Bourdieu evokes the dense and impenetrable state that social constructions impose on physical bodies and thereby become internalized. The habitus creates people’s dispositions which are an internal embodiment of the social structure itself. This is very independent and different from a discussion of ideologies and “ideas” that people possess about the world. Rather, the socialization Bourdieu discusses is much deeper and problematic than that as it becomes integrated within our body itself.

I totally agree and I find the thoughts about the relation between external (social) and internal (habitus) structure very interesting and worth the read.
However, I’m not so happy about the second post. The title, Consciousness Determines Life, pretty much says it all: There’s an interpretation here saying that Bourdieu opposes Marx’s materialism.

Marx believed that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (The German Ideology). Therefore, the material reality of life is not determined by thoughts and ideologies but rather these ideologies are a reflection and reaction to the material existence of people. If this material existence is extended to represent the physical world, Bourdieu here too rejects Marx and his idea that consciousness is a result of the way life is. Bourdieu subscribes to the conception that our physical existence is structured by the prevailing ideologies. These ideologies, such as the division of labor, presuppose the physical reality.

To support this, Bourdieu’s debate of historically changing concepts of the ‘physical nature’ of men and women is cited, concluding:

The division of labor, an ideology, a constructed concept has therefore determined our life, material and physical existence.

Now, I don’t think Bourdieu was this kind of a constructivist. His point, rather, was exactly what was stated in the first post: It’s not a solely ‘discursive’ matter of ideologies but an equally physical matter of habitus. Or, to put it differently: It’s neither simply consciousness that determines physical existence nor just the other way round, but there is a complex interrelation between the social structures outside of us and the social structures incorporated as dispositions of habitus. And, what’s more: the existing relation between men and women at a given time and the corresponding division of labour is of course much more than a mere ideology: it is a physical reality in the structure of everyday life, and only thus does it have the ability to become part of the internal social structures of habitus. Domination thus does have much stronger roots than just being a ‘constructed concept’ that determines our existence.

There’s a post on this at orgtheory.net, in which brayden states:

Emirbayer and Johnson provide a good overview of how Bourdieuian concepts might be more fully utilized in organizational research. The paper is well worth reading.

and provides some highlights.

Times Higher Ed has a pretty good review by Nick Prior:

Readers familiar with Bourdieu’s work will find the short theoretical summaries less interesting than the scraps of polemic designed to inform and energise various political publics. These are the letters, statements, declarations of intent and interviews, some sourced from the archives of the Collège de France and published for the first time. Like the Communist Manifesto, these fragments cut to the chase with little modesty. They exhort the reader, often impatiently, to fight for a “realpolitik of reason” in which a restless critique of the “imperialism of universality” is married with a staunch defence of the intellectual instruments of reason. They also show Bourdieu wrestling with a striking paradox in which a compulsion to open his mouth and promote the political effectiveness of intellectuals is all the more effective if the autonomy of the intellectual from political and economic fields is optimum. [...]

If sociology is indeed a way of doing politics by other means, maybe our biggest loss will be the absence of a champion who did most to convince the world that a rigorous but committed sociopolitics was possible. Certainly, we are impoverished by his passing at a time when it is more necessary than ever to renew the strength of intellectual criticism.

[...] Justement, les clercs surplombent mais n’interviennent pas…

La conception qu’il se fait de la sociologie confirme tout au moins une prédilection pour le travail intellectuel, et sa réserve atteste la puissance de l’héritage weberien qui exige une mise à distance de l’engagement politique. Jusqu’à ces dernières années, Bourdieu s’est tenu à cet ethos de la distanciation. Il a pensé qu’il ne pouvait pas être partie prenante de la mêlée sous peine de déroger à sa déontologie…

Et vous regrettez ce « regard éloigné » ?

Disons en tout cas que cette attitude n’allait pas sans risques, Le sociologue opposé à l’homme d’opinion, le scientifique se défiant du doxologue, c’est la porte ouverte à une exclusion par la philosophie de tout ce qui n’est pas elle… [...]

Aber es gibt Leute wie Pierre Bourdieu, der eine klassische Rolle gespielt und die Bewegung repräsentiert hat.

Antonio Negri: Ich kannte ihn gut und habe ihn für seine grundlegende Rechtschaffenheit sehr bewundert. Er war nicht verpflichtet, das zu tun, was er 1995 tat, er hatte nichts zu gewinnen. Pierre Bourdieu war ein großer Professor und ein bemerkenswerter Verstand, aber nicht viel mehr. Er hatte niemals die Funktion, die in einer anderen Epoche jemand wie Sartre haben konnte. Selbst als Bourdieu 1995 diese erstaunliche Rede vor den Streikenden an der Gare de Lyon hielt, war das nicht die Rede von jemandem, der die Linien eines politischen Prozesses aufzeigte.

Bourdieu erklärte einfach seine Solidarität: Das ist selten und kostbar, aber das ist nicht wirklich eine politische Geste. Das ist nicht der Intellektuelle, wie ihn uns die sozialistische oder kommunistische Bewegung zeigte. Zugleich ist klar, die politische Funktion des Intellektuellen hat sich mit den siebziger Jahren geändert: Er ist kein Gewissen mehr, das die Massen erleuchtet, er ist zum Aktivisten geworden. Er steht nicht über den Kämpfen, er ist gemeinsam mit anderen einer ihrer Akteure. Er ist eines der Gesichter dieses “Gemeinsamen”, das die kämpfenden Singularitäten erfinden.

Q: But there are people like Pierre Bourdieu, who played a classic role and represented the movement?

Negri: I knew him well and I admired him very much for his fundamental integrity. He was not obliged to do what he did in 1995, he had nothing to gain from it. Pierre Bourdieu was a great professor and a remarkable intellect, but not much more. He never played the role that someone like Sartre was able to play in a different epoch. Even when Bourdieu held that astonishing speech to strikers at the Gare de Lyon in 1995, that was not the speech of someone identifying the lines of a political process.

Bourdieu simply declared his solidarity: That’s rare and valuable, but it’s not really a political gesture. This is not the intellectual that the socialist or communist movement used to show us. At the same time it’s clear that the political function of intellectuals has changed since the 1970s: He is no longer a conscience enlightening the masses, but has become an activist. He is not above the struggles, he is, together with others, one of the protagonists in them. He’s one of the faces of this ‘common’ that is invented by the fighting singularities.

Read all of it (in German, though)

The first one ist Sketch for a Self-Analysis, which has been around in German* and French for a while:

‘This is not an autobiography.’ – Pierre Bourdieu. Pierre Bourdieu’s commitment to a reflexive sociology led him ineluctably to take on the final challenge of a self socio-analysis in which he recounts and analyses, more fully and intimately than ever before, his understanding of the trajectory that led him from the peasant world of Barn, through sometimes painful years as a lyce boarder, as a student in 1950s Paris and as a conscript in the Algerian War, to the pinnacle of the French intellectual and academic world. ‘This is not an autobiography’, he said of this work but it reveals much of the hitherto implicit experience of his formative years, and gives precious insights into his relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault and many others, which deepen our understanding of his unique contribution to sociology and anthropology.

And the other is The Bachelor’s Ball. This one hasn’t appeared in any other language than French yet, and Bourdieu himself didn’t really approve of it being translated (look for the reason in Sketch for a Self-Analysis)

Continuing the theme of self-reflection, Bourdieu’s final book, “The Bachelors’ Ball”, sees him return to Bearn, the village where he grew up, to examine the gender dynamics of rural France. This personal connection adds poignancy to Bourdieu’s ethnographic account of the way the influence of urban values has precipitated a crisis for male peasants. Tied to the land through inheritance, these bachelors find themselves with little to offer the women of Bearn who, like the young Bourdieu himself, abandon the country for the city in droves.

This one has also just appeared in German, by the way.

*Interestingly, this book was first published in German by Suhrkamp in 2002, shortly after his death. It only appeared in French two years later. This was Bourdieu’s own choice: He hoped that the german public would be less emotional than the french scientific and cultural scene and that, the scientific content of the book would get more attention than its purely personal aspects. The book consists of a greatly enlarged version of his last lecture at the Collège de France, which was published as the last chapter of Science of Science and Reflexivity.

The editors say:

Le renom de Pierre Bourdieu s’étend aujourd’hui bien au-delà de la sociologie, au-delà de l’Université, au-delà du public cultivé, au-delà de la France. Que s’est-il donc passé pour qu’un universitaire, fils de petits employés béarnais “monté” à Paris pour faire l’École normale supérieure, devienne, le temps d’une génération, ce phénomène international ; “Bourdieu”?
Ni hagiographie à l’usage des bourdieusiens, ni pamphlet à l’usage des anti-bourdieusiens, ni analyse épistémologique à l’usage des spécialistes, ni essai de vulgarisation à l’usage de profanes, ce portrait intellectuel brossé par une ex-disciple qui a pris, depuis, ses distances, est une tentative pour comprendre, avec les outils de la sociologie et à travers le témoignage en première personne, les raisons d’un tel succès.

My translation (excuse the occasional mistake):

Pierre Bourdieu’s reputation today extends far beyond sociology, beyond the university, beyond the cultivated public, beyond France. How did it happen that an academic who was the son of petty employees from Béarn and had ‘climbed’ up to Paris to attend the École normale supérieure became, in the time of one generation, that international phenomenon: ‘Bourdieu’? Neither hagiography for the use of bourdieusians, pamphlet for the use of anti-bourdieusians, epistemological analysis for the use of specialists nor attempt at vulgarisation for the use of the profane, this intellectual portrait outlined by an ex-disciple who has since taken her distance is an attempt to comprehend, using the tools of sociology and through first-person testimony, the reasons for such a success.

The book seems to have provoked a bit of debate in France, in which the author has herself intervened. In February, she published an article in Le Monde des Livres, to strengthen the accusation against Bourdieu of having been a “radicalist”. So she seems to be trying to join in the business of wrongly separating an ‘early, scientifically solid’ and a ‘late, ideologically radical’ Bourdieu that some in France have been in engaged in for years and that Bourdieu always vigorously rejected in his lifetime. It amounts to another attempt to impose on social science a concept of scientificity adapted from the natural sciences that just isn’t its own and that would make it lose most of its scientific potential. She’s rightly debunked for the ‘radicalism’ claim here.

The longer version: I hav been feeling a strange lack of up-to-date online resources and internet-based debate about the works of Pierre Bourdieu, whom I consider the most important – and most inspiring – sociologist of the last 30 years or so. Now, during the last year or two, I’ve been working towards writing a doctoral thesis that draws on the concepts of Bourdieu (namely, those of field and habitus) as well as those of Michel Foucault (the dispositif, mainly) and tries to make a combination of both workable in empirical research on what we call the ‘labour market’. And in this process I’ve been noticing this strange lack of web activity concerning Bourdieu. There’s a whole bunch of blogs and more or less up-to-date sites dealing with Foucault and his concepts – just like there are for a range of other theorists – but there’s nothing of the kind catering for the needs of Bourdieu aficionad@s. Not in English (or German), anyway. That’s what I’d like to change. If time allows, I’ll try to make this blog a place for accessing and exchanging information on all things Bourdieu: New books and articles, conferences, Bourdieu-inspired reflections on current events, and whatever else might come along. So if you’ve been noticing the same lack or just share my interest in Bourdieu, you’re very welcome to contribute.