Sociology and ideas about language
Bourdieu and linguistic capital
Another figure who has placed a stress on language as a central feature in the analysis of social life is Bourdieu. Like Habermas, Bourdieu focuses attention on language as social action, arguing strongly that social science must reject 'the core intention of linguistics, namely the intellectualist philosophy which treats language as an object of contemplation rather than as an instrument of action and power' (Bourdieu 1991: 37). For Bourdieu, social relations are symbolic interactions and linguistic exchanges are also relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers or their respective groups are actualized.
This claim sets Bourdieu at odds with both Saussure and Chomsky, since it entails a rejection of dichotomies between langue and parole (in the case of Saussure) and competence and performance (in the case of Chomsky). The Saussurean emphasis on language as an autonomous system of codes realized through actual utterances is seen as unacceptable on a number of counts. In its concentration on meaning as deriving from the internal relations between the semiotic elements of a text, it tends to disregard the empirical manifestations of languages through actual speech. This inattention to the empirical frequently leads to a reification of language and to a neglect of the social and historical conditions surrounding the production and reception of texts. It may also result in an unreflexive account of the researcher's own position, since it implies a clear distinction between the object of enquiry (language as langue, as semiotic system) and the researcher, such that the latter's social location and its implications for the account of language that he or she develops are taken for granted. In other words, the structuralist model conceals in a methodological distinction (between language as a system and languages as actually uttered, either as spoken or written texts) a series of substantive assumptions about what is to count as language in terms of social research. So, for example, for Bourdieu the idea of homogeneous, identifiable languages or speech communities is chimerical, simply an idealization of a particular set of historically determinate linguistic practices. It is the linguist who produces the illusion of a common language through the theoretical strategy of treating a particular set of linguistic practices as a normative model defining who belongs to this or that speech community.
Bourdieu's rejection of the structuralist model, whether in the form of Saussure's semiotic system or Chomsky's transformational grammar, has a further aspect pertinent to our own arguments, namely that it is insufficient to account for the kind of competence and creativity that actual speakers possess. Bourdieu's argument does not compel him to deny that human beings possess the capacity to generate grammatical sentences, that they have a biological or organismic capacity for language use, but it does lead him to point out that such a capacity cannot satisfactorily explain the practical competence of actual speakers. Practical competence, for Bourdieu, requires not only that speakers produce grammatical sentences, but also that they produce utterances appropriate to the context of their utterance. To speak (or to write) is not only to produce sentences that make sense in the obvious linguistic sense; it is also to recognize who has the right to speak and in what sorts of terms one is likely to be listened to. Practical competence therefore deals with the profoundly sociological question of the forms of power and authority implicit in all communicative situations. It is, as Bourdieu quoting Proust points out, about 'the infinitely varied art of marking distances' (Bourdieu 1986: 66).
The concern with language as practical social action prompts Bourdieu to take a much more sympathetic view of Austin than he does of Saussure and Chomsky. The significance of Austin's work for Bourdieu is its concern with performative utterances and the accompanying recognition that such utterances presume an institutional setting which defines the conditions that must be fulfilled in order for an utterance to be effective. For example, the utterances of a judge in passing sentence obtain their force from the judicial setting in which they are uttered, which places the judge in a position of authority in relation to the defendant and so on. Although in Bourdieu's view Austin left undeveloped the nature of the 'conventional procedures' that underpinned performative utterances (what Austin (1962) termed 'illocutionary acts'), he sees the insight as fundamental to a social scientific account of language.
This critical scrutiny of the work of Saussure, Chomsky and Austin provides the foundation for Bourdieu's own distinctive approach, including the two concepts that are core to his perspective on language and social life: habitus and practice.
Broadly speaking, 'habitus' for Bourdieu refers to the 'durable motivations, perceptions and forms of knowledge that people carry around in their heads as a result of living in particular social environments and that predispose them to act in certain ways' (Layder 1997: 236). The concept of habitus is Bourdieu's resolution of the structure-agency problem that we have identified elsewhere. The concept explains why everyday, routine activities are to some degree regular and predictable, since our social backgrounds delineate ways of seeing, patterns of thought, even physical posture. However, habitus only provides a general, loose series of predispositions, and these are not determining of what people do in specific social contexts. This is in part due to the emergent quality of social action, the fact that for Bourdieu what people actually do in a particular setting is an outcome of the relation between the habitus, on the one hand, and the specific social contexts (or 'fields' in Bourdieu's terms) within which the individual acts. A 'field' may be seen as 'a structured space of positions in which the positions and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different kinds of resources or "capital", (Bourdieu 1991: 15).
In this way, Bourdieu seeks to escape the trap of objectivism (the Saussurean, Chomskyan flaw in which actual language use is merely an epiphenomenal instance of a structural code or a language acquisition device) through an emphasis on practice, the concrete negotiation of social settings by people predisposed by their habitus to certain ways of doing things but capable of adapting such ways appropriately to particular contexts. At the same time, Bourdieu's perspective seeks to avoid subjectivism, the intellectual orientation to the social world that epistemologically privileges immediate experience. This is close to what we refer to as 'experiential empiricism', which rests upon the presupposition that it is possible to apprehend in an immediate sense the lived experience of others (as in some forms of sociology, such as ethnomethodology).
It is a source of some contention how far Bourdieu has managed to accomplish this twin ambition. For example, Bourdieu's notion of practice has been criticized for being defined against theoretical dis course (Archer 2000: 151). That is, Bourdieu's practical knowledge is exactly that: knowledge of how to practically effect social competence. It is not obvious why this should count as 'knowledge' (Pleasants 1999), but more significantly, it rules out an adequate account of 'World 3' theoretical discourse as itself the emergent product of our practical relations with the world (Archer 2000: 151). The position we are advancing here would therefore want to argue for a more foundational role for human practice than Bourdieu's. Indeed, the emergentist model of language development and acquisition that we are advocating is one based squarely on a realist, materialist view of human practice.
Nevertheless, Bourdieu's notion of social fields has much to offer. Layder, for example, has made a convincing case for regarding social fields as similar to his social domains of 'contextual resources' and 'social settings' (Layder 1997: 116-17). Furthermore, Bourdieu's view of various forms of capital as emergent (habitus + field =value) is one which we find appealing. In particular, there are strong similarities between what Bourdieu terms the realization of capital and what we have described as the realization of constraints and enablements:
The dispositions constituting the cultivated habitus are only formed, only function and are only valid, in the relationship with a field which.,. is itself a 'field of possible forces', a 'dynamic situation', in which forces are only manifested in their relationship with certain dispositions. This is why the same practices may receive opposite meanings and values in different fields, in different configurations or in opposing sectors of the same field. (Bourdieu 1986: 94)
We thus have a powerful means of viewing the distributions of linguistic attributes- accent, dialect, patterns of speech and so forth and their realization as constraints and enablements in particular linguistic markets, where they may become either the source of profit or the cause of bankruptcy. This is a matter we shall return to in our discussion of 'language death'.
Whilst we hope to have demonstrated that both Habermas and Bourdieu attach a good deal of importance to language in the interpretation and constitution of the social world, it remains the case that neither of them systematically analyses language in the ways that applied linguists do. Whilst they reject the structuralist view of language as an autonomous, regulatory system of codes in favor of an approach which regards language and social life as profoundly inter linked, they do not see the task of developing this claim in a rigorous way as one that requires a specifically linguistic knowledge.
