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Bourdieu and the dead end of reflexivity: On the impossible task of locating the subject

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2015

SAMUEL KNAFO
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Abstract

This article examines recent attempts by International Relations (IR) scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our subjective biases through reflexive means. But as I argue Bourdieu – like most reflexive scholars – largely overestimated his ability to grasp his own subject position. For he assumed he could be objective about the very thing he had the least reasons to be objective about: himself. Instead of bending over backwards in this way and directly take the subject into account, I then propose to rearticulate the problematic of reflexivity by going back to a more classic concern with the question of alienation. Through a detailed critique of Bourdieu’s reflexive approach and the ways in which it was received in IR, I set out a series of principles to reconfigure the agenda of reflexivity and offer a platform for a proper methodological alternative to positivism.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 25 - 47
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Sahil Dutta, Julian Germann, Xavier Guillaume, Matthew Hughes, Daniel Jacobi, Martijn Konings, Richard Lane, Lara Montesinos-Coleman, Dinah Rajak, Jan Selby, Benno Teschke, Steffan Wyn-Jones, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and constructive engagement with this article in its formative stages.

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28 On this front, it must be noted that the feminist literature is perhaps alone in IR in having offered specific interventions which address more directly the problem of moral ambiguity involved in scholarship. See Dauphinee, Elizabeth, ‘The ethics of autoethnography’, Review of International Studies, 36:3 (2010), pp. 799–818CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But it is important to note that these only succeed precisely when they keep the terrain circumscribed to the personal; a terrain that is fully liable to the problems of self-understanding that I later outline as powerfully demonstrated by Hamati-Ataya. See Hamati-Ataya, ‘Transcending objectivism’.

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71 Although Skinner offers a brilliant strategy to think of textual contextualisation, he decided, for some reason, not to apply across the board the same principles of contextualisation based on differentiation and authorship. As a result, Skinner’s social and political contextualisations are very superficial and mostly concerned with establishing the reasons motivating someone to write, rather than a broader attempt to use social contextualisation to place their work in perspective and understand its historical significance. This is, in a way, the problem I seek to tackle with the idea of agency.

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