Bourdieu's Biographical Illusion: An Interpretive Reading

 Pierre Bourdieu’s short essay „The Biographical Illusion” (1987) is one of the most well-known critiques of biography as a method of research. To Bourdieu, a sociologist famous for his contributions to social theory (his typology of capital and his concept of social fields are wildly influential), the immediate point of view on biography is on that as a method of social-scientific research, and of ethnography (e.g., interviews).

Nevertheless, the short essay does provide some insights, some points worthy of reflection. Amusingly, at least to me, not as much to the method of biography, but to sociological views on anthroponomastics, the study of human names. What follows is a reflection on what piqued my interest, an interpretive, not a hermeneutic reading.

 I.

When we speak of human life, it is never devoid of its own historicity. Human beings are situated in time: they experience, and they reflect on their experiences. And, most relevantly, they narrate these lives to themselves, and to others, in order to make sense of their own situation in time. As Bourdieu critically notes on the outset, “a life is inseparably the sum of the events of an individual existence seen as a history and the narrative of that history.” In this view, the notion of human life as a historical phenomenon, seen as the totality of everything that happened to that human being, is elevated to the level of common sense, of quasi-natural understanding of the world: “’[L]ife’ is a whole, a coherent and finalized whole, which can and must be seen as the unitary expression of a subjective and objective ‘intention’ of a project.”[1]

This notion, perhaps, is best reflected in our capitalist fetishization of the idea of a “career.” Indeed, the general acceptance of this idea appears ubiquitous in our social practice. Applying for a job, for higher education, and so on, without submitting a CV detailing the (selective) history of one’s past is beyond absurd. And, quite current in today’s social-mediated cancel culture, I can’t help but be reminded of the practice of digging out an ancient statement from the teenage years of a public persona, which is then weaponized as an attack on their personal integrity.

II.

Unsurprisingly, Bourdieu was critical of this notion, which is also not devoid of a teleological dimension: “This way of looking at a life implies tacit acceptance of the philosophy of history as a series of historical events (Geschichte) which is implied in the philosophy of history as an historical narrative (Historie),” he writes, continuing, “or briefly, implied in a theory of the narrative.”

Of course, nowadays, the narrativist dimension of history is widely accepted, and even at the time of Bourdieu writing the statement, more than a decade after Hayden White’s seminal work, this is not really worthy of debate for the theory of history. However, this is also not Bourdieu's principal intent: after all, his interest is social practice, not some academic discipline’s self-perception. He views “accepting the postulate of the meaning of narrated existence (and implicitly, of all existence)” as problematic, after all. This acceptance of the elevation of a mere narrative representation which structures—no, more than that: evaluates, judges—the disparate experiences according to the ominous “’intention’ of a project” to becoming synonymous with human life itself, this is what should be seen as nothing more than the mere conforming to a “rhetorical illusion.”

The problem, then, is “the old empirical question on the existence of a self irreducible to the rhapsody of individual sensations.” In other words: the problem of identity and the self. Identity, this elusive attribute that human beings are said to possess, which is reflective of themselves, which is elevated to the status of essence, and thus legitimizes the construction of the various biographical dossiers we use, and their value for human interaction in the first place.

But even Bourdieu acknowledges that “this practical identity reveals itself to intuition only in the inexhaustible series of its successive manifestations, in such a way that the only manner of apprehending it as such consists perhaps in attempting to recapture it in the unity of an integrative narrative.” No matter how critical and skeptical we may be of the narrativization of our past as a mirror of our identity in this world, perhaps the very act of doing so is the only method available to us in order to materialize this very identity in our consciousness—at least this is how I read this passage. And this, then, leads to a conundrum: does this not mean that there is only a rhetorical illusion?

 III.

This practical identity, no matter its ontological status (which we just cast doubt upon), this identity that we use in our existence as social beings, is integrated into the social world that we are inescapably a part of by means of institutions tasked with this very process of integration and unification of the self. Interestingly, Bourdieu chooses as an example the proper name, which designates the same object (i.e., person) “in different states of the same social field (diachronic constancy) or in different fields at the same time (synchronic unity beyond the multiplicity of occupied positions).” This is, of course, a very sociological way to phrase things. For one, it emphasizes the biographical unity of an individual through time within the same social context, and also the unity of an individual that lies “behind” its many “faces” worn: as family father, manager, hobby tennis player, and author of self-help manuals, and so on. This institutionalized fetishization of the proper name as the unifying signifier par excellence is then made manifest in social practice, such as the personal signature, which is typically a symbolic representation of the proper name. Bourdieu writes, “in many social universes, the most sacred duties to oneself take the form of duties towards one’s proper name (always to some extent also a common name, a family name made specific by a first name).”

And furthermore:

“’Rigid designator’, the proper name is the form par excellence of the arbitrary imposition operated by the rites of institution, the attribution of a name and classification introduce clear-cut, absolute divisions, indifferent to circumstances and to individual accidents, amidst shifting biological and social realities.”

But this reduction of the human being to a single signifier has a downside, namely that “the proper name cannot describe properties and conveys no information about that which it names.” I can only partially agree: proper names can indeed have meanings, but these meanings are not pointing to the particularity of the individual per se, but rather to its social embeddedness. They are, in a sense, intrinsic in the name itself, or relating to something that is not the individual named, especially not within whatever the current circumstances may be: simply put, a name by itself cannot tell if you someone is a family father, manager, tennis player, etc. But still, as Bourdieu notes, since what the proper name “designates is only a composite and disparate rhapsody of biological and social properties undergoing constant flux, all descriptions are valid only within the limits of a specific stage or place. In other words, it can only attest to the identity of the personality, as socially constituted individuality, at the price of an enormous abstraction.”

 IV.

What is quite interesting is that, as a scholar of Japanese history, this idea becomes problematic: it may be argued that Bourdieu implicitly acknowledges the proper name as a universal feature of (contemporary) society. Certainly, typically, we do carry the same name from birth (or shortly after) to death. And, of course, the contemporary issue of denying one’s name, of taking up a new name, may be taken very seriously by people transitioning gender for this very reason: the rupture between who you were, not for yourself, but for society, and who you are, is symbolically expressed in the very act.

But what counts as the proper name? And what does this say about a society in which not everyone (!) even has a proper name in the first place? I think that the appropriate concept of the proper name in premodern Japan would be the jitsumyō, or, for someone who had taken Buddhist vows, the hōmyō. But those were types of names obtained through rites of passage (e.g., coming-of-age, appointment to rank and title, Buddhist vows). Women who were social actors, often as widows, possessed the latter. And many noble women possessed the former. But many other women did not. Children did not. And the entire social group of genin, the manservants, the unfree, did not. The many women who possessed neither had to take recourse to their “family name” (to retain Bourdieu’s terminology, although not entirely satisfying in this context) in order to represent themselves as social agents: hence, we find numerous “Fujiwara no uji no nyo” (i.e., Woman of the Fujiwara lineage) and so on in documents. And the latter, the genin, who were denied even a family name, were thus rendered outright unrepresentable: stripped of the power of being social actors of their own in the world of writing.

 V.

The constancy imposed by the proper name in Bourdieu’s view may be an effect, the ultimate abstraction, of the very “rhetorical illusion” of the unified life myth that Bourdieu spoke of. But what implications does this have for historical societies, who did not follow the same practice? Where names were not taken up from birth, were more easily, and more commonly, changed, and when some people did not even possess the privilege of bearing them in the first place? And where using multiple names in place of the proper name was commonplace. Did they, this elusive “other,” think of the human self in the same way as we did, or is our way to think merely conditioned by our historical situation, in which the idea of unalienable sovereignty of the person over themselves justifies the notion of an fundamental equality, central to the democratic project, in the first place?

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[1] The choice of the term “project” and the emphasis on intentionality, a trajectory within life, quite clearly evokes Sartre, although I have unfortunately never had the opportunity to read him.