Bourdieu et la délibération consciente

International audienceSocial theorists have in recent years concerned themselves with the question of the kind and intensity of people’s everyday reflective capacities. In this respect, Bourdieu’s theory has mostly been found wanting. In an effort to counter this sentiment, I intend to find in Bourdieu’s theory of practice an adequate response to this question. This is accomplished first by examining the dominant ‘mechanistic’ interpretation of Bourdieu’s theory, within which practice is reduced to programmatic action detached from conscious thought. While recognizing that mechanistic traces persist within Bourdieu’s theory, I advocate an alternate reading that accentuates his manifestly ‘anti-mechanistic’ intentions. I argue that by reifying ‘consciousness’, opposing it to a mechanistic habitus, and then positing a triangular relation to a reified social world, commentators have manufactured theoretical problems that a different way of reading Bourdieu dissolves. In this alternate reading, the sociologist makes no wager on the causal efficacy of consciousness or habit, and allows for a conception of the relation between actor and world that locates ‘agency” in improvised struggles undertaken over time