Some queries

I understood Bourdieu’s project as the one that primarily sets to reconcile the antinomies of subjectivist/phenomenological and objectivist/structuralist thinking to produce a synthetic understanding of social phenomena gaining from the best of both streams of thought. But more important than this, Bourdieu’s project is one that problematizes and questions the knowing subject, who in the process of knowing, objectifies the object s/he studies but does not question or objectify the relationship between himself and the object s/he studies. In what he calls as a ‘reflexive turn’ which doesn’t overturn the possibilities of doing research within a particular discipline like the poststructuralist thought did, but makes significant contribution to the corpus of sociological knowledge by inviting us to investigate more carefully ourselves as knowing subjects emerging from a particular set of social conditions which make the process of objectification of the object possible in the first place, Bourdieu is redirecting the gaze upon the knowing subject. I understood it as:

Knowing  subject àdirects his gaze upon àobject (what existed before Bourdieu)

Knowing Subject is objectified ßà object (After Bourdieu)

I want us to think about how is this different from Foucault’s question “what do disciplines?” in his “Order of Things” and “Archaeology of Knowledge”? Isn’t he also occupied with somewhat a similar question? Is the difference between Bourdieu and Foucault is one where Foucault doesn’t engage with individual/collective practices within a particular field, but enquires the function of a particular branch of knowledge collectively created at a particular time in history? What is the difference in their questions? Is Foucault dealing with the question of ‘emergence’ and ‘what an emergence does’ and Bourdieu trying to understand the social conditions and the agents behind it?  After reading the essay (that Maithreyi posted a few days ago) which discusses Bourdieu and Foucault, and tells us that Bourdieu, in many ways, was not comfortable with philosophical appropriation of social problem (that requires empirical work) without learning the trade of doing empirical research, I wanted to know more about the difference between both of their works. For me question is, hasn’t Foucault also answered in a way the question of knowing subject in trying to tell us the disciplines had their history and emerged at particular points in time to serve specific functions. What is the difference in Bourdieu’s reflexive turn?

The chapter “Belief and the Body” where Bourdieu shows us how bodies incorporate the structures doesn’t seem to me very different from what Foucault discusses in his “Discipline and Punish” especially the chapter on docile bodies. Again I want to know if you people find any difference between the two in the way they explore the corporeality of structures (in Foucault’s case it’s power)?

Another most important question, Bourdieu studies ‘rituals’ that don’t have sense/meaning outside their very observance. How can we connect his object of study i.e., rituals to what he has arrived at a kind of reconciliation within social theory of what was considered irreconcialable? How has his object of study helped him achieve this? This question flows from our previous discussion on Foucault’s object of study ‘ideas’ and his project of telling us their histories.