ABSTRACT
I would like to take my cue from Johan Muller’s introduction to a collection of essays entitled Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein (2004). In “The Possibilities of B. Bernstein”, Muller makes two observations with which I fully concur. First of all, in his discussion of the political implications of Bernstein’s work (which extends the Bernsteinian project), Muller situates these implications within the framework of the descriptive and analytical power of the theory as a whole, inasmuch as the theory is capable of revealing and helping to conceive possibilities for political action and choice. Second, Muller insists that, unlike in Bourdieu’s work, the category of possibility is not external to the theory and to the conceptual architecture of Bernstein’s sociology. For Bourdieu, while a knowledge of the most probable (reproduction) is construed as helping to reveal other possibilities, such possibilities are not granted any status within the theory (see, among others, Terrail 1987). This is not the case with Bernstein’s theory, which, in Muller’s view – a view that I share – is an attempt to capture the real dynamically rather than merely statically, and thus to capture and interpret what I shall call the realized real (that which is noted, observed, analysed in the first analysis), as the realization of just one of the logical possibilities which the theory helps to describe and analyse. The real cannot be reduced to that which is realized; the analysis of the realized or dominant real is also designed to make it possible to construe and detect virtual or devalued possibilities, i.e. alternatives to the realized real. The theoretical framework, concepts and categories thus devised, used and ordered need to enable this or at the very least must be designed to enable this. It is precisely to this extent that Bernstein’s sociology may be viewed as a non-deterministic sociology. If this is the case, it is because Bernstein’s work is a non-“sociologistic” sociology both in the conception of its object, attentive as it is to what Bernstein calls “the ambiguity which lies at the heart of the social” (Bernstein 1994, 2000, p. 92), and in its relations with that which it is not, especially Bernstein’s desire to combine different disciplines and to foster a dialogue between them (in his latest book Bernstein references engage, among others, Durkheim, Bourdieu, Garfinkel and the ethnomethodologists, Vygotsky and Luria, “sociolinguistics”, or Cassirer and
Foucault). In other words, the non-determinism of Bernstein’s sociology is based jointly and severally on its “relations within” and its “relations to” other authors or theories, to use Bernstein’s own categorizations. This chapter, relying for the most part on his latest work, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, will largely follow the thread of Bernstein’s critical dialogue with the authors and theories with and against whom he has tended to conceive and elaborate his own work.
