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²⁷ It might be argued that Bourdieu himself did not fall in this trap since he was sceptical of the idea of objectivity. But the point is moot in that even if we adopt a softer conception of objectivity based on intersubjectivity, as Bourdieu did, the problem remains exactly the same. For the issue here is the promise that knowledge about the self can be produced for an intersubjective realm, such as the one that defines a social scientific community, in order to ground knowledge claims. Bourdieu’s wager is that intersubjective standards can anchor a reflexive engagement with the self which helps control bias. But producing intersubjective knowledge about the self, regardless of the standard to which this production is subjected, will end up confronting the same problems because of the conflicts of interest that are the heart of this strategy. Ultimately, such a project underestimates how these very standards can be easily turned around and be exploited to produce the very opposite of what they intend to do, as I argue below.

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’.

²⁹ Bourdieu, Sketch.

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³³ This was a point raised by Bourdieu himself when criticising the idea that the subject is a bearer of transhistorical qualities. He argued that a trajectory cannot be understood without taking into account how individuals find themselves in different social settings which necessarily inflect this trajectory in unpredictable ways, at least from the individual’s perspective. See Bourdieu, Pierre, Raisons pratique: Sur la théorie de l’action (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 81–89Google Scholar. But he misunderstood the significance of this point. For the issue here stems from the narrative reconstruction, not the actual bifurcations produced by history. For the latter change little to the point I make here: even if Bourdieu sought to reconstruct his trajectory differently as a series of surprising turning points and emphasised in the process social settings rather than individual commitments, he still fell in the trap of what he calls the biographical illusion. Saying that the subject is shaped by (changing) contexts does not alter the fact that meaning and purpose are established through narrating one’s life.

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⁴¹ Elsewhere I have made the argument that this phenomenological problem compels us to place agency at the centre of our methodology in order to move away from the idea of structural determination. Knafo, ‘Critical approaches’.

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⁴⁴ This move essentially leads Bourdieu to take phenomenology out of the equation by assuming that there is nothing specific about the question of how an object presents itself to a subject. The outcome is then a superficial solution for the gaze of the author is not captured through this process of bending over backwards. It is simply transferred to another level as it now looks upon the object of research and an objectified self. For this reason, the subject object relationship cannot be solved by treating the subject as an object, for you still need a subject to look upon the new assemblage. In this respect, Hamati-Ataya fails to recognise that a similar critique as the one she so effectively addresses to autobiography to this effect also applies to her own Bourdieusian project of objectifying the objectification. Hamati-Ataya, Inanna, ‘Transcending objectivism, subjectivism, and the knowledge in-between: the subject in/of “strong reflexivity”’, Review of International Studies, 40:1 (2014), pp. 153–175CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁷ Madsen, ‘Reflexivity and the construction of the international object’.

⁴⁸ This is not to deny that reflexivity can be a means to conduct empirical research as international sociologists wish to do, but rather to emphasise that when it comes to empirical research, they have little left to specify what is reflexive about their work, by comparison to any other empirical work.

⁴⁹ Pouliot, International Security.

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⁵¹ When Bourdieu seeks to address more technical matters, such as the issue of interviewing, it is striking how much of what he writes places the onus on disposition rather than concrete methodological techniques once more reflecting the optimism of a scholars confident in his own judgement rather than challenging it. See Bourdieu, Pierre, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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⁵⁷ Grenfell, Michael, Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 129Google Scholar.

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⁶¹ This is a point that Skinner makes, for example, with the notion of virtù in Machiavelli. See Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume One: The Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

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⁷⁰ See, by the author of this article, ‘The fetishizing subject of Marx’s capital’, Capital and Class, 76 (2002), pp. 183–213.

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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