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This paper presents a particular understanding of Bourdieu's social theory and the place of language within it, in response to Susen's depiction of these matters in his “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”. Bourdieu's understanding of language is argued to be overly derivative and too dependent upon conventional assumptions of late twentieth-century thought. Conversely, allegations of “determinism” in Bourdieu's social theory are rebutted as being too often glib and unquestioningly rooted in liberal assumptions about human “creativity”. It is argued that Bourdieu's social theory could in fact be construed of as not being determinist enough, an appraisal hardly ever entertained by social theorists today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that Simon Susen’s “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation” does not sufficiently acknowledge that Bourdieu’s work is always “conjunctural”, a consequence of his “position-taking” as an individual and intellectual. It examines in detail the historical context between 1972 and 1982 of most of Bourdieu’s texts considered a-historically by Susen. It suggests that Susen’s analysis wrongly attempts to situate Bourdieu as a philosopher of language, rather than as a socio-linguist. Although he differentiates Bourdieu from Habermas in showing that Bourdieu emphasizes the social context of linguistic exchanges, Susen does not follow Bourdieu in applying this contextualization to his own practice, with the result that he strangely approves of Bourdieu almost in terms established by Habermas, rather than in the terms set by Bourdieu himself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]