Bourdieu, Language and “Determinism”: A Reply to Simon Susen.

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]