The dialogue is a crafted scene and therefore marked [HYPOTHESE].

Teaser

I stage an extended conversation between Didier Eribon, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault on social friction—how it testifies to social ties and, handled well, drives transformation.

Framing (method)

I triangulate three lenses: biographical injury and class return (Eribon), habitus/field and symbolic violence (Bourdieu), and discipline/governmentality/subjectivation (Foucault). The scene below condenses their arguments into a single dialogue to clarify where frictions come from and how they can be made productive. [HYPOTHESE]

The Roundtable: Eribon × Bourdieu × Foucault [HYPOTHESE]

1) Naming the wound

Eribon: “Friction begins as experience: the accent mocked, the school corridor where you learn your place, the family you leave to ‘make it’ and the shame that trails you. When I ‘returned to Reims’, I found not just people but judgments sedimented in me. Social friction is the trace of these judgments—and the chance to counter-judge together.”

Bourdieu: “Call that symbolic violence: domination recognized as legitimate by dominator and dominated alike. The hurt feels private because the habitus—our embodied history—agrees with the world it misrecognizes. Friction erupts when the world changes faster than dispositions: hysteresis.”

Foucault: “And note the devices that make wounds reproducible: exams, files, timetables, dashboards. These are disciplinary techniques; they shape bodies and make comparisons possible. Friction is a contact point where such techniques meet resistant lives.”

2) Class, sexuality, and the politics of voice

Eribon: “Humiliation is never only classed or only sexual; it is the interface of both. Friction becomes political when those who share injuries create a vocabulary and a venue to speak.”

Bourdieu: “Speech alone rarely suffices. In the field of the university or workplace, what counts is capital—economic, cultural, social—plus the rules of the game. Voice needs institutional footholds: scholarships that change life chances, not merely charters that praise diversity.”

Foucault: “Yet inventing a new form of speaking is already a change in government: a counter-conduct. When a department replaces individual evaluations with anonymous collective review, the conduct of conduct shifts. Speech and rule co-constitute each other.”

3) Metrics, merit, and the manufacture of friction

Foucault: “Our era governs through metrics; the subject is induced to self-measure. Friction multiplies when dashboards become norms.”

Bourdieu: “Metrics are not neutral; they are field effects. They reweight capitals—often devaluing tacit knowledge and relational labor. Friction then signals a misfit between what the field rewards and what the practice requires.”

Eribon: “And for those with fragile trajectories, metrics re-activate shame. The same graph tells some they belong and others they never will. A humane reform would separate feedback from stigmatization.”

4) Institutions that hurt—and how they might help

Foucault: “Ask which routines produce docility: surveillance emails, forced visibility, spatial arrangements. Replace some with trust-producing devices: rotated chairing, time-bounded observation, clear appeal routes.”

Bourdieu: “And measure whether the distribution of capital actually changes. Do new rules shift who advances? If not, we have improved the script but not the game.”

Eribon: “Do not forget biographies. Offer places where people can narrate injury safely and translate it into claims—scholarships, recruitment reforms, protected time. Without this, reforms leave humiliation intact.”

5) Where they converge—my synthesis

They agree that friction is evidence of contact between dispositions, institutions, and power techniques; it becomes a motor when:

• Injuries are named and collectivized (Eribon),
• Fields and capitals are mapped and adjusted (Bourdieu),
• Governing routines are redesigned to enable dissent and dignity (Foucault).

Triangulation Map (expanded)

• Biographical injuries (Eribon): shame, class/sexual judgment → create venues for voice and counter-judgment.
• Practice & field (Bourdieu): habitus, capital mix, hysteresis → align rewards with necessary practice; build conversion paths between capitals.
• Power techniques (Foucault): surveillance, examination, normalization → swap punitive visibility for licensed disagreement and reversible experiments.

Practice heuristics (extended)

1. Name the machine, not the person: treat humiliation as a social device before “fixing” individuals.
2. Do a field audit: who has which capitals, which are convertible here, and which rules convert them?
3. Metric minimalism: keep only the measures that improve practice; kill the ones that manufacture shame.
4. Rotate power: chairs, reviewers, minute-takers; distribute visibility and discretion.
5. Hysteresis fixes: when fields change, provide bridging scaffolds (mentoring, tacit knowledge exchanges).
6. Collective testimony: institutionalize safe storytelling so biographies become evidence for reform.
7. Counter-conduct pilots: time-boxed, reversible trials (anonymous grading, no-meeting days, student-run colloquia).
8. Outcome check: did reforms alter trajectories (admissions, promotions) or only the rhetoric?

Interdisciplinary bridge

• Sociology: organizational fields, inequality regimes, institutional ethnography.
• Social psychology: humiliation, status threat, identity repair; design for psychological safety without denial of power.
• Philosophy: ethics of recognition and freedom; critique of domination and practices of the self.

Transparency & Ethics

• AI co-author: I use AI to support synthesis and drafting; I decide what is published and take responsibility.
• Empirical material: The dialogue is constructed and marked [HYPOTHESE].
• Privacy & contact: See Imprint/Privacy.

Literature (APA) — publisher-first links

• Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. Outline of a Theory of Practice. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
• Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. Distinction. (hup.harvard.edu)
• Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press. Pascalian Meditations. (Stanford University Press)
• Eribon, D. (2013). Returning to Reims (trans. M. Lucey). Semiotext(e). Returning to Reims. (Semiotext(e))
• Eribon, D. (2004). Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Duke University Press. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. (Duke University Press)
• Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. A. Sheridan). Vintage / Penguin Random House. Discipline and Punish. (PenguinRandomhouse.com)
• Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (trans. R. Hurley). Vintage / Penguin Random House. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. (PenguinRandomhouse.com)
• Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Palgrave Macmillan. Security, Territory, Population. (Macmillan Publishers)

Sociology Brain Teasers (advanced)

1. Humiliation loop: Trace one routine in your institution that replays humiliation. Which tweak would break the loop without sacrificing coordination?
2. Capital conversion: Identify a form of cultural capital currently unrewarded (mentoring, translation work). Design a rule that converts it into recognized merit.
3. Metric side-effects: Drop two metrics for a month. Predict and then measure the effect on practice quality and status threat.
4. Hysteresis diary: Ask five colleagues to log moments of misfit between ingrained habits and new rules. What patterns emerge?
5. Counter-conduct trial: Run a reversible change (anonymous submissions, rotating chair). Specify falsification criteria: what would count as failure?
6. Voice architecture: Build a testimony protocol that protects narrators from secondary exposure. What institutional promise will you attach to it?
7. Field shift indicator: Choose one indicator that would show the field’s hierarchy genuinely moved (not just its rhetoric).
8. Double diagnosis: Analyse the same case with Eribon (injury/voice), Bourdieu (field/capital), and Foucault (technique/governance). Which remedy do you implement first, and why?

Prompt (publishable version)

“Expand the Eribon–Bourdieu–Foucault roundtable on ‘social friction’ for the Social Friction blog. Keep first-person framing; mark the dialogue as [HYPOTHESE]. Deepen exchanges on humiliation/voice (Eribon), habitus/field/hysteresis (Bourdieu), and discipline/governmentality (Foucault). Add concrete institutional examples (metrics, exams, dashboards), an expanded triangulation map, eight practice heuristics, an advanced set of eight brain teasers, APA references with publisher-first links, and the standard transparency note plus internal link to /imprint-privacy/. Maintain the orange house style.”

Check log

Status: Version 1.1 (expanded dialogue).
Checks: First-person voice; [HYPOTHESE] marking; APA list with publisher-first links; internal /imprint-privacy/ link; aligns with Social Friction article pattern.