The links between teaching and literatures were a recurrent focus of Bourdieu's thought from the 1960s. Indeed, for much of his writing that nexus appears as a target. Literatures are understood within these domains of his thought in a composite manner, both in the sense of pedagogical corpuses serving class-and nation-based cultural strategies, and as the products of strategies of ‘distinction’ within increasingly self-conscious and relatively autonomous fractions of an artistic ‘field’ (the relations between these two dimensions are also explored by Bourdieu). The posture Bourdieu adopts in this regard is external or ‘objectifying’: he is the ‘scientist’ of a society’s serious ‘games’ whose invisible mechanisms need ‘explicating’. But Bourdieu is himself implicated in a rather different kind of relation to a ‘literature’ derived from the processes evoked above but apprehended in a different mode. This relation is largely unthematized as such in his work, but is a constant feature of his thinking practice. Literature here signifies something like a precipitation of dislocated textual fragments whose current status is uncertain (not scientific, not documentary, not immediately instrumental), but which condition and enable certain kinds of perception. Bourdieu, the product of a certain kind of education and self-education, carries them around with him: they are ingrained into his disposition (his habitus). They draw out (educt) his understanding in particular ways.