Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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current sociological Marxism in South Africa, dialogue between Marxism and Bourdieu, with his concentration on symbolic domination and the reproduction of social order, may contribute to the regeneration of South African Marxism, inviting it to rethink its assumptions and its ways of seeing.
There is something else as well. Bourdieu, with his emphasis on the construction of scholarly fields and on the necessity for reflexivity regarding scholarly practices, invites us to consider a matter to which we are too often blind: the racial structure of South African sociology and what this may mean for the nature of the analytical narratives it establishes.
The canonical authorities of South African sociology are virtually all white. It may be responded that the white authors of mainstream sociology are mostly progressive and Marxist, aligning themselves broadly with the interests of the oppressed and on the side of democracy. These points may be true as far as they go, but what is the significance of the racial structure of this field for the production of knowledge and the search for truth? Is it not necessarily the case that most white scholars, lacking the experience of racial oppression – and not only that, but experiencing the structures of racial oppression as dominants, and therefore as beneficiaries and protagonists of its symbolic violence – are likely to have a limited feel for its place in social reality and therefore in the scholarly analysis of social reality? To take this point further, white scholars have a direct stake, emotional as much as material, in continuing to underplay the significance of racial power.
And indeed, Marxist sociology (in contrast to the communism of the South African Communist Party) has tended to treat national oppression, racism and racial discrimination as epiphenomena in relation to the narrative of capitalist accumulation, class domination and class struggle – something that Marxism allows all too well. Thus, Black Consciousness and the national liberation movement were regarded with a profound scepticism: their focus on epiphenomena was an index of their petty bourgeois class base. In the 1970s many in the white student Left, rejected as ‘liberal’ by black students who were developing the theories and practices of Black Consciousness at the time, turned to Marxism and involvement in the fledging trade union movement (Ally, 2005). Progressive white scholars took an analogous turn in the scholarly field, writing against white liberal historiography, on the one hand, and the national liberation movement and its associated communist movement, on the other.
It is not only the question of race that is important, however; it is also a question of the extent to which the scholarly field reproduces the hegemony of the Western canon, and with it the symbolic violence of hegemonic rationality against the rest of the world – what Bourdieu calls the imperialism of reason. In this logic, South Africa becomes simply the local site of a global logic of development or, in its Marxist manifestation, of capitalist accumulation and reproduction. This question is not entirely separate from the racial one, since there are a multitude of reasons why white scholars with a settler background might feel more at ease reproducing the Western canon – in which Bourdieu, of course, is a towering figure – than seeking a position of critique founded in the ‘periphery’. What is required, in the words of Suren Pillay (2009), is not only a deracialisation of knowledge production, but its decolonisation.
The power of white scholars to define the stakes and rules of the scholarly field, and to shape its analytical narratives, its curricula and its themes may appear to be invisible, but is all too visible to many black students and staff. The symbolic violence of white seniority and authority is alive and replicated in the academy. The scholarly establishment may comfort itself that the new generation of black scholars and researchers will confine themselves to amplifying the sanctified narratives through their better ability to conduct research in townships and workplaces, but already they are subverting, contesting and reconstructing the dominant narratives.3 Race plays a critical part in this, as do new narratives about our colonial history and post-colonial reality, and a reconsideration of the canon itself, including Bourdieu. New forms of combat in the scholarly fields of sociology and its sister disciplines should therefore be anticipated and welcomed.
NOTES
1See the responses of Anderson (2002), Duneier (2002) and Newman (2002) to Wacquant’s (2002) attack on their work.
2There is, of course, an element of combat in Parsons too, for example, in the way he deals with Marx at a time when Marxism was enjoying a certain renaissance in US sociology: ‘[J]udged by the standards of the best contemporary social-science theory, Marxian theory is obsolete’ (1967: 132). Marx was a ‘social theorist whose work fell entirely within the nineteenth century … he belongs to a phase of development which has been superseded’ (1967: 135).
3For recent interventions, see Ally (2005), Buhlungu (2006), Naidoo (2010) and Pillay (2009).
CONVERSATION 2
THEORY AND PRACTICE
MICHAEL BURAWOY
Marx Meets Bourdieu
The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of the social world which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect – that it, more than any other, has created – is doubtless, today, the most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world to which it has, in times gone by, more than any other contributed.
Bourdieu (1991 [1984]: 251)
What is Bourdieu saying here? The historical success of Marxism is to have constituted the idea of class out of a bundle of attributes shared by an arbitrary assemblage of people, what he calls ‘class on paper’. Aided by parties, trade unions, the media and propaganda – an ‘immense historical labor of theoretical and practical invention, starting with Marx himself’ (Bourdieu, 1991 [1984]: 251) – Marxism effectively called forth the working class as a real actor in history, an actor that otherwise would have had only potential existence. However, Marxism did not see itself as constituting the working class, but as discovering and then reflecting the prior existence of an objective class that was destined to make history in its own image. Marxism did not have the tools to understand its own effect – ‘theory effect’ – without which there would be no ‘working class’. In short, Marxism did not comprehend its own power – the power of its symbols – and thus missed out on the importance of symbolic domination.
But why does Marxism constitute such a ‘powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 1991 [1984]: 251) now, if before it had been so successful? Here I conjecture the answer to be as follows. In failing to recognise the symbolic world, Marxism fails to anticipate the emergence of fields of symbolic production – fields of art, literature, science, journalism – that engender their own domination effects, overriding and countering Marxism’s symbolic power. Marxism cannot understand that a classification or representational struggle has to precede class struggle, i.e. classes have to be constituted symbolically before they can engage in struggle. Unable to compete in the classification struggle, Marxism loses its symbolic power and the working class retreats back to a class on paper, no longer the effective actor that it was. When the economic was being constituted as an autonomous field in 19th-century Europe, Marxism had a firm grasp of reality, but with the rise of cultural, scientific and bureaucratic fields, Marxism lost its grip on reality and its theory became retrograde.
Bourdieu never examines his claims about Marxism, but that is precisely what we will do, starting with Marx himself. I will let Marx respond through a dialogue with Bourdieu, taking as my point of departure their common critique of philosophy. From there I construct a conversation that reveals their divergent theories, showing how the one ends up in a materialist cul-de-sac and the other in an idealist cul-de-sac. Each breaks out of the prison he creates, but in ways he cannot explain, which becomes the paradox of the gap between theory and practice.
THE CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY
Uncanny parallels join Marx and Engels’ critique of the ‘German Ideology’ (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]) and Bourdieu’s critique of ‘scholastic reason’ in Pascalian Meditations (2000 [1997]). In The German Ideology,