Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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Bourdieu settles his scores with his own philosophical antecedents. Both condemn philosophy’s disposition to dismiss practical engagement with the world. As Marx writes in the first Thesis on Feuerbach, the German philosophers elevate the theoretical attitude as the ‘only genuinely human attitude’, while practice is only conceived in ‘its dirty-judaical manifestation’. Bourdieu’s immersion in the Algerian war of independence and his experience of the raw violence of colonialism made nonsense of his philosophical training at the École Normale Supérieure.
Still, Pascalian Meditations is Bourdieu’s culminating theoretical work in which Pascal is presented as an inspirational philosophical break with philosophy, centring the importance of the practice of ordinary people, emphasising symbolic power exercised over the body and refusing pure philosophy emanating from the heads of philosophers. The German Ideology, by contrast, is not a culminating work, but an originating work that clears the foundations for Marx’s theory of historical materialism and materialist history. The different titles reflect their different location in the biography of each of their authors, but the argument against philosophy is, nonetheless, surprisingly similar.
Let us begin with Marx and Engels scoffing at the Young Hegelians who think they are making history, when they are but counter-posing one phrase to another:
As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy … has developed into a universal ferment into which all the ‘powers of the past’ are swept. … It was a revolution besides which the French Revolution was child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity and in the three years 1842–45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries. All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 147).
Here is Bourdieu’s attack on modern and postmodern philosophers:
Now, if there is one thing that our ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ philosophers have in common, beyond the conflicts that divide them, it is this excessive confidence in the powers of language. It is the typical illusion of the lector, who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 2).
The argument is the same: we must not confuse a war of words with the transformation of the real world, the things of logic with the logic of things.
But how is it that philosophers mistake their own world for the real world? The answer lies in the fact that they are oblivious to the social and economic conditions under which they produce knowledge. For Marx, it is simply the division of mental from manual labour that permits the illusion that ideas or consciousness drives history:
Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 159; emphasis added).
Emancipated from manual labour, upon which their existence nevertheless rests, philosophers imagine that history is moved by their thought. ‘It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers’, Marx and Engels (1978 [1845–46]: 149) write, ‘to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.’ In identical fashion, Bourdieu argues that philosophers fail to understand the peculiarity of the material conditions that make it possible to produce ‘pure’ theory:
But there is no doubt nothing more difficult to apprehend, for those who are immersed in universes in which it goes without saying, than the scholastic disposition demanded by those universes. There is nothing that ‘pure’ thought finds it harder to think than skholè, the first and most determinant of all the social conditions of possibility of ‘pure’ thought, and also the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 12).
The scholastic disposition calls forth the illusion that knowledge is freely produced and that it is not the product of specific material conditions. Bourdieu does not limit his critique of the scholastic fallacy – i.e. repression of the conditions peculiar to intellectual life – to philosophers, but broadens it to other disciplines. He criticises anthropologists, such as Lévi-Strauss, and economists for universalising their own particular experience, foisting their abstract models onto the recalcitrant practice of ordinary mortals. Only sociologists, reflexively applying sociology to themselves and, more generally, to the production of knowledge, can potentially appreciate the scholastic fallacy of others, and the necessary separation of theory and practice.
In Bourdieu’s eyes – and here I am imputing an argument to Bourdieu that, as far as I know, he never made – Marx contravenes his own critique of idealism and becomes the perpetrator of a scholastic fallacy. He is guilty of inventing the idea of the proletariat that carries the burden of humanity by fighting against dehumanisation to realise another scholastic invention – communism – a world community populated by renaissance individuals, rich in needs and varied in talents. These ideals are but the projection of the intellectuals’ sense of alienation from their own conditions of existence. Real workers, Bourdieu would argue, are only concerned to better their material conditions of existence, bereft of such lofty Marxian dreams. Just as Bourdieu could turn Marx against Marx, so, as we will see, Marx could turn Bourdieu against Bourdieu. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that both Marx and Bourdieu insist on a break with the logic of theory by turning to the logic of practice.
FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO COEXISTING FIELDS
Out of these common critiques of philosophy arise divergent social theories. Since Bourdieu’s social theory is so clearly a response to Marx, we should begin with the latter. For Marx, the logic of practice refers to economic practice, understood as the concrete social relations into which men and women enter as they transform nature. These social relations form the mode of production with two components: the forces of production (relations through which men and women collaborate in producing the means of existence, including the mode of cooperation and the technology it deploys) and the relations of production (the relations of exploitation through which surplus is extracted from a class of direct producers and appropriated by a dominant class). The mode of production gives rise to Marx’s three histories: (1) history as a succession of modes of production – tribal, ancient, feudal and capitalist; (2) history as the dynamics of any given mode of production as the relations of production first stimulate and then fetter the expansion of the forces of production – a theory that Marx only works out for capitalism; and (3) history as the history of class struggle that propels the movement from one mode of production to another when the material conditions of such a transition are met. Capitalism gives way to communism, which, being without classes and thus without exploitation, is not a mode of production. The key to history lies in the mode of production, but it is only within the capitalist mode of production that the direct producers, i.e. the working class, through their struggles come to recognise their role as agents of revolution.
Bourdieu will have no truck with such economic reductionism, such a theory of history and of the future, this projection of intellectual fantasies onto the benighted working class. But let us proceed step by step. When Bourdieu turns to the ‘logic of practice’, he goes beyond economic activities to embrace activities in all arenas of life, and furthermore those activities are seen less in terms of ‘transformation’ and more in terms of bodily practices that lead to and evolve from the constitution of the habitus, the inculcation of dispositions of perception and appreciation. Here is how Bourdieu defines habitus in Outline of a Theory of Practice:
The habitus, the durably