Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]: 78).
The habitus generates practices that, like moves in a game, are regulated by the regularities of the social structure and in so doing they reproduce these structures. But practices and knowledge are bound together by the body whose importance the intellectualist vision misses. The social order inscribes itself in bodies; that is to say, we learn bodily and express our knowledge bodily – all under the organising power of the habitus, itself largely unconscious.
The notion of habitus gives much greater weight and depth to the individual, who in Marx is simply the effect or carrier of social relations. Nevertheless, in the account of these social relations, Bourdieu’s notion of field draws on and generalises certain features of Marx’s concept of mode of production, or at least his conception of the capitalist mode of production elaborated in Capital. Indeed, underlining the parallels, Bourdieu refers to the political economy of symbolic goods (science, art, education). As with the capitalist mode of production, so with the notion of field, individuals are compelled to enter relations of competition in order to accumulate capital according to the rules of the marketplace. Bourdieu’s fields have the same character, each having their own distinctive ‘capital’ that agents seek to accumulate, bound by rules of competition that give the field a certain functional integrity and relatively autonomous dynamics. If there is any overall historical tendency of fields, it is toward the concentration of field-specific capital, as when Bourdieu (1975) writes of the scientific field as being dominated by those who increasingly monopolise scientific capital.
However, there are fundamental differences between Marx and Bourdieu. In Bourdieu’s field, most fully elaborated for the literary field in Rules of Art (Bourdieu, 1996 [1992]), but also in his account of the scientific field, the notion of exploitation, so essential to Marx, is absent. Instead we have a field of domination governing the struggle between the consecrated incumbents and the new challengers, the avant-garde. It is as if capitalism were confined to just the competition among capitalists, which is, of course, how conventional economics thinks of the economy. Indeed, the only book Bourdieu devotes to the economy as such, The Social Structures of the Economy (2005), focuses on the role of habitus and taste in the matching of supply and demand for different types of housing. It is all about the social underpinnings of the housing market. There is no attempt to study housing from the standpoint of its production process – from the standpoint of construction workers, for example. The very concept that is definitive of the capitalist economy for Marx, namely exploitation, is absent in Bourdieu’s concept of the field.
More to the point, the architecture of fields is profoundly different in the two theories. In Marx, there is essentially just one major field – the capitalist mode of production with its inherent laws of competition leading to crises of overproduction and falling rates of profit, on the one hand, and the intensification of class struggle, on the other. The only thing holding back the demise of capitalism is its superstructure, composed of, you might say, a series of subsidiary fields – legal, political, religious, aesthetic and philosophical. Bourdieu transposes the base–superstructure model into a system of coexisting fields. Although the economic field is, in some undefined sense, still dominant and threatens the autonomy of other fields, Bourdieu pays attention to the inner workings of the ‘superstructure’ that in Marx is more or less dismissed as epiphenomenal.
No less fundamental is the way they conceive of the relation among fields. If Marx has a historical succession of economic fields, Bourdieu has a functional coexistence of fields. Bourdieu’s multiplication of coexisting fields poses a host of new problems with respect to the relations among fields, which is why one axis of differentiation and struggle within any field is over its autonomy/heteronomy with respect to other fields, usually the economic field. In his later writings, Bourdieu engages in a polemical defence of science and culture, education, and politics against the corrosive influence of the invading economy. The creation of the literary field in 19th-century France required the break from bourgeois literature, on the one hand, and social realism, on the other, to an autonomous literature-for-literature’s sake. But autonomy brings with it another kind of relation among fields, a relation of misrecognition. The autonomy of the educational field or of various cultural fields leads to the misrecognition of their contribution to the reproduction of relations in other fields, most notably class relations in the economic field. Whether in distinction or in reproduction, the pre-existence of class structure is taken as given and the focus is on how culture or education simultaneously secure and obscure class domination.
The coexistence of fields raises a further question: that of their effect on the action of individuals as they move across fields. In Marx, individuals are only studied in one field and there they act out the imperatives of the relations in which they are embedded. Bourdieu’s analysis is more complex, for he has to ask how individuals nurtured in one field behave in another field – how do students coming from peasant families (as opposed to the urban middle classes) behave within the educational sphere? Does it make no difference or is there something in their cultural capital or their habitus that makes them behave differently? Each field may have its logic, but sometimes the strength of the habitus that agents bring from another field – the peasant who comes to town – may lead to a tension, conflict or even rupture with the new order in what he calls a ‘misfiring’ of habitus. It is the durability of the habitus that can lead to what Bourdieu calls hysteresis – how an individual’s inherited and obdurate habitus inhibits adaptation to successive fields.
Bourdieu’s favourite example of hysteresis is the devaluation of educational credentials that, in his view, explains the student protest of May 1968. In Homo Academicus, Bourdieu (1988 [1984]) describes how the expansion of higher education created an oversupply of assistant lecturers whose upward mobility was consequently blocked. The ensuing tension between aspirations and opportunities not only affected the young assistants, but students more generally, who found that their degrees did not give them access to expected jobs. The result was a discordance between class habitus and the labour market in a number of fields simultaneously, so that their normally disparate temporal rhythms were synchronised, merging into a general crisis conducted in a singular public time and producing an historical event that suspended common sense.
This is a repotted version of the theory of relative deprivation that once informed so much social psychology and social movement theory. It does not take seriously the self-understanding of the actors, nor even the resources they have at their disposal. The disjuncture of habitus and field, expectation and opportunity, disposition and position is always a potential source of change, but we need to know when it leads to adjustment to the field, when it leads to innovation and when it leads to rebellion. In these regards, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus has little to offer – even less than Robert Merton’s (1968 [1947]) famous essay on social structure and anomie that more systematically examined the consequences of the gap between aspirations and possibilities, namely, rebellion, ritualism, retreatism, innovation and conformity. In Bourdieu’s hands, habitus remains a black box, yet one that is nonetheless essential to thinking about the effects of mobility between fields both on the individual and on the transformation of the fields themselves.
We can now put the two models side by side: Marx’s succession of modes of production through history with its problematic dynamics and transition, its unjustified linear progress to communism; and Bourdieu’s unspecified totality made up of coexisting and homologous fields with unexamined and untheorised interrelationships. If Marx’s totality is governed by a richly developed base and a weakly understood superstructure, Bourdieu’s unspecified history can at best be seen as the development of a differentiated set of fields with no mechanisms of propulsion, reminiscent of Durkheim’s or Spencer’s models of differentiation, or Weber’s coexisting value spheres. Thus, in Bourdieu’s account, the Kabyle form an undifferentiated society without the separate fields that characterise advanced societies, but there is no notion of how one gets from the undifferentiated to the differentiated society. Or, to put it even more crudely: if Marx’s theory of history is deeply flawed, Bourdieu has no theory of history, even