Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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SYMBOLIC DOMINATION: FROM WEAK TO strong
Marx’s strong sense of social transformation is accompanied by a weak theory of symbolic domination, in contrast to Bourdieu’s strong theory of social reproduction, at the heart of which is symbolic domination. Still, there remains an uncanny convergence in the way they both conceive of symbolic domination. Let us return to The German Ideology and to the much-quoted passage on ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 172; emphasis added).
Here, Marx and Engels advance from a dismissal of ideology (in contradistinction to science) to the real effects of those illusory ideas in sustaining the domination of the dominant class. We do not know, however, what they intended when they wrote that the dominated class, i.e. those who don’t have access to the means of mental production, are subject to the ruling ideas. Bourdieu takes up the issue and sees subjection as deep and almost irreversible:
Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make this relation appear as natural; or, in other words, when the schemes they implement in order to perceive and evaluate themselves or to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/female, white/black, etc.) are the product of the incorporation of the (thus neutralized) classifications of which their social being is the product (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 170).
The parallels are astonishing, except that Bourdieu puts symbolic violence at the centre of his account. For Marx, of course, symbolic violence does not only originate from the superstructure, but is powerfully present within the economic base itself. Exploitation itself is mystified by the very character of production, which hides the distinction between necessary and surplus labour, since workers appear to be paid for the entire work day. Participation in the market leads to commodity fetishism wherein the objects we buy and sell and those we consume are disconnected from the social relations and human labour necessary to produce them. Again, the essence of capitalism is mystified.
For Marx, however, these expressions of ideology – whether ideology is understood as ruling ideas or as lived experience – are dissolved through class struggle, leading the working class to see the truth of capitalism, on the one hand, and their role in transforming it, on the other:
It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality, and what in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its goal and its historical action are prefigured in the most clear and ineluctable way in its own life-situation as well as in the whole organization of contemporary bourgeois society. There is no need to harp on the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is continually working to bring this consciousness to full clarity (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 134–35).
This optimistic teleology is deeply flawed. For the proletariat to rid itself of the ‘the muck of ages’, as Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology (1978 [1845–46]: 193), is not so easy. Only under unusual circumstances does class struggle assume an ascendant path, intensifying itself as it expands. On the contrary: through its victories, through the concessions it wins, its revolutionary tempo is dampened and its struggles come to be organised, most frequently within the framework of capitalism. In this, the state, under-theorised by Marx, plays a key role. In such a context, the symbolic violence of dominant ideologies incorporated in lived experience prevails over the cathartic effect of struggle.
Bourdieu indicts the whole Marxist tradition – and not just Marx – for its revolutionary optimism, labelling it an intellectualist fantasy or scholastic illusion, and then bends the stick in the opposite direction:
And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe resistance to domination in the language of consciousness – as does the whole Marxist tradition and also the feminist theorists who, giving way to habits of thought, expect political liberation to come from the ‘raising of consciousness’ – ignoring the extraordinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of practices. While making things explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing process of countertraining, involving repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform habitus (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 172).
What this ‘countertraining’ might look like is never elaborated. Whether class struggle might be a form of ‘countertraining’ is especially unclear, because Bourdieu never entertains the idea of class struggle or even allows for ‘collective resistance’ to the dominant culture. The working classes are driven by the exigencies of material necessity, leading them to make a virtue out of a necessity. They embrace their functional lifestyle rather than reject the dominant culture. An alternative culture remains beyond their grasp, because they have neither the tools nor the leisure to create it (Bourdieu, 1984 [1979]: chap. 7).
Having thus written off the working classes as incapable of grasping the conditions of their oppression, Bourdieu is compelled to look elsewhere for ways of contesting symbolic domination. Having broken from a fallacious logic of theory to the logic of practice and having discovered that the logic of practice is no less fallacious, he breaks back to the logic of theory, to the emancipatory science of sociology and to struggles within the dominant class. Let us follow his argument.
FROM CLASS STRUGGLE TO CLASSIFICATION STRUGGLE
In his writings on the period 1848–51 in France, Marx has a complex analysis of the struggles among the fractions of the dominant class that cannot be summarised here. Suffice to say that intellectuals played a significant role. In a succinct paragraph in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote of a cleavage within the dominant classes, between its economic part and its intellectual part, as follows:
The division of labour ... manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and manual labour, so that inside this class one part appears as thinkers of the class (its active conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of the class and have less time to make up the illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 173).
Without referring to Marx, Bourdieu calls these the dominant and dominated fractions of the dominant class, giving the latter a ‘chiastic’ structure in which one part is well endowed with economic capital (and relatively low in cultural capital), while the other is well endowed with cultural capital (and relatively low in economic capital). Bourdieu, too, recognises the conflict between the two fractions, but casts that conflict in terms of struggles over categories of representation – so-called classification struggles. Recognising that intellectuals are the source of ruling ideology – ‘the illusion of the class about itself’ – Bourdieu also sees the possibility of their generating a symbolic revolution that can shake the ‘deepest structures of the social order’:
Likewise, the arts and literature can no doubt offer the dominant agents some very powerful instruments of legitimation, either directly, through the celebration they confer, or indirectly, especially through the cult they enjoy, which also consecrates its celebrants. But it can also happen that artists or writers are, directly or indirectly, at the origin of large-scale symbolic revolutions (like the bohemian lifestyle in the nineteenth century, or, nowadays,