Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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capable of shaking the deepest structures of the social order, such as family structures, through transformation of the fundamental principles of division of the vision of the world (such as male/female opposition) and the corresponding challenges to the self-evidences of common sense (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 105).
It is not clear whether this ‘shaking’ will actually undermine the domination of the dominant class; there is not even a hint that it will create opportunities for the dominated to challenge their subjugation. One has to ask, therefore, what are the interests that lie behind any such ‘symbolic revolution’?
As the dominated fraction of the dominant class, intellectuals are in a contradictory position. Certain parts may identify with the dominated classes and, indeed, try to represent the latter’s interests. As such, they may even pursue an agenda hostile to the dominant class as a whole. In the final analysis, however, it is an intellectualist illusion that they share interests with the dominated, as there is little basis for an enduring connection between intellectuals born out of skholé and workers born into material necessity.
Rather than turning to any presumed universalism from below, Bourdieu commits himself to what he calls the Realpolitik of reason, the pursuit of universality that is wired into the character of the state:
Those who, like Marx, reverse the official image that the State bureaucracy seeks to give of itself and describe the bureaucrats as usurpers of the universal, acting like private proprietors of public resources, are not wrong. But they ignore the very real effects of the obligatory reference to the values of neutrality and disinterested devotion to the public good which becomes more and more incumbent on state functionaries in the successive stages of the long labor of symbolic construction which leads to the invention and imposition of the official representation of the State as the site of universality and the service of the general interest (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 124).
In this remarkable passage, written at the very time he is attacking the French state for continuing to violate its public function, in which the (conservative) right hand of the state is displacing the (socialist) left hand, when the state is openly pursuing an aggressive assault on the working class, Bourdieu is also appealing to its ‘disinterested devotion to the public good’ that will, he claims, eventually assert itself against the state’s usurpers. In the long run, therefore, the state will become the carrier of the general interest, but how?
The idea of universality will not prevail simply because it is an attractive ideal – that would be the worst form of idealism – but because there are certain fields that by their very functioning, by virtue of their internal struggles, give rise to a commitment to the universal:
In reality, if one is not, at best, to indulge in an irresponsible utopianism, which often has no other effect than to procure the short-lived euphoria of humanist hopes, almost always as brief as adolescence, and which produces effects quite as malign in the life of research as in political life, it is necessary I think to return to a ‘realistic’ vision of the universes in which the universal is generated. To be content, as one might be tempted, with giving the universal the status of a ‘regulatory idea’, capable of suggesting principles of action, would be to forget that there are universes in which it becomes a ‘constitutive’ immanent principle of regulation, such as the scientific field, and to a lesser extent the bureaucratic field and the judicial field; and that, more generally, as soon as the principles claiming universal validity (those of democracy, for example) are stated and officially professed, there is no longer any social situation in which they cannot serve at least as symbolic weapons in struggles of interests or as instruments of critique for those who have a self-interest in truth and virtue (like, nowadays, all those, especially in the minor state nobility, whose interests are bound up with universal advances associated with the State and with law) (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 127).
Let us recall that Bourdieu sets out on his journey with a critique of scholastic reason that misses the ways in which theoretical models, such as those of ‘rational choice’ or ‘deliberative democracy’, are but projections of the very specific conditions under which academic knowledge is produced. After turning from this fallacious logic of theory to the logic of practice and finding there only misrecognition, Bourdieu returns to the same universalities produced in the scientific, legal and bureaucratic fields, universalities that he had earlier called into question as scholastic fallacies – the product of the peculiar circumstances of their production. But now he turns to them as the source of hope for humanity.
We are back with the Enlightenment, with Hegel’s view of the state criticised by Marx as portraying a false universality that masks the interests of the dominant class by presenting them as the interests of all. Not just Marx, but Weber too saw the danger that such universality would become a formal rationality and, thus, the perfection of domination. We can see this Enlightenment faith in Bourdieu’s proposals for an International of intellectuals, recognising that they are a corporate body with their own interests, but at the same time regarding them as the carriers of universalism and forming a corporatism of the universal. They are what Alvin Gouldner (1979) calls a flawed universal class. Bourdieu was not only organising intellectuals, but paradoxically he was also to be found on the picket lines of striking workers, haranguing them about the evils of neoliberalism – even as he claimed they could not understand the conditions of their own oppression. No different from the people he studied, he too created a gap between his theory and his practice, especially when his theory led him into a political cul-de-sac.
CONCLUSION
Marx and Bourdieu set out from similar positions, but they end up in divergent places. They both start out as critics of intellectualist illusions or scholastic fallacies that privilege the role of ideas in the making of history. They both move to the logic of practice, but where Marx remains wedded to this logic, seeing in it a future emancipation realised through working-class revolution, Bourdieu sees it as a cul-de-sac mired in domination. So he breaks away from the logic of practice back to the practice of logic and to a faith in reason, whether embodied in an International of intellectuals or the universality of the state. In short, if Bourdieu starts out as a critic of philosophy and ends up as a Hegelian, believing in the universality of reason, Marx also starts out as a critic of philosophy, but ends up with material production, but no considered place for intellectuals or for himself. Marx cannot explain how he produced his theory of capitalism, sitting in the British Museum removed from the working class and writing in a place remote from their experiences. We are on the horns of a dilemma: intellectuals without the subaltern or the subaltern without intellectuals.
Each recognises the dilemma and, in his practice, each breaks with his theory: Bourdieu joins workers as allies in the struggle against the state, while Marx battles with intellectuals as though the fate of the world depended on it. Can we bring theory and practice closer together? Gramsci, with his theory of hegemony and intellectuals, seeks to do just that, trying to transcend the theoretical opposition: faith in the subaltern, on the one hand, and in intellectuals, on the other. In the next conversation, we will see how he fares, and where this will leave Bourdieu.
KARL VON HOLDT
Bodies of Defiance
Bourdieu is interested in the subordinated body that the subaltern habitus predisposes to manual labour, as well as to deference, humility and a physical stance of submission. This immediately poses the question of the body in resistance. The body on strike is already a body of defiance, refusing the routines of subordination and of the supervisor’s instruction, disrupting authority. Striking workers today chant songs with their roots in the freedom songs of the 1980s, dance the toyi-toyi war dance that originated in the military camps of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and carry sticks that they understand to symbolise acts of fighting or war.
Where does this – the refusal, the defiance – fit into the idea of habitus, which predisposes the dominated to find domination invisible and submit to it? Nor does the body of resistance only come into being at the moment of explicit collective mobilisation. In my study of workers’ struggles at Highveld Steel in the apartheid era, workers talked about a continual resistance to the pace of white managers and their machinery, about an ‘apartheid go-slow’ on the part of African workers. Workers at the Daimler-Benz plant in East London wore wooden AK-47s strapped