Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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with Marxism – were all concerned with developing a theory of superstructures or ideological domination, and therefore most convergent with what lies at the centre of Bourdieu’s opus: the theory of symbolic domination. These theorists also had important things to say about intellectuals and the public face of social science, and here too there was much to debate, as Bourdieu was – and still is – the pre-eminent public sociologist of our era. Like Marxist theory, Bourdieu was always concerned with the relation of theory and practice.
Still, this was South Africa, and even if Marxism had more currency here than in other parts of the world, it was nonetheless flagging; and, moreover, Bourdieu’s concerns with symbolic domination seemed removed from the South African situation, where physical violence seemed far more salient – something about which Bourdieu has little to say beyond some of his early writings on Algeria. My original intention was to try and show the significance of Bourdieu to the New South Africa; this was, after all, a time of the struggles between African National Congress Youth leader Julius Malema and Congress of South African Trade Unions president Zwelinzima Vavi, struggles that might be seen as precisely open warfare of a symbolic kind, with Vavi even calling for a ‘lifestyle audit’ for Malema – effectively questioning the basis of ruling-class ‘distinction’, a questioning that would be difficult to imagine in France, with its settled symbolic order. It was also the time of preparation for the FIFA Soccer World Cup, a spectacle if ever there were one that absorbed the attention of the entire population, masking the real interests at play. Again, the symbolic world of post-apartheid South Africa could not be disregarded. Still, it could be argued that Bourdieu’s significance might be the non-applicability of his ideas to South Africa, i.e. that his ideas are irrevocably Northern or French.
The eight conversations held over a period of six weeks in February and March 2010 brought in crowds from different quarters of the university, and each presentation was followed by heated exchanges. They were made all the more interesting by Karl von Holdt, who consistently defended Bourdieu against Marxist detractors, showing how his ideas do have validity in South Africa. My own attempt to incorporate South Africa into these conversations proved to be paltry and wooden, and so when it came to writing up the lectures, I invited Karl to respond with his own reflections. He has done this in an exceptional manner, in a sense returning Bourdieu to where he began his sociological life – Africa. After all, many of Bourdieu’s abiding ideas are taken from his interpretation of the Kabyle kinship society in Algeria. It was from his studies of the Kabyle that he developed the notions of symbolic capital, misrecognition, habitus, male domination and so forth. Bourdieu applied these ideas to French society, and Karl has now taken them back to Africa, pointing to the symbolic dimensions of township violence, the power of the concept of habitus, the disciplinary mode of education and the place of intellectuals in contemporary South Africa.
If I presented a rather arid conversation between Bourdieu and Marxism, Karl has extended the conversational mode to one between Northern and Southern theory, but based on more than three decades of engaged research and contestation in education, labour and community. Karl brings to the forefront a subordinate register in Bourdieu’s writings, the dimensions of struggle, crisis and social transformation. He does not, however, engage Bourdieu’s writings as a combat sport and he does not dismiss or ignore either myself or Bourdieu, but uses Bourdieu to construct a dialogue about the South Africa of yesterday, today and tomorrow. So we now offer a set of conversations on conversations in the hope of sparking further debate and discussion about the trajectory of South Africa, about the continuing vitality of Marxism and about the relevance of Bourdieu’s thought to different contexts.
These conversations have benefitted from many other conversations with colleagues and students: in Berkeley with Xiuying Cheng, Fareen Parvez, Gretchen Purser, Dylan Riley, Ofer Sharone, Cihan Tuǧal, and Loïc Wacquant, whose boot camp course opened my eyes to the enormity of Bourdieu’s achievements; in Madison with Erik Wright, Gay Seidman, Mara Loveman and Matt Nichter; and in Johannesburg with Bridget Kenny, Oupa Lehoulere, Peter Alexander, Irma du Plessis, Prishani Naidoo, Michelle Williams, Vish Satgar, Eric Worby, Shireen Ally, Tina Uys, Andries Bezuidenhout, Sonja Narunsky-Laden, Ahmed Veriava and Jackie Cock. Especial thanks to Jeff Sallaz, who gave me detailed commentary on both the Madison and the Johannesburg Conversations with Bourdieu, and to an anonymous second reviewer who also gave us excellent comments on the draft manuscript. I have tried to address their criticisms and suggestions in the book. Last, but not least, for the past 45 years I have had the good fortune of listening to, learning from and living with two great interpreters of South Africa – Luli Callinicos and Eddie Webster – and it is to them that I dedicate these conversations.
PROLOGUE
The Johannesburg Moment
KARL VON HOLDT
Forty years ago, in the early 1970s, Durban experienced a ferment of new ideas that were to profoundly shape resistance to apartheid. The central figures in this ferment were two charismatic intellectuals, Steve Biko and Rick Turner. Biko and his comrades founded the Black Consciousness movement and its organisational forms, the South African Students’ Organisation and the Black People’s Convention, from which emerged a new generation of political activists who went on to organise trade unions, community organisations and the United Democratic Front. Rick Turner’s ideas about participatory democracy and the projects he initiated to support a nascent black trade union movement, partly in response to the challenge of Black Consciousness, influenced many of those who contributed to the building of the trade union movement.
The Durban ferment was not only about the ideas of intellectuals; it was also about a shift in popular consciousness. In 1973 some 100,000 workers participated in a wave of strikes in Durban, breaking with the quiescence of the 1960s. By the end of the decade both Biko and Turner had been killed by the Security Police. Their ideas, however, continued to shape the resistance movement in different ways throughout the 1980s.
This was what Tony Morphet – drawing on Raymond Williams’s idea of a structure of feeling – called the ‘Durban moment’, constituted by profound shifts in ideas and consciousness among intellectuals and workers, and setting off far-reaching reverberations across South Africa, way beyond the immediate locale of Durban (Morphet, 1990: 92–93; Webster, 1993).
That was the Durban moment. This book is subtitled ‘the Johannesburg moment’. What do we mean by this?
At the simplest level, the title is a reference to the fact that the book grew out of a series of lectures on Pierre Bourdieu, the great French sociologist, given at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2010. The significance of the reference to place is not simply that the lectures took place here, but that they presented an occasion for interrogating the relevance of Bourdieu’s work to South Africa – and, more importantly, confronting the meaning of South Africa for Bourdieu’s theory. It is through exploring the significance of this interrogation and confrontation that we can arrive at some sense of the possible meaning of a ‘Johannesburg moment’.
In contrast to the Durban moment, the Johannesburg moment is a post-apartheid moment; that is to say, it is a moment of political rupture with apartheid – a moment of the new Constitution, democracy, reconstruction and transformation.
Yet in our book – which presents a multilayered conversation, not only between Bourdieu and an array of interlocutors presented by Michael, not only between ‘Johannesburg’ and Bourdieu, but also between Michael and myself – I argue that this place (Johannesburg and its hinterland) is distinguished by a fractious and turbulent set of social contestations, both small and large, over the shape of an emerging social order in post-apartheid South Africa. So sharp is this contestation, so multi-centred and diverse, that we may speak of multiple local moral orders, a social fragmentation and a profound disordering of society, which are evident in many different ways, among them an argument deep in the heart of our society over the meaning of ‘law’ and ‘order’.
Thus, from the start, the Johannesburg moment is one that disrupts the stark binary of oppression and freedom and the comforting trajectory of transformation and reconstruction. Nor should we imagine that such arguments and contestations take place only on the far peripheries of our city, in places like Trouble (discussed in the main body of the book), from which its towering