Conversations with Bourdieu. Michael Burawoy
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theory so that it is better able to name our own world. Not only that, though: the point is to so rework theory that it enables a rethinking of the West, a renaming of what appears so solid and dominant. In short, the goal, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), is to provincialise Europe.
This is not a project that limits itself, or can limit itself, to Johannesburg or South Africa. The Johannesburg moment is linked to Mumbai, São Paulo, Istanbul, perhaps Cairo, perhaps Lagos, perhaps Beijing (Yongle, 2010), perhaps Moscow, other cities of the global South, or outside of the West, with the accumulated cultural and intellectual resources to undertake such projects. Indeed, Johannesburg is a latecomer to this scene – we have only recently won our political freedom – but we can draw on resources from our past. Explicit in the work of both Biko and Turner, for example, was a questioning of European ‘civilisation’.
Nor is the project limited to a set of questions about theory. These questions have urgent practical implications, and if we develop the wrong answers, the consequences could be disastrous. As an illustration, in the first decade of democracy, the ANC government adopted orthodox Western policy prescriptions regarding economic policy, and at the same time took a radically heterodox position on the nature of HIV and AIDS. The result was the deepening of both inequality and the ravages of disease in our society. If the opposite positions had been taken – medical orthodoxy and economic heterodoxy – South Africa might have found itself in a very different position today.
In this book, we begin a process of putting Western theory through the grinder of Johannesburg, probing and reconstructing it in a way that helps us understand our world and name it afresh. At least, that is our ambition. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether it is successful.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first of all like to express my huge gratitude to Michael for inviting me to participate in this project. It has been a wonderfully exciting and productive journey of exploration that totally disorganised my plans for the two years we have been working on it – but that is just another of the hazards of the Johannesburg moment. I would also like to thank my colleagues on the collaborative research project into collective violence embarked upon by the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation – Malose Langa, Sepetla Molapo, Kindiza Ngubeni, Adele Kirsten and Nomfundo Mogapi. I have drawn so much from this research, and from our continuing conversations about its meaning and implications, in my engagement with the work of Bourdieu and the other interlocutors in this book. I want especially to thank Adele Kirsten, my partner, for those many conversations over breakfast or tea in which I first tested some of the ideas that have gone into this book. I am grateful too to the colleagues who took the time to read and comment on various of the pieces I wrote for the book – Khayaat Fakier, Brahm Fleisch, Sarah Mosoetsa and Eddie Webster – as well as the wonderfully engaging audiences at Michael’s lecture series at Wits.
Belinda Bozzoli, deputy vice chancellor for research at the time; Tawana Kupe, dean of the Faculty of the Humanities; and the Faculty Research Committee all contributed to making Michael’s visit possible, while the award of a Mellon Distinguished Visitor’s Grant provided the necessary financial support and Christine Bischoff provided seamless organisation. I would particularly like to thank Veronica Klipp of Wits University Press for her enthusiastic response to the idea of this book, and the other members of her team – Melanie Pequeux, Alex Potter and Tshepo Neito – for so efficiently piloting the processes of production, editing and marketing. To Veronica and Darryl Accone, thanks for inviting me to present the opening address at the 2011 Mail & Guardian Literary Festival, so forcing me to present a trial run of the ideas that have gone into this prologue.
Publication of this book is also an occasion to acknowledge my friend and comrade, Moloantoa Molaba. I mourn his untimely death. We worked together as a team for so much of my research into violence and state functioning and our conversations about our experiences were so lively that I cannot think about what I have written in this book without remembering him. Lala ngoxolo, mtshana.
CONVERSATION 1
SOCIOLOGY AS A COMBAT SPORT
MICHAEL BURAWOY
Bourdieu Meets Bourdieu
I often say sociology is a combat sport, a means of self-defence. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.
Pierre Bourdieu
These sentences are taken from La Sociologie est un sport de combat, a popular film produced by Pierre Carles in 2001 about the life of Pierre Bourdieu featuring him at demonstrations, in interviews about masculine domination, in humorous banter with his assistants, in an informal research seminar with his colleagues, in the lecture hall, on television debating with Günter Grass and, in a final dramatic scene, facing the wrath of immigrants. We see Bourdieu voicing opposition to government policies and especially neoliberalism, but we also see him on the defensive – stumbling to explain sociology in simple terms to a confused interviewer, or sweating under pressure of interrogation or intensely nervous when he has to speak in English.
Is this sociology as a combat sport? If so, where are the combatants? We see Bourdieu, but where is the opposition? Where are the other contestants? It’s like watching a boxing match with only one boxer. No wonder he can talk of sociology as ‘self-defence’; no wonder he can seem so innocent and charming with the opposition absent. Where is the reviled Bourdieu, ‘the sociological terrorist of the left’, ‘the cult leader’, ‘the intellectual dictator’? Even the Spanish feminist interviewing him about masculine domination lets him off the hook when it comes to his own masculinity – at which point he leans on Virginia Woolf – or when he claims to understand masculine domination better than women do. Significantly, the only time he comes under hostile fire is when young immigrants tell him they are not interested in his disquisitions on oppression – after all, they know they are oppressed – whereupon Bourdieu goes on a tirade against their anti-intellectualism. It seems he has nothing to offer them but words. Here, only at the end of the film, are the first signs of combat.
This absent combat with the absent enemy is not peculiar to the film. Throughout Bourdieu’s writings, combatants are slain off-stage with no more than a fleeting appearance in front of the readership. Sociologists, economists and philosophers come and go like puppets, dismissed with barely a sentence or two. What sort of combat sport is this? He says sociology shouldn’t be used for unfair attacks, but how fair is it to tie up the enemy in a corner and with one punch knock him/her out of the ring? What is this combat without combat? I’ve searched through Bourdieu’s writings to find elaborations of ‘sociology as a combat sport’, but to no avail. Minimally, if this is a true combat sport, there should be rules of play that allow all contestants to show their abilities – their strengths as well as their weaknesses. And the rules should apply equally to all. There is not much evidence of fair play either in the film or in his writings.
The purpose of these conversations, then, is to restore at least a small band of combatants who, broadly speaking, are Marxist in orientation. They are there in Bourdieu’s ‘practical sense’ beneath consciousness, circulating in the depths of his habitus, and only rarely surfacing in an explicit and verbal form. To attempt such a restoration is to counter the symbolic violence of their erasure with a symbolic violence of my own. It involves a certain intellectual combat. Still, I restore these Marxists not so much as to issue a knock-out blow (as if that were even possible), but rather to orchestrate a conversation in which each learns about the other to better understand the self. In this opening conversation, however, I will probe the idea of sociology as a combat sport as it applies to Bourdieu’s own practice, leading to his contradictory postures in academic and non-academic fields. I will suggest that a better model than combat is the more open and gentle one of conversation – a conversation between Bourdieu the academic theorist and Bourdieu the public intellectual – if we are to unravel the paradoxes of his life’s work.
COMBAT VS. CONSENSUS
I am struck by the translation of the film’s title into English: La Sociologie est un sport de combat