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, the subversive provocations of the feminist or homosexual movements), 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
