in the contrast with his later work on the invisibility of domination in the West.
Echoes of the Algerian experience do surface at critical moments in Bourdieu’s text, particularly when he considers the possibilities of social change and the disruption of domination. Contradictory positions in social structure may generate ‘destabilised habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division, generating suffering’, and the same effect may occur ‘when a field undergoes a major crisis and its regularities (even its rules) are profoundly changed’; this happens ‘in situations of crisis or sudden change, especially those seen at the time of abrupt encounters between civilisations linked to the colonial situation or too-rapid movements in social space’. But, strangely, this disjunction does not culminate in collective struggle; instead, Bourdieu emphasises the difficulty agents then have ‘in adjusting to the newly established order’, and the durability of these now maladjusted dispositions creates the ‘Don Quixote effect’: the disoriented individual is reduced to tilting at windmills and the possibility of subaltern mobilisation to restructure the field itself is elided (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 160–61).
But the question of subaltern agency reappears several times in Bourdieu’s text, mostly as a possibility to be gestured towards rather than something fully explored. Thus, 20 pages from the passage discussed above, we find the following:
The specifically political action of legitimation is always carried out on the basis of the fundamental given of original acceptance of the world as it is, and the work of the guardians of the symbolic order, whose interests are bound up with common sense, consists in trying to restore the initial self-evidences of doxa. By contrast, the political action of subversion aims to liberate the potential capacity for refusal which is neutralised by misrecognition, by performing, aided by a crisis, a critical unveiling of the founding violence that is masked by the adjustment between the order of things and the order of bodies (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 181).
For Bourdieu, it is only intellectuals who can see through the silent ‘self-evidences’ of the given order of things. But what if in the colonial world it is domination that is self-evident? Then what becomes of subaltern agency and intellectuals’ monopoly of the power to understand?
Notwithstanding their ambiguities and briefness, it is these passages in Bourdieu that I read most avidly, gesturing as they do to our history of resistance and contestation, and at the fractured and endlessly subverted reality we inhabit in Johannesburg today – which demonstrates so forcefully the limits of authority in post-apartheid South Africa; and they seem to gain an added charge of theoretical explosiveness precisely because of their sparseness and elliptical brevity, surrounded as they are by the overwhelming accumulated weight of domination that is the main emphasis of his texts, as Michael points out.
When Bourdieusian theory, drawing on anthropological insights into indigenous society in the colonies and elaborated in the advanced capitalism of France, is returned to Johannesburg and South Africa, it is confronted by disjunction, fragmentation and subversion, where passages such as those I have quoted above are the ones that really make sense. They need to be expanded and elaborated on.
Colonial and post-colonial realities that are deeply structured by their ‘founding violence’, by domination and by the uneven distribution of power suggest that the social world may better be understood as contradictory, inconsistent, polyvocal, paradoxical, and full of tensions and uncertainties than as a coherently structured order. In this case, the habitus too should be regarded as complex and contradictory, where different dispositions may be at odds with one another and a particular disposition may even be dogged by a shadow counter-disposition, to which at times the individual may give way. When considered in this way, the relationship between habitus and social world, while structured, is not seamless. The potentiality of the body of defiance is present within the body of submission.
The subaltern has to be brought back in and theorised as an agent capable of mobilising to change the fields of domination.1 But what kind of subalterns would these be? Would they be workers in their trade unions, which may bear at least a family resemblance to the labour organisations of classical sociology? Or the residents of informal settlements where the state has a minimal presence and is unable to impose its authority in the face of informal local elites who control land, law and punishment? Or the intellectuals, fighting back against the accumulated weight of the imperialism of reason? Does the agency and mobilisation of subalterns such as these bear any resemblance to Marx’s conception of a working class whose historical agency is derived from its essential relationship with capitalism?
NOTES
1As Jennifer Chun (2009) does in her study of the ways in which casualised workers and their organisations seek to challenge their labour market status in Korea and the United States.
CONVERSATION 3
CULTURAL DOMINATION
MICHAEL BURAWOY
Gramsci Meets Bourdieu
It would be easy to enumerate the features of the life-style of the dominated classes which, through the sense of their incompetence, failure or cultural unworthiness, imply a form of recognition of the dominant values. It was Antonio Gramsci who said somewhere that the worker tends to bring his executant dispositions with him into every area of life.
Bourdieu (1984 [1979]: 386)
It’s like when these days people wonder about my relations with Gramsci – in whom they discover, probably because they have [not] read me, a great number of things that I was able to find in his work only because I hadn’t read him …. (The most interesting thing about Gramsci, who in fact, I did only read quite recently, is the way he provides us with the basis for a sociology of the party apparatchik and the Communist leaders of this period – all of which is far from the ideology of the ‘organic intellectual’ for which he is best known.)
Bourdieu (1990 [1986]: 27–28)
This is an additional reason to ground the corporatism of the universal in a corporatism geared to the defense of well-understood common interests. One of the major obstacles is (or was) the myth of the ‘organic intellectual,’ so dear to Gramsci. By reducing intellectuals to the role of the proletariat’s ‘fellow travelers,’ this myth prevents them from taking up the defense of their own interests and from exploiting their most effective means of struggle on behalf of universal causes.
Bourdieu (1989: 109)
If there is a single Marxist whom Pierre Bourdieu had to take seriously, it has to be Antonio Gramsci. The theorist of symbolic domination must surely engage the theorist of hegemony. Yet I can only find passing references to Gramsci in Bourdieu’s writings. In the first reference above, Bourdieu appropriates Gramsci to his own thinking about cultural domination, in the second he deploys Gramsci to support his own theory of politics, and in the third he ridicules Gramsci’s ideas about organic intellectuals.1
Given the widespread interest in Gramsci’s writings during the 1960s and 1970s, when Bourdieu was developing his ideas of cultural domination, one can only surmise that the omission was deliberate. Bourdieu’s allergy to Marxism here expresses itself in his refusal to entertain the ideas of the Marxist closest to his own perspective. He openly declares that he had never read Gramsci and that, if he had, he would have made his criticisms abundantly clear. Of all the Marxists, Gramsci was simply too close to Bourdieu for comfort.
Indeed, the parallels are remarkable. Both repudiated Marxian laws of history to develop sophisticated notions of class struggle in which culture played a key role, and both focused on what Gramsci called the superstructures and what Bourdieu called fields of cultural domination. Both pushed aside the analysis of the economy itself to focus on its effects –
