he ascended the academic staircase, converting his academic capital into political capital, he became more radical. He used his position as professor at the Collège de France, which he assumed in 1981, to draw attention to the limits of educational policy, and began to direct his attacks at the academy. Still, at the same time, he placed his hope in the potential universality of the state and the creation of an International of intellectuals. In the 1990s he deliberately gave voice to the down-trodden in the best-seller The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al. 1999 [1993]), a collaborative work of interviewing immigrants, blue-collar workers and low-level civil servants – in short, the dominated. He joined social struggles, most famously the general strike of 1995 that opposed the dismemberment of the welfare state. He spoke out against the socialist government that was socialist in name, but neoliberal in content. As he aged, so his assaults on neoliberalism and the distortions of the media, especially television, took a popular turn in the book series Liber-Raisons d’Agir. Gone were the long and tortured sentences, and in their place he delivered uncompromising attacks written in an apocalyptic tone. Neoliberalism, he warned, meant the subjugation of education, art, politics and culture to the remorseless logic of the market, not to mention the ‘flexploitation’ of workers and their ever-more precarious existence.
His combative spirit in the public sphere, however, collided with his theoretical claims. For a long time Bourdieu had been contemptuous of sociological interventions in politics – social movement sociology or ‘charitable sociology’, as he once called it (Bourdieu, Passeron & Chamboredon, 1991 [1968]: 251). He insisted that sociology had to be a science with its own autonomy, its own language and its own methods inaccessible to all but the initiated. He had dismissed the idea of the organic intellectual as a projection of the habitus and conditions of existence of intellectuals onto the benighted, yet here he was on the picket lines, leading the condemnation of the socialist government. Having insisted on the depth of symbolic violence, how could he work together with the subaltern? Was he just manipulating them for his own ends, as he accused others of doing? If the social struggles of the subaltern are misguided, rooted in a misrecognition of their own position, was Bourdieu being led astray by joining workers in their protests? We don’t know – his practice was at odds with his theory, and he never cared to interrogate the contradiction. This is what he writes in Acts of Resistance:
I do not have much inclination for prophetic interventions and I have always been wary of occasions in which the situation or sense of solidarity could lead me to overstep the limits of my competence. So I would not have engaged in public position-taking if I had not, each time, had the – perhaps illusory – sense of being forced into it by a kind of legitimate rage, sometimes close to something like a sense of duty. ... And if, to be effective, I have sometimes had to commit myself in my own person and my own name, I have always done it in the hope – if not of triggering mobilization, or even one of those debates without object or subject which arise periodically in the world of the media – at least of breaking the appearance of unanimity which is the greater part of the symbolic force of the dominant discourse (Bourdieu, 1998: vii–viii).
Here, Bourdieu is attributing a certain rationality – you might say good sense – to the publics he is addressing that they don’t have in his earlier writings.
This is the first paradox, the paradox of public engagement – the simultaneous claim of its impossibility and its necessity. It leads to the second paradox, the paradox of relative autonomy. In fighting neoliberalism, Bourdieu finds himself defending the very autonomy of educational, cultural and scientific fields that earlier he had claimed were responsible for the reproduction of domination. In the end, he finds himself defending the great institutions of French culture, notwithstanding their role in reproducing domination. A child of the French Enlightenment, Bourdieu claims that these institutions he condemns – the state, the university, literature and art – do have a universal validity and do represent a rich cultural heritage that should be accessible to all.
You might say Bourdieu is defending not the status quo ante, i.e. the relative autonomy of these institutions, but their full autonomy, so that they become the privilege of all. Yet if this is the case, then it is an entirely utopian project, so that the paradox remains: defending the relative autonomy of cultural fields against market invasion is the defence of the very thing he denounces – symbolic domination. But in calling for the defence of the cultural, bureaucratic and educational fields, he can rally the interests of intellectuals, artists and academics – fractions of both the dominant classes and the new middle classes – against market tyranny.
COMBAT IN THE ACADEMIC FIELD
It is easier for intellectuals and academics to attack the excesses of the market than to see themselves exercising symbolic domination over society by virtue of the autonomy they so stoutly defend. While intellectuals denounce physical violence throughout the world, they are reluctant to recognise that they too are the perpetrators of violence, i.e. a symbolic violence that assures a taken-for-granted – what Bourdieu calls ‘doxic’ – submission to domination incorporated in bodies and language. Thus, although they may see themselves as autonomous, intellectuals are implicated in the state through its monopoly of the legitimate use of symbolic violence, through consecrated classifications and categories.
But intellectuals, academics and social scientists are not all of a piece. While most do not recognise their contribution to symbolic domination, some, like Bourdieu’s followers, do spell out the truth of symbolic domination. This division of intellectuals into those who have a good sense and those who have bad sense calls for an analysis of academic fields that reveals what we are up to behind our screens of objectivity and science, pointing to the ways we deceive both ourselves and others. In short, the sociology that we apply to others must equally be applied to ourselves. The purpose of such reflexivity, however, is not to denounce our fellow scientists, but to liberate them from the illusions – scholastic fallacies – that spring from the conditions under which they produce knowledge, namely their freedom from material necessity. Bourdieu criticises his fellow academics for not recognising how their material conditions shape their knowledge production, and so they mistakenly foist their theories onto the subjects whose actions they theorise. For Bourdieu, to better understand the conditions of the production of knowledge is a condition for producing better knowledge.
This sounds very fine in principle, but in practice the scientific field, no less than any other field, is a combat zone in which actors struggle to enforce their view of the world – their theories, methodologies and philosophies. Indeed, Bourdieu (2000 [1997]: 116) refers to the scientific field as one of ‘armed competition’ in which some actors manage to accumulate capital at the expense of others. He assumes, however, that the rules of such combat ensure the production of truth – or, more accurately, the reduction of falsehood – even though, as he says in his article on the scientific field, there is an ever-increasing concentration of capital with its own conservative tendencies. What happens to that open competition for truth when the scientific field is monopolised by a few powerful actors? What assures the ascendancy of good sense over bad sense, Bourdieusian sociologists over neoliberal economists? Are there rules of combat or does anything go?
In his own practice of science Bourdieu can be quite ruthless in establishing his domination. As already mentioned, he devotes little time to recognising the contributions of others, tending to constitute himself as the soul originator of his ideas. He may be standing on the shoulders of giants, but they are invisible, repressed below the surface. He seems to deploy the recognition of others in footnotes and acknowledgements to maximise the recognition that he receives. His very writing is a form of symbolic violence, trying to impress upon the readers his own distinction through esoteric references, appeals to Greek and Latin, and long-winded sentences, all of which have an intimidating effect. Those who dare to openly disagree with him – if they are sufficiently important – are deemed to suffer from irrationality, weak-mindedness or even psychological disorders manifested in repression and defence mechanisms. Or, more simply, they express the interests that they have by virtue of their place in the academic field. He exercises symbolic violence within the field
