of reason and to unmask symbolic violence in the wider society. Throughout, he is so sure that he is right that any stratagem to vanquish the opposition seems justified. Here, combat often appears not as self-defence, but as ‘unfair attacks’ on enemy combatants.
While happy to locate others in the academic field and explain their perspectives in terms of that position, he fails to apply the same principle to himself. The nearest we get to such a self-analysis are his claims to outsider status, coming as he did from a peasant background with a ‘cleft habitus’, that allows him greater insight into the workings of the academy and, indeed, of the world. His Sketch for a Self-analysis (Bourdieu, 2007 [2004]) is just that – a sketch that describes his sufferings in boarding school and as an outsider in the École Normale Supérieure, but tells us next to nothing of Bourdieu as a combatant in the scientific field. Indeed, Bourdieu never undertook a sociological investigation of the field of sociology, in which he was indeed a, if not the, central player – the French field. The nearest he gets is Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988 [1984]) which is an incomplete examination of the French academic field as a whole – an examination of the relations among disciplines, but not the disciplinary field itself.
Here, then, we come to the third paradox, the paradox of reflexivity. On the one hand, he argues that an analysis of the academic field in which one operates is a precondition of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, he himself undertakes neither an analysis of his own place in the field of sociology nor even an analysis of the field of French sociology itself, as if none of his competitors is worthy of serious examination. Bourdieu’s interest in reflexivity – i.e. in scientifically assessing the field of sociology and his position in it – clashes with his interests as an actor, namely to accumulate academic capital, which means to elevate the status of sociology and his position within it. To accomplish these ends, Bourdieu mobilises the cultural capital that derives from a philosophy degree at the École Normale Supérieure and builds a school of sociology with its own vocabulary, methodology, theory, journal, etc. It involves disrecognising others and exercising symbolic domination over them, which, if successful, is at odds with the project of reflexivity and endangers the very project of science.
In these three paradoxes – the public engagement of sociologists, the relative autonomy of fields, the reflexivity of scientific analysis – we see the contradiction between theory and practice. But according to Bourdieu’s own theory, this is to be expected – there is always a gap between theory and practice. We find this argument in all his meta-theoretical writings from Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977 [1972]) to The Logic of Practice (1990 [1980]) to Pascalian Meditations (2000 [1997]). He shows the necessity of the rupture between sociological understanding and common sense, between theory and practice, and how practice reproduces this separation. If people truly understood what they do, if they understood how their practices reproduce their subordination, then the social order would crumble. But for all his interest in reflexivity, Bourdieu does not turn this analysis back onto himself and examine the ways in which his theory and practice are at odds with each other. There is no internal conversation between Bourdieu and Bourdieu, between his theory and practice.
The following engagements with Bourdieu, therefore, will study the paradoxical relations among and within the three nodes of Bourdieu’s meta-framework: how he condemns symbolic domination, but defends the very institutions that reproduce that domination; how he advocates reflexivity by locating intellectuals within their fields of production, but fails to do the same for himself; and, finally, how he is critical of public engagement and yet this becomes so central to his own identity.
CONVERSATIONS WITH BOURDIEU
Bourdieu’s model of sociology as a combat sport certainly casts doubt on the conventional collective self-understanding of scientists as building science through consensus. In his celebrated model, Robert Merton (1973 [1942]) defines the ethos of science as made up of four elements: universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism. Competition there is, but this does not take the form of a combat sport in which the goal is to defeat the opposition! Yet of course, inasmuch as science is a field in the Bourdieusian sense, it must have relations of domination and subjugation that play themselves out as combat. To deny those relations of domination, as is the wont of the dominant, is itself a strategy of domination. It is not surprising, therefore, that Parsons and Merton should have a consensus view of science. On the other hand, to endorse the idea of sociology as a combat sport without any further elaboration of the rules of that combat also excuses opportunistic strategies of disrecognition, expropriation and distortion that are inimical to science.
Here I want to consider a third model of science, one based on dialogue. The idea is not to suppress difference in the name of consensus, but to recognise difference as a challenge to existing assumptions and frameworks. Here one challenges not in order to vanquish, but rather to converse in order to better understand others and, through others, learn the limits and possibilities of one’s own assumptions and frameworks. A model of dialogue is not exclusive of the other two models. In order to converse, there must be some common ground to make conversation intelligible. An inner circle of agreement is necessary for an outer circle of disagreement. Equally, in order to converse, it is necessary to give voice to subordinate perspectives, which usually requires combat. In a field of domination, conversation cannot be taken for granted, but has to be advanced and defended.
In the conversations that follow, we will bring to life some of the combatants Bourdieu has slain. I will follow Bourdieu’s prescription that to read an author it is necessary to first place him or her in the context of the field of production – competitors, allies and antagonists who are taken for granted by the author and invisibly shape his or her practice. I cannot recreate all the academic fields within which Bourdieu was embedded. That would be a task far beyond my capabilities, covering as it would philosophy, linguistics, literature, painting and photography, as well as sociologists and anthropologists – indeed, the entire French intellectual field. So I have chosen a distinctive group of social theorists who wander like ghosts through Bourdieu’s opus, because, unlike Bourdieu, they believe the dominated, or some fraction thereof, can indeed under certain conditions perceive and appreciate the nature of their own subordination. I am, of course, thinking of the Marxist tradition that Bourdieu engages, usually without so much as recognising it, and even to the point of denying it a place in his intellectual field. This is ironic indeed, but perhaps not surprising, since these social theorists were all experienced combatants, very much Bourdieu’s equals.
In staging these conversations with Bourdieu, I have chosen Marxists with distinctive perspectives on the place awarded to intellectuals in social theory and public life, namely Gramsci, Fanon, Freire and Beauvoir. I begin with Marx, perhaps the greatest gladiator of them all, whose Achilles heel is undoubtedly the absence of a theory of intellectuals, and I end with C. Wright Mills, no mean combatant himself, who erected a theoretical architecture similar to Bourdieu’s.
While Marx did not pay serious attention to the question of intellectuals – their place in society or their labour process – his theory of capitalism as a self-reproducing and self-destroying system of production is nonetheless deeply embedded in Bourdieu’s treatment of fields of cultural and intellectual production. The underlying structure of Bourdieu’s thought is similar to Marx and Engels’s engagement with Hegelian thought laid out in The German Ideology (1978 [1845–46]), but Bourdieu carries it forward in a very different direction, toward the study of cultural fields rather than the economic field. From Marx we turn to Gramsci and his theory of intellectuals that turns on the understanding of hegemony – a notion at first glance similar to, but in the final analysis profoundly different from, Bourdieu’s symbolic domination. When asked to explain the difference between his own work and that of Gramsci, Bourdieu dismisses the very question. Yet I shall show that this conversation is pivotal to all the others.
Frantz Fanon, whose account of the colonial revolution is in many ways parallel to that of Bourdieu (their stays in Algeria overlapped), suffers the same fate as Gramsci. There is no serious engagement,
