As competent speakers we arc aware of the many ways in which linguistic exchanges can express relations of power. We are sensitive to the variations in accent, intonation and vocabulary which reflect different positions in the social hierarchy. We are aware that individuals speak with differing degrees of authority, that words are loaded with unequal weights, depending on who utters them and how they are said, such that some words uttered in certain circumstances have a force and a conviction that they would not have elsewhere. We are experts in the innumerable and subtle strategies by which words can be used as instruments of coercion and constraint. as tools of intimidation and abuse, as signs of politeness, condescension and contempt. In short, we are aware that language is an integral part of social life, with all its ruses and iniquities, and that a good pan of our social life consists of the routine exchange of linguistic expressions in the day-to-day flow of social interaction.
Il is much easier, however, to observe in a general way that language and social life are inextricably linked than it is to develop this observation in a rigorous and compelling way. The contemporary intellectual disciplines which are particularly concerned with language have been illuminating in this regard, but they have also suffered from a number of shortcomings. In some branches of linguistics, literary criticism and philosophy, for instance, there is a tendency to think of the social character of language in a rather abstract way. as if it amounted to little more than the fact that language is. as Saussure once put it, a collective “treasure’ shared by ail members of a community. What is missing from such perspectives is an account of the concrete, complicated ways in which linguistic
practices and products are caught up in, and moulded by, the forms of power and inequality which are pervasive features of societies as they actually exist. Sociologists and sociolinguists have been more concerned with the interplay between linguistic practices and concrete forms of social life; but in their work there is a tendency -though this is by no means without exception - to become preoccupied with the empirical details of variations in accent or usage, in a way that is largely divorced from broader theoretical and explanatory concerns. When social theorists have turned their attention to language they have not neglected these broader concerns, but all too often they have run roughshod over the specific properties of language and language use in the interests of developing some general theory of social action or the social world.
One of the merits of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is that it avoids to a large extent the shortcomings which characterize some of the sociological and social-theoretical writing on language, while at the same time offering an original sociological perspective on linguistic phenomena which has nothing to do with abstract conceptions of social life. In a series of articles originally published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bourdieu developed a trenchant critique of formal and structural linguistics, arguing that these disciplinary frameworks take for granted but fail to grasp the specific social and political conditions of language formation and use. He also began the task of elaborating an original, innovative approach to linguistic phenomena, an approach that aims to be both theoretically informed and sensitive to empirical detail. The theory that informs Bourdieu's approach is a general
The material brought together in this volume includes Bourdieu's most important writings on language, as well as a set of essays which explore some aspects of representation and symbolic power in the field of politics. My aim in this introduction is to provide an overview of this material and to outline the theoretical framework which
guides Bourdieu's approach. For his critical analysis of orthodox linguistics, and the alternative account of linguistic phenomena which he offers, are effectively an application to language of a range of concepts and ideas elaborated elsewhere. I shall begin by summarizing briefly his critique of formal and structural linguistics, as well as his appraisal of the theory of speech acts developed by Austin, I shall then discuss some of the main concepts and assumptions of Bourdieu's own theoretical framework, focusing on those aspects which are most relevant to the analysis of language use. in the third section I shall broaden the discussion to consider Bourdieu’s views on the nature of politics and political discourse, which are the concern of the final set of essays in this volume. My aim is to provide a sympathetic exposition of some themes in Bourdieu’s work, not a critical analysis of his views. There are, of course, various aspects of Bourdieu's work which could be questioned and criticized, and indeed which have been questioned and criticized in the literature, sometimes in ways that are thoughtful and probing, at other times in ways that display more than a hint of wilful incomprehension? But these are issues which I shall not pursue here.
1
As a thinker whose formative milieu was the Paris of the 1950s and early 1960s, Bourdieu is more aware than many of the intellectual impact of certain ways of thinking about language. Bourdieu followed closely the development of Levi-Strauss's work and incorporated some features of Levi-Strauss’s method - in particular, his emphasis on the analysis of relations and oppositions - in his early ethnographic studies of kinship structures and matrimonial strategies among the Kabyle of North Africa.3 But Bourdieu became increasingly dissatisfied with Levi-Strauss's method, which gave rise to insoluble theoretical and methodological problems.4 He was also somewhat sceptical of the fashionable trend called ‘structuralism', which was rapidly gaining ground among Parisian intellectuals in the 1960s and which reflected, in Bourdieu's view, an overly zealous and methodologically uncontrolled application of the linguistic principles worked out by Saussure and others. The misadventures of structuralism alerted Bourdieu at an early stage both to the inherent limitations of Saussurian linguistics and to the dangers of a certain kind of intellectual imperialism, whereby a particular model of language
could assume a paradigmatic status in the social sciences as a whole.
Hence, when Bourdieu undertakes a critique of the linguistic theories of Saussure and others, he is seeking
It is important to emphasize that, in distancing himself from the various kinds of internal analysis which are commonly employed in the study of literary texts and cultural artefacts, Bourdieu is not seeking simply to
Bourdieu develops this argument by examining some of the presuppositions of Saussurian and Chomskyan linguistics. There are, of course, many important differences between the theoretical approaches of Saussure and Chomsky - for instance, Chomsky’s approach is more dynamic and gives greater emphasis to the generative capacities of competent speakers. But there is, in Bourdieu’s view, one principle which these theoretical approaches have in common: they are both based on a fundamental distinction which enables language to be constituted as an autonomous and homogeneous object, amenable to a properly linguistic analysis. In the case of Saussure, the distinction is that between
and 'speech’ as the situated realization of the system by particular speakers. Chomsky draws a somewhat similar distinction between ‘competence', which is the knowledge of a language possessed by an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech community. and 'performance’, which is the actual use of language in concrete situations.5
Bourdieu’s objection to this kind of distinction is that it leads the linguist to take for granted an object domain which is in fact the product of a complex set of social, historical and political conditions pf formation. Under the guise of drawing a
This process can be examined by looking carefully at the ways in which particular languages have emerged historically as dominant in particular geographical locales, often in conjunction with the formation of modern nation-states. Bourdieu focuses on the development of French, but one could just as easily look at the development of English in Britain or the United States, of Spanish in Spain or Mexico, and so on.6 in the case of French, much of the historical groundwork was carried out by Ferdinand Brunot in his monumental study,
(he construction of a monarchical state. In the central provinces of the
As Bourdieu shows, the members of the ^upper classes had everything to gain from the policy of linguistic unification which accompanied the French Revolution. This policy, which was part of Condillac’s theory of the purification of thought through the purification of language, would give the upper classes a
effect of various institutions and social processes, people speaking local dialects were induced, as Bourdieu puts it. ‘to collaborate in the destruction of their instruments of expression‘.8
If linguistic theories have tended to neglect the social-historical conditions underlying the formation of the language which they take, in an idealized form, as their object domain, so too they have tended to analyse linguistic expressions in isolation from the specific social conditions in which they arc used. In the work of Saussure and Chomsky, the isolation of linguistic analysis from the social conditions of use is closely linked to the distinctions drawn between
Bourdieu's objection to this aspect of Chomsky’s theory is that the notion of competence, understood as the capacity of an ideal speaker to generate an unlimited sequence of grammatically well formed sentences, is simply too abstract. Ihe kind of competence that
utterances, but
It is with this limitation of Chomskyan linguistics in mind that Bourdieu turns to a different body of writing on language, namely, to Austin's work on speech acts. In some respects. Bourdieu's approach to language is quite similar to that developed by Austin and other so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers' in the 1940s and 1950s.10 Consequently. Bourdieu’s appraisal of Austin’s work is more sympathetic than his analysis of Saussure and Chomsky. In singling out a class of'performative utterances’, such as ‘I do’ uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony or i name this ship the
utterance presupposes a set of social relations, an institution, by virtue of which a particular individual, who is
While Bourdieu praises the speech-act theorists for calling attention to the social conditions of communication, he thinks that Austin, and especially some of the authors influenced by him, have not fully unfolded the consequences of this view. They have not fully appreciated the implications of the fact that the conditions of felicity are primarily
It is in this context that Bourdieu expresses reservations about the
way in which another major social thinker, Jurgen Habermas, tries to build upon the work of speech-act theorists. Habermas argues that, in exchanging speech acts, individuals are implicitly raising certain 'validity claims', such as truth and correctness: and that some of these validity claims can only be redeemed or made good in an ‘ideal speech situation*, that is, a communicative situation in which participants are motivated to accept or reject a problematic claim on the basis of reasons or grounds alone.12 Although Bourdieu does not engage extensively with Habermas’s work, it is clear that the way in which he wishes to pursue the insights of speech-act theorists is quite different from Habermas’s account. Whereas Habermas seeks to show that the analysis of speech acts discloses a ‘rationally motivating force' at work in communicative exchange, Bourdieu is concerned to demonstrate that whatever power or force speech acts possess is a power or force ascribed to them by the social institution of which the utterance of the speech act is part; and hence the notion of an ideal speech situation, in which the rational character of communicative exchange would be unhindered by social constraints, is a notion which is based, in Bourdieu's view, on a fictitious elision of the social conditions of language use. This line of argument, which echoes criticisms that others have made of Habermas's work, certainly has some plausibility. One may have doubts about Bourdieu’s own account of speech acts-one may wonder, for instance, if he is not relying too heavily on those occasions in which the utterance of speech acts is clearly part of some recognized social ritual, like a marriage or a baptism, as distinct from those occasions in which individuals engage in relatively unstructured face-to-face interaction, like a banal and casual conversation between friends.15 But it cannot be denied that, by focusing on the institutional aspects of language use and probing them with an astute sociological imagination, Bourdieu has highlighted some of the social conditions of language use in a way that is largely absent from the existing literature on the theory of speech acts.
IT
Bourdieu’s writings on language offer more than an illuminating critical perspective on the work of Saussure. Chomsky. Austin and others: they also put forward a new approach to language and linguistic exchange. This approach is essentially a development of the theoretical framework that he has worked out in other contexts.
To understand this approach, it is therefore necessary to take account of Bourdieu’s other theoretical work, that is, the key concepts and assumptions of his theory of practice.
Bourdieu’s theory of practice is a systematic attempt to move beyond a series of oppositions and antinomies which have plagued the social sciences since their inception. For anyone involved in the social sciences today, these oppositions have a familiar ring: the individual versus society, action versus structure, freedom versus necessity, etc. Bourdieu’s theoretical approach is intended to bypass or dissolve a plethora of such oppositions. When he develops his approach, however, he generally begins with a broad dichotomy, expressed at the level of epistemology or the theory of knowledge, between ‘subjectivism’ and ’objectivism’. By ‘subjectivism’ Bourdieu means an intellectual orientation to the social world which seeks to grasp the way the world appears to the individuals who are situated within it. Subjectivism presupposes the possibility of some kind of immediate apprehension of the lived experience of others, and it assumes that this apprehension is by itself a morc-or-less adequate form of knowledge about the social world. What Bourdieu has in mind here are certain forms of ‘phenomenological’ and ’interpretative’ sociology and anthropology, such as the phenomenological sociology developed by Alfred Schutz.14 By ‘objectivism’ Bourdieu means an intellectual orientation to the social world which seeks to construct the objective relations which structure practices and representations. Objectivism presupposes a break with immediate experience; it places the primary experience of the social world in brackets and attempts to elucidate the structures and principles upon which primary experience depends but which it cannot directly grasp. The kinds of analyses developed by Levi-Strauss and by some versions of structural linguistics are examples of objectivism in this sense.
Bourdieu’s view is that both subjectivism and objectivism are inadequate intellectual orientations, but that the latter is less inadequate than the former. The chief merit of objectivism is that it breaks with the immediate experience of the social world and is able thereby to produce a knowledge of the social world which is not reducible to the practical knowledge possessed by lay actors. In Bourdieu's view, the break with immediate experience is an essential prerequisite for social-scientific inquiry, a break which is made all the more difficult by the fact that the social scientist is also a participant in social life and hence is inclined to draw upon everyday words and concepts in analysing the social world.15 If objectivism rightly emphasizes the break with everyday experience, it suffers
from shortcomings of its own. The main shortcoming of objectivism is that, by failing to reflect rigorously on its own conditions of possibility, it cannot grasp the link between the knowledge it produces and the practical knowledge possessed by lay actors; or. to put it another way. it cannot grasp the link between the objective relations and structures it elucidates, on the one hand, and the practical activities of the individuals who make up the social world, on the other. Thus, from the perspective of objectivism, the practical activities of individuals can appear as nothing other than the application of a rule, or the realization of a model or structure, which has been elucidated or constructed by the analyst. Practice is turned into a mere epiphenomenon of the analyst's own constructs. Bourdieu's view, persuasively argued, is that this perspective is irremediably flawed as an account of practice. His alternative theory of practice is an attempt to move beyond objectivism without relapsing into subjectivism, that is, to take account of the need to break with immediate experience while at the same time doing justice to the practical character of social life.
The key concept that Bourdieu employs in developing his approach is that of
viduals from similar backgrounds. Structured dispositions are also
The habitus also provides individuals with a sense of how to act and respond in the course of their daily lives. It ‘orients’ their actions and inclinations without strictly determining them. It gives them a ‘feel for the game’, a sense of what is appropriate in the circumstances and what is not, a ‘practical sense’ (/e
The habitus, and the related notions of practical sense and bodily hexis, are the concepts with which Bourdieu seeks to grasp the
generative principles or schemes which underlie practices and perceptions, works and appreciations. But when individuals act. they always do so in specific social contexts or settings. Hence particular practices or perceptions should be seen, not as the product of the habitus as such, but as the product of the
A field is always the site of struggles in which individuals seek to maintain or alter the distribution of the forms of capital specific to it. The individuals who participate in these struggles will have differing aims - some will seek to preserve the status quo, others to change it -and differing chances of winning or losing, depending on where they are located in the structured space of positions. But all individuals, whatever their aims and chances of success, will share in common certain fundamental presuppositions. All participants must believe in the game (hey are playing, and in the value of what is at slake in the struggles they are waging. The very existence and persistence of the game or field presupposes a total and unconditional ‘investment’, a practical and unquestioning belief, in the game and its stakes. Hence the conduct of struggle within a field, whether a conflict over the distribution of wealth or over the value of a work of art, always presupposes a fundamental accord or complicity on the part of those who participate in the struggle.
The terms used by Bourdieu to describe fields and their properties - ‘market’, ‘capital*, ‘profit*, etc. - are terms borrowed from the
j
language of economics, but they are adapted for the analysis of fields which are not ‘economic* in the narrow sense. This is a point on which Bourdieu can be easily misunderstood. The reader may get the impression that, when Bourdieu uses these terms to analyse forms of interaction which are not strictly economic transactions, he is treating these forms of interaction
narrow sense of financial or material gain.
There is a further qualification that should be added to this schematic account of Bourdieu’s theory of practice. While agents orient themselves towards specific interests or goals, their action is only rarely the outcome of a conscious deliberation or calculation in which the pros and cons of different strategies are carefully weighed up, their costs and benefits assessed, etc. To view action as the outcome of conscious calculation - a perspective implicit in some forms of game theory and rational action theory22 - is to neglect the
fact that, by virtue of the habitus, individuals are
In developing his approach to language and linguistic exchange, Bourdieu applies and elaborates the ideas that make up the theory of practice. Linguistic utterances or expressions are forms of practice and, as such, can be understood as the product of the relation between a linguistic habitus and a linguistic market. The linguistic habitus is a sub-set of the dispositions which comprise the habitus: it is that sub-set of dispositions acquired in the course of learning to speak in particular contexts (the family, the peer group, the school, etc.). These dispositions govern both the subsequent linguistic practices of an agent and the anticipation of the value that linguistic products will receive in other fields or markets - in the labour market, for example, or in the institutions of secondary or tertiary education. The linguistic habitus is also inscribed in the body and forms a dimension of the bodily hexis. A particular accent, for instance, is the product of a certain way of moving the tongue, the lips, etc.: it is an aspect of what Bourdieu calls, following Pierre Guiraud, an ‘articulatory style’.23 The fact that different groups and classes have different accents, intonations and ways of speaking is a manifestation, at the level of language, of the socially structured character of the habitus. Differences of this kind are well known and have been amply documented by sociologists, sociolinguists and social historians. A less obvious index of the differentiation of articulatory styles may be found in the ways that particular classes or the respective sexes are associated with particular conceptions of the
whereas
Linguistic utterances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets, and the properties of these markets endow linguistic products with a certain ‘value’. On a given linguistic market, some products are valued more highly than others; and part of the practical competence of speakers is to know how, and to be able, to produce expressions which are highly valued on the markets concenied. This aspect of the practical competence of speakers is not uniformly distributed throughout a society in which the same language. such as English or French, is spoken. For different speakers possess different quantities of ‘linguistic capital’ - that is, the capacity to produce expressions
Bourdieu offers a vivid example of this dynamic. The example is from the town of Pau in Bearn, a province in southern France from
which Bourdieu himself comes and where a local dialect. Bearnais, is spoken. The occasion is the official celebration, in September 1974, of the centenary of the birth of a Bearnais poet, Simin Palay. A French newspaper published in the province reported an event that “greatly moved' the audience who “applauded at length’: the event was that the mayor of Pau addressed the audience in “good quality Bearnais’.25 Why should a group of people whose native language is Bearnais feel greatly moved by the fact that the mayor of their town addresses them in Bearnais on the occasion of honouring a Bearnais poet? Such a response is possible, argues Bourdieu, only in so far as they tacitly recognize the unwritten law which imposes French as the only acceptable language on official occasions. The mayor of Pau employs a
As this example illustrates, in reproducing linguistic expressions speakers take into account - in varying ways and to differing extents - the market conditions within which their products will be received and valued by others. The speaker’s assessment of the market conditions, and the anticipation of the likely reception of his or her linguistic products, operate as internalized constraints on the very process of production. Individuals implicitly and routinely modify their expressions in anticipation of their likely reception - in the way, for instance, that adults alter their vocabulary and tone of voice when speaking to children. Hence all linguistic expressions are, to some extent, “euphemized'; they are modified by a certain kind of
tion of a situation common to all linguistic production. Tact is nothing other than the capacity of a speaker to assess market conditions accurately and to produce linguistic expressions which are appropriate to them, that is, expressions which are suitably euphe-mized.
Mechanisms of censorship operate not only in the production of everyday oral discourse, but also in the production of the scholarly discourses found in written texts. Here as elsewhere, when Bourdieu speaks of ‘censorship* he is not referring to the explicit activity of political or religious organizations seeking to suppress or restrict the diffusion of symbolic forms. Rather, he is referring to a general feature of markets or fields which requires that, if one wishes to produce discourse successfully within a particular field, one must observe the forms and formalities of that field. Ulis is just as true of the scholarly fields of literature, philosophy and science as it is of the mundane markets of everyday social interaction. Bourdieu takes the philosophical discourse of Heidegger as an example. Heidegger’s work is particularly interesting precisely because the language is so arcane, so preoccupied with distinctions, allusions and rhetorical effects - in a word, so euphemized. What Bourdieu tries to show is that the style and form of Heidegger's prose is a product of the mechanisms of censorship and strategies of euphemizalion associated with his position in a specific philosophical field, itself related in determinate ways to the literary, political and broader social fields of Weimar Germany. Part of the distinctiveness of Heidegger’s work is that it borrows many words from ordinary language -
period. By carefully reconstructing these fields and analysing the mechanisms and strategies associated with Heidegger’s location within them, it may be possible to shed some fresh light on Heidegger’s work while steering clear of the rather polemical opposition between those critics who charge him with an apologetics for Nazism and those who seek to redeem him at any cost.26
Irrespective of whether one is considering the oral discourse of everyday life or the scholarly discourse of written texts, it is important to see that systematic discrepancies may arise between linguistic markets and the forms of censorship associated with them, on the one hand, and the capacities of individuals from differing social backgrounds to produce linguistic expressions appropriate to those markets, on the other. As a result of such discrepancies, individuals from differing social backgrounds are able to relate to linguistic markets, as well as to themselves as producers for these markets, in differing ways. Bourdieu illustrates this point by considering some of the typical speech practices of individuals from different class backgrounds when they find themselves in formal or official situations (an interview, a classroom discussion, a public ceremony, etc.).27 Individuals from upper-class backgrounds are endowed with a linguistic habitus which enables them to respond with relative ease to the demands of most formal or official occasions. There is a concordance or congruence between their linguistic habitus and the demands of formal markets. It is this congruence which underlies the confidence and fluency with which they speak: their confidence merely attests to the fact that the conditions in which they are speaking concur fairly closely with the conditions which endowed them with the capacity to speak, and hence they are able (and know they are able) to reap symbolic benefits by speaking in a way that comes naturally to them. Hence, on most public occasions, they speak with distinction and thereby distinguish themselves from all those who are less well endowed with linguistic capital. By contrast, individuals from petits-bourgeois backgrounds must generally make an effort to adapt their linguistic expressions to the demands of formal markets. The result is that their speech is often accompanied by tension and anxiety, and by a tendency to rectify or correct expressions so that they concur with dominant norms. This hyper-correction of petit-bourgeois speech is the sign of a class divided against itself, whose members are seeking, at the cost of constant anxiety, to produce linguistic expressions which bear the mark of a habitus other than their own. For members of the lower classes, whose conditions of existence are least conducive to the
acquisition of a habitus which concurs with formal markets, there are many occasions in which their linguistic products are assigned, by themselves as well as others, a limited value. Hence the tendency of working-class children to eliminate themselves from the educational system, or to resign themselves to vocational courses of training. Hence also the unease, the hesitation leading to silence, which, as we noted earlier, may overcome individuals from lower-class backgrounds on occasions defined as official.
There are other circumstances, of course, in which individuals from lower-class backgrounds are able to speak fluently and confidently. and one of the merits of Bourdieu's approach is that he is able to analyse these so-called ‘popular’ forms of speech in a way that avoids the kind of intellectual romanticism characteristic of some studies of working-class or peasant culture. Bourdieu prefers to avoid blanket terms like “popular culture’ and ‘popular speech', which have themselves become part of a struggle carried out among researchers and commentators in the intellectual field, He prefers, instead, to examine concretely the ways in which those who are most deprived in terms of economic and cultural capital are able to express themselves in the diverse settings of everyday life. These settings - gatherings of friends or peers, conversations among workers in an office or on the shop floor, etc. - can be viewed as markets with their own propenies and forms of censorship, so that individuals who wish to speak effectively in these settings must concur to some extent with the demands of the market. Hence forms of speech like slang and 'cant' should not be seen simply as a rejection of dominant modes of speech: they are. at the same time, highly euphemized forms of speech which are adeptly tailored to the markets for which they are produced. In Bourdieu's terms, slang is the product of the pursuit of distinction in a dominated market. It is one of the ways in which those individuals-especially men - who arc poorly endowed with economic and cultural capital are able to distinguish themselves from what they regard as weak and effeminate. Their pursuit of distinction therefore goes hand-in-hand with a deep-seated conformity with regard to established hierarchies, such as the hierarchy between the sexes. It also leads them to take for granted, and indeed positively to assert, the very characteristics (e.g. physical strength, lack of education) by virtue of which they occupy a subordinate position in the social space.28
In taking for granted certain aspects of established hierarchies even when overtly rejecting dominant modes of speech, individuals from lower-class backgrounds betray the fact that they share, to
some extent, a system of evaluation which works against them. This is an example of a general phenomenon with which Bourdieu is concerned throughout his writings, and which he describes as •symbolic power’ (or, in some cases, as 'symbolic violence'). Bourdieu uses the term ’symbolic power' to refer not so much to a specific type of power, but rather to an aspect of most forms of power as they are routinely deployed in social life. For in the routine flow of day-to-day life, power is seldom exercised as overt physical force: instead, it is transmuted into a symbolic form, and thereby endowed with a kind of
Like many of Bourdieu's ideas, the notions of symbolic power and symbolic violence are rather flexible notions which were worked out in specific research contexts, and hence they are best explained by reference to his more concrete anthropological and sociological studies. Bourdieu originally developed the notion of symbolic violence in the context of analysing the nature of the gift exchange in Kabyle society.29 Instead of analysing the exchange of gifts in terms of a formal structure of reciprocity, in the manner of Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu views it as a mechanism through which power is exercised and simultaneously disguised. In a society like Kabylia, where there are relatively few institutions in which relations of domination can be given a stable and objective form, individuals must resort to more
personalized means of exercising power over others. One such means is debt: an individual can bring another under his or her sway by enforcing the obligations deriving from usury. But there are other, ‘softer’ and more subtle means of exercising power, like the giving of gifts. By giving a gift - especially a generous one that cannot be met by a counter-gift of comparable quality - the giver creates a lasting obligation and binds the recipient in a relation of personal indebtedness. Giving is also a way of possessing: it is a way of binding another while shrouding the bond in a gesture of generosity. This is what Bourdieu describes as ‘symbolic violence’. in contrast to the overt violence of the usurer or the ruthless master: it is 'gentle, invisible violence, unrecognized as such, chosen as much as undergone, that of trust, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, debts, piety, in a word, of all the virtues honoured by the ethic of honour’. In a society like Kabylia, where domination has to be sustained primarily through interpersonal relations rather than institutions, symbolic violence is a necessary and effective means of exercising power. For it enables relations of domination to be established and maintained through strategies which are softened and disguised, and which conceal domination beneath the veil of an enchanted relation.
In those societies (including all modern industrial societies like Britain or the United States) which have witnessed the development of objectified institutions, the importance of symbolic mechanisms for sustaining domination through interpersonal relations has declined. The development of institutions enables different kinds of capita] to be accumulated and differentially appropriated, while dispensing with the need for individuals to pursue strategies aimed directly al the domination of others: violence is. so to speak, built into the institution itself. Hence, if one wishes to understand the ways in which symbolic power is exercised and reproduced in our societies, one must look more carefully at how, in different markets and fields, institutionalized mechanisms have emerged which tend to fix the value accorded to different products, to allocate these products differentially and to inculcate a belief in their value. The educational system provides a good example of this process: the development of this system involves a certain kind of objectification in which formally defined credentials or qualifications become a mechanism for creating and sustaining inequalities, in such a way that the recourse to overt force is unnecessary.31 Moreover, hy concealing the link between the qualifications obtained by individuals and the cultural capital inherited by virtue of their social
background, this mechanism provides a practical justification of the established order. It enables those who benefit most from the system to convince themselves of their own intrinsic worthiness, while preventing those who benefit least from grasping the basis of their own deprivation.
Ill
The development of Western European societies since the Middle Ages can be characterized very broadly, from Bourdieu’s perspective, in terms of the differentiation of distinct spheres or fields of practice, each involving specific forms and combinations of capital and value as well as specific institutions and institutional mechanisms. Through this process of differentiation, a market economy based on capitalist principles was separated out and constituted as a relatively distinct sphere of production and exchange; a centralized state administration and legal system were established and progressively dissociated from religious authority; fields of intellectual and artistic production emerged and acquired a certain autonomy, with their own institutions (universities, museums, publishing houses, etc.) their own professionals (intellectuals, artists, writers, etc.) and their own principles of production, evaluation and exchange. While these and other spheres or fields of practice have emerged historically and acquired a certain autonomy, they are not completely disconnected from one another. They are interlocked in complex ways, and part of the task of a sociological study of these fields, as proposed by Bourdieu, is to bring out the ways in which they are structured and linked while rigorously avoiding the tendency to reduce one field to another, or to treat everything as if it were a mere epiphenomenon of the economy.
This broad perspective on the development of modern societies is a view strongly influenced by the work of Max Weber, to whom Bourdieu owes a significant intellectual debt. Like Weber, Bourdieu is particularly interested in the ways in which groups emerge in different fields and struggle for power and influence. Much of Bourdieu’s work on the sociology of fields has been concerned with artistic and intellectual production, but he has also written extensively on other fields, such as religion and politics.32 In the essays which make up part III of this volume, Bourdieu examines various aspects of the social organization of political fields. The analysis of the field of politics - understood here in the narrow sense of ‘politics’, i.e. the
sphere of political parties, electoral politics and institutionalized political power - is closely related to the theme of language and symbolic power. For the political field is, among other things, the site
To understand the ways in which the political field works in modern societies, it is essential to see, Bourdieu argues, that the development of this field has involved a process of professionalization in which the political means of production (i.e. the means to produce political products like programmes, policies, etc.) have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of professional politicians. The most obvious manifestation of this process is the formation of political parties with their own bureaucratic structures, full-time officials and so on. But the professionalization of political activity, together with the increasing autonomy of the political field, has a paradoxical consequence: individuals cannot constitute themselves as a group with a voice, capable of making itself heard in the political field, unless they
Bourdieu analyses the phenomenon of political dispossession as a two-step process of 'delegation'. The first step is that a group creates itself by establishing an institutional framework - a permanent office, a bureaucracy, paid officials, etc. The second step is that the organization then ‘mandates* an individual or individuals to speak on
behalf of the group. This delegate (Bourdieu uses the French term
As political parties and bureaucracies expand, the field of production of political discourses - what Bourdieu sometimes describes as ‘ideologies’ - becomes more and more autonomous, like a game with its own rules and conditions of entry. The bureaucracies take over responsibility for training the professionals who will enter the game, endowing them with the specialist skills and competencies which they will require in order to succeed. Above all, these professionals must acquire a practical sense or 'feel' for the game, that is, a habitus attuned to the specific conditions of the political field. The discourses produced by political professionals are therefore determined by two broad sets of constraints. One set of constraints derives from the logic of the political field itself, in which professionals are competing with one another, taking stances
The second set of constraints which operates in the production of
political discourse derives, not from the field itself, but from the relation between this field and a broader range of social positions, groups and processes. While the political field has a considerable degree of autonomy, it is not completely independent of other fields and forces. Indeed, one of the distinctive characteristics of the political field is that, in order for professionals to succeed within it, they must appeal to groups or forces which lie
Bourdieu’s essays on the field of politics and political discourse should be seen as a contribution to a research project which, in order to be followed through properly, would require more detailed empirical or historical inquiry.33 None the less, it is clear that Bourdieu has outlined a distinctive approach to political phenomena, an approach which has definite methodological implications. One such implication is that it would be superficial (at best) to try to analyse political discourses or ideologies by focusing on the utterances as such, without reference to the constitution of the political field and the relation between this field and the broader space of social positions and processes. This kind of ‘internal analysis' is commonplace in the academic literature, as exemplified by the numerous and varied attempts to apply some form of semiotics or ‘discourse analysis' to political speeches. The difficulty with all such attempts is similar to the difficulty that vitiates all ‘formalist’ approaches to language (or, indeed, all purely ‘literary’ approaches to literature): they take for granted but fail to take
account of the social-historical conditions within which the object of analysis is produced, constructed and received. Bourdieu’s approach implies - and in this respect it seems to me that he is entirely justified - that an adequate analysis of political discourse must be based on a systematic reconstruction of the field within which such discourse is produced and received (with its distinctive organizations, schemes of production and perception, etc.) and its relation to the broader social space.
Another implication of Bourdieu’s approach is that political phenomena cannot be analysed as if they were no more than a manifestation of socioeconomic processes, or of relations and oppositions between classes. This traditional type of Marxist analysis would involve a methodological short-circuiting which is quite antithetical to Bourdieu’s approach. The problem with most forms of Marxist analysis, in Bourdieu’s view, is that they tend to treat the social world as a one-dimensional space, in which phenomena or developments are explained, either directly or indirectly, in terms of the unfolding of the economic mode of production and the class oppositions stemming from it. While Bourdieu does not underestimate the importance of economic relations, his approach is rather different. He views the social world as a multi-dimensional space, differentiated into relatively autonomous fields; and within each of these fields, individuals occupy positions determined by the quantities of different types of capital they possess. Hence we cannot simply assume that those who occupy dominant positions in the political field will be identical with, or in some way directly linked to, those who occupy dominant positions in the field of economic production. There are likely to be important connections here; it is likely that the fields will correspond in certain ways, so that, for instance, the relations between positions in one field will reflect the relations between positions in another - that is, the fields will display certain ‘homologies’, as Bourdieu puts it. But if we want to understand these connections properly, there is no alternative to a careful, rigorous reconstruction of the fields and of the links between the positions and agents within them.
There is a further difficulty, in Bourdieu’s view, with most forms of Marxist analysis: they tend to confuse theoretical classes with real social groups, and hence they misconstrue a whole series of questions concerning the ways in which agents mobilize themselves through representation. The notion of class plays a fundamental explanatory role in Bourdieu’s work, and some readers may feel (with some justification, I think) that Bourdieu is trying to get too
much theoretical mileage from this concept. Readers may also feel that he gives insufficient attention to other bases of social division, inequality and conflict in modern societies, such as those connected with gender, ethnicity or the relations between nation-states.34 These reservations may have some grounds; but it is important to appreciate that Bourdieu's use of the notion of class is quite distinctive, and that it differs in crucial respects from the way this notion is used in the traditional Marxist literature. Bourdieu does not define classes in terms of the ownership or non-ownership of means of production (his use of traditional Marxist terms like ’bourgeois’ and ‘petit-bourgeois’ may be somewhat misleading in this regard, and is best seen as a kind of conceptual shorthand). For Bourdieu, classes are sets of agents who occupy similar positions in the social space, and hence possess similar kinds and similar quantities of capital, similar life chances, similar dispositions, etc.35 These ’classes on paper’ are
While Bourdieu is sharply critical of much traditional Marxist analysis, there can be no doubt that his work is deeply influenced by Marx's approach. The very fact that Bourdieu gives a certain theoretical priority to social classes, and to the role of economic capital in the social space, is ample testimony to his debt. But the way in which Bourdieu uses ideas drawn from Marx is the same as the way he uses notions drawn from Weber or Levi-Strauss (or. in
other respects, Durkheim): he adapts them and re-works them for the purposes of concrete social analysis. Hence it would be quite misleading to view Bourdieu as a contemporary exponent of Marxism. even if a ‘disguised’ or heavily qualified Marxism, as some commentators are inclined to do.36 This kind of characterization is based on a rather superficial understanding of the distinctive trajectory and concerns of Bourdieu’s work. Moreover. Bourdieu is not a thinker who moves with the fashion, espousing ‘structuralism’ one day, ‘post-structuralism’ (or ‘post-modernism’) the next. He fiercely resists labels of this kind, and he has no sympathy for what he sees as a sort of intellectual faddism.
Bourdieu's work is an exceptionally sophisticated attempt to develop a coherent theoretical framework for the analysis of the social world, a framework of comparable interest and scope to the very different approaches elaborated by such contemporary thinkers as Habermas and Foucault. Throughout his writings Bourdieu displays a firm commitment to the value of empirical investigation, and he makes no apologies for his use (at limes extensive) of statistical and quantitative methods. But his work also has a sharp critical edge. As a social scientist first and foremost, Bourdieu rarely engages in normative political theory, nor does he seek to formulate political programmes or policies for particular social groups. But his relentless disclosure of power and privilege in its most varied and subtlest forms, and the respect accorded by his theoretical framework to the agents who make up the social world which he so acutely dissects, give his work an implicit critical potential. For the first step in creating new social relations, alternative ways of organizing social and political life, is to understand the socially instituted limits of the ways of speaking, thinking and acting which are characteristic of our societies today. That Bourdieu has made a major contribution to our understanding of these limits is a judgement that would be difficult to dispute.