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Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu
In Symbolic Violence Michael Burawoy brings Pierre Bourdieu into an extended debate with Marxism—a tradition Bourdieu ostensibly avoided. While Bourdieu's expansive body of work stands as a critique of Marx's inadequate account of cultural domination, Burawoy shows how Bourdieu's eschewal and rejection of Marxism led him to miss out on a number of productive theoretical engagements. In eleven “conversations,” Burawoy outlines the intellectual and biographical parallels and divergences between Bourdieu and the work of preeminent Marxist thinkers. Among many topics, Burawoy examines Bourdieu's appropriation and silencing of Beauvoir and her theory of masculine domination; the commonalities as well as differences in Bourdieu's and Fanon's thought on colonialism and revolution; the extent to which Gramsci's theory of hegemony aligns with Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence; and both how Freire and Bourdieu understood education as the site of oppression. In showing how Bourdieu has more in common with these thinkers than Bourdieu himself cared to admit, Burawoy offers a critical assessment of Bourdieu's work that illuminates its paradoxes and reaffirms its significance for the twenty-first century.
- GenresSociology
240 pages, Paperback
Published October 11, 2019
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174 people want to read
About the author
Michael Burawoy
36 books32 followersMichael Burawoy was a British sociologist working within Marxist social theory, best known as the leading proponent of public sociology and the author of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism—a study on the sociology of industry that has been translated into a number of languages.
Burawoy was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the American Sociological Association in 2004. In 2006–2010, he was one of the vice-presidents for the Committee of National Associations of the International Sociological Association (ISA). In the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology he was elected the 17th President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the period 2010–2014.
Burawoy was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the American Sociological Association in 2004. In 2006–2010, he was one of the vice-presidents for the Committee of National Associations of the International Sociological Association (ISA). In the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology he was elected the 17th President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the period 2010–2014.
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May 4, 2020
When I bought this book I didn’t look closely enough at the blurb and assumed it was literally conversations between the author and Bourdieu. And yes, I know he is dead, but I just assumed these conversations occurred prior to him dying. That’s not what this book is about. Bourdieu had an odd relationship with Marx and Marxists. Although it is clear he borrowed the idea of capital from Marx – he extends ‘capital’ beyond financial capital, and includes other forms, similar to how Weber does too. The main additional capitals in his theory are social and cultural capital. And while Marx sees the whole of society moving towards two main social classes – capitalists who own the means of production and workers who must sell their labour to survive – Bourdieu is less interested in classes than in classifications.
His major classifications are the dominant class and the dominated class - but there is also the middle class and a series of other fractions between and amongst these three extremes. For instance, the intellectuals, a group very important to Bourdieu, are a dominated fraction of the dominant class. Bourdieu fits all of this within his conceptions of fields – which he directly links to sporting fields, where players compete for positions. A player’s skills at playing the game depend on what he calls the player’s habitus – the dispositions and habits of mind the player has acquired over a lifetime, so that these become embodied within the person to such an extent that it is impossible for that person to even notice these habits are there.
And this is where the title comes into the scheme of things. All these ideas of Bourdieu’s are various supports for the primary question his sociology seeks to answer – that is, what is the nature of symbolic violence? Symbolic violence explains why the dominant class and dominant class interests – despite being different from, and even opposed to, the interests of other classification groups in society – come to appear to everyone as natural and inevitable.
The author of this book is a neo-Marxist – and so when he was first introduced to Bourdieu he couldn’t quite see what Bourdieu what all the excitement was about. Basically, he felt that not only was Bourdieu not actually adding anything new, but rather he was stealing ideas from people like Fanon, Gramsci, Freire or de Beauvoir. After an extensive investigation into the life and works of Bourdieu – that also involved studying with Wacquant – he decided to pull together his thoughts on Bourdieu’s relationship with these Marxist and post-Marxist scholars into this book. He does this by imagining a series of conversations between Bourdieu and each of these scholars in turn. These aren’t exactly Platonic dialogues – in fact, I think they are more interesting than that in a way. No one really talks, so a ‘conversation’ might not, in some ways, be quite the right word – rather, the author provides a space for the ideas of the two theorists to bump up against each other where he discusses the similarities and differences between the two sets of ideas.
A key aspect of Bourdieu’s work is that it is so broad in its reach – he wrote on education, literature, culture, feminism, economics, colonialism – and so each of the chapters engages with his ideas on each of these subjects and compares and contrasts those ideas with the ideas of leading Marxist scholars. The result is a critique that is anything but a ‘crushing blow’ or even polemic against Bourdieu (all the same, I really have come away from this book with quite a different understanding of his works and ideas – and given I’ve read quite a lot of Bourdieu, I wasn’t quite expecting that to be the case). Rather, this is a series of dual engagements with a topic, where the strengths and weaknesses of both sides are highlighted and the reader is not left so much with ‘the answer’ as with very a series of interesting questions to continue thinking about after the book is finished.
Perhaps the key message to take away from this book is the difference between Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence and how that compares to similar ideas (say, Gramsci’s hegemony) from these Marxists. I think over the years I’ve preferred to believe that although Bourdieu’s ideas of reproduction imply change is virtually impossible, that this exaggeration was necessary so as to stress the depth of inertia that clearly exists in society. This book makes it clear that Bourdieu had a much deeper pessimism about the possibility of social change than even I’m able to muster. That is, he basically assumed it was impossible. The dominant classes are obviously not really interested in social change if it is going to diminish their power – and ultimately, what fundamental change wouldn’t? The middle classes are mostly concerned with emulating the dominant classes, and so the only real change they are interested in are social climbing and snobbery. And the dominated classes are so far under the heel of the dominated and so trapped in a precarious world of survival, that rather than being the great revolutionary force set to transform the world with nothing to lose but their chains, they barely have the mental capacity left to scratch themselves.
But what is odd about Bourdieu is that this wasn’t quite how he ended up living his life – so, that brings us to the last chapter of this book, which is a conversation between different aspects of Bourdieu himself – particularly in relation to his last major work ‘The Weight of the World’. Bourdieu become something of an activist in the last years of his life (attending strikes and talking to workers about the dangers of neoliberalism) and that is a deeply odd thing to do from someone who didn’t believe change was impossible or who believed that workers are so oppressed they can never bring change about.
Bourdieu comes out of this book as a mess of contradictions – but while some contradictions in people are just based on dull self-justification, with Bourdieu they are much more interesting and more productive. I think the problem with Bourdieu that I’m really going to need to think about in more depth now that this book has alerted me to it, is the idea that our habitus is embodied within us. Unlike all of the Marxists, Bourdieu makes the central character of sociology to be the individual – even if, as a representative of a classification, the individual has a relationship with others. The dangers here are similar to the neoliberal project more generally that it is always based on atomising people so as to disconnect them from those around them. This means people are forced to rely on their personal resources, and that this is the basis of neoliberal theory in general or the sociology of Beck or Giddens. Bourdieu, of course, talks of social and cultural capital – but ultimately these are embodied in our habitus and this habitus is always personal and individual – it being impossible for two habituses to be identical.
Anyway – this book raises a great many questions and I think presents a fair exploration of Bourdieu’s ideas in a way that is about coming to understand those ideas rather than to refute them, asking what can be taken away from them that can be used to further our understanding of the world. I really do recommend reading this, it provides an excellent introduction not only to Bourdieu, and also to a group of key Marxist scholars.
His major classifications are the dominant class and the dominated class - but there is also the middle class and a series of other fractions between and amongst these three extremes. For instance, the intellectuals, a group very important to Bourdieu, are a dominated fraction of the dominant class. Bourdieu fits all of this within his conceptions of fields – which he directly links to sporting fields, where players compete for positions. A player’s skills at playing the game depend on what he calls the player’s habitus – the dispositions and habits of mind the player has acquired over a lifetime, so that these become embodied within the person to such an extent that it is impossible for that person to even notice these habits are there.
And this is where the title comes into the scheme of things. All these ideas of Bourdieu’s are various supports for the primary question his sociology seeks to answer – that is, what is the nature of symbolic violence? Symbolic violence explains why the dominant class and dominant class interests – despite being different from, and even opposed to, the interests of other classification groups in society – come to appear to everyone as natural and inevitable.
The author of this book is a neo-Marxist – and so when he was first introduced to Bourdieu he couldn’t quite see what Bourdieu what all the excitement was about. Basically, he felt that not only was Bourdieu not actually adding anything new, but rather he was stealing ideas from people like Fanon, Gramsci, Freire or de Beauvoir. After an extensive investigation into the life and works of Bourdieu – that also involved studying with Wacquant – he decided to pull together his thoughts on Bourdieu’s relationship with these Marxist and post-Marxist scholars into this book. He does this by imagining a series of conversations between Bourdieu and each of these scholars in turn. These aren’t exactly Platonic dialogues – in fact, I think they are more interesting than that in a way. No one really talks, so a ‘conversation’ might not, in some ways, be quite the right word – rather, the author provides a space for the ideas of the two theorists to bump up against each other where he discusses the similarities and differences between the two sets of ideas.
A key aspect of Bourdieu’s work is that it is so broad in its reach – he wrote on education, literature, culture, feminism, economics, colonialism – and so each of the chapters engages with his ideas on each of these subjects and compares and contrasts those ideas with the ideas of leading Marxist scholars. The result is a critique that is anything but a ‘crushing blow’ or even polemic against Bourdieu (all the same, I really have come away from this book with quite a different understanding of his works and ideas – and given I’ve read quite a lot of Bourdieu, I wasn’t quite expecting that to be the case). Rather, this is a series of dual engagements with a topic, where the strengths and weaknesses of both sides are highlighted and the reader is not left so much with ‘the answer’ as with very a series of interesting questions to continue thinking about after the book is finished.
Perhaps the key message to take away from this book is the difference between Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence and how that compares to similar ideas (say, Gramsci’s hegemony) from these Marxists. I think over the years I’ve preferred to believe that although Bourdieu’s ideas of reproduction imply change is virtually impossible, that this exaggeration was necessary so as to stress the depth of inertia that clearly exists in society. This book makes it clear that Bourdieu had a much deeper pessimism about the possibility of social change than even I’m able to muster. That is, he basically assumed it was impossible. The dominant classes are obviously not really interested in social change if it is going to diminish their power – and ultimately, what fundamental change wouldn’t? The middle classes are mostly concerned with emulating the dominant classes, and so the only real change they are interested in are social climbing and snobbery. And the dominated classes are so far under the heel of the dominated and so trapped in a precarious world of survival, that rather than being the great revolutionary force set to transform the world with nothing to lose but their chains, they barely have the mental capacity left to scratch themselves.
But what is odd about Bourdieu is that this wasn’t quite how he ended up living his life – so, that brings us to the last chapter of this book, which is a conversation between different aspects of Bourdieu himself – particularly in relation to his last major work ‘The Weight of the World’. Bourdieu become something of an activist in the last years of his life (attending strikes and talking to workers about the dangers of neoliberalism) and that is a deeply odd thing to do from someone who didn’t believe change was impossible or who believed that workers are so oppressed they can never bring change about.
Bourdieu comes out of this book as a mess of contradictions – but while some contradictions in people are just based on dull self-justification, with Bourdieu they are much more interesting and more productive. I think the problem with Bourdieu that I’m really going to need to think about in more depth now that this book has alerted me to it, is the idea that our habitus is embodied within us. Unlike all of the Marxists, Bourdieu makes the central character of sociology to be the individual – even if, as a representative of a classification, the individual has a relationship with others. The dangers here are similar to the neoliberal project more generally that it is always based on atomising people so as to disconnect them from those around them. This means people are forced to rely on their personal resources, and that this is the basis of neoliberal theory in general or the sociology of Beck or Giddens. Bourdieu, of course, talks of social and cultural capital – but ultimately these are embodied in our habitus and this habitus is always personal and individual – it being impossible for two habituses to be identical.
Anyway – this book raises a great many questions and I think presents a fair exploration of Bourdieu’s ideas in a way that is about coming to understand those ideas rather than to refute them, asking what can be taken away from them that can be used to further our understanding of the world. I really do recommend reading this, it provides an excellent introduction not only to Bourdieu, and also to a group of key Marxist scholars.
Displaying 1 of 1 review