lalala Manel’s Reviews > Bourdieu in International Relations > Status Update

Charisma occupies a key place in Bourdieu's thinking about politics because it highlights the symbolic dimensions that mark the specificity of politics as distinguished from crudely materialist views. However, he views understandings of charisma (including Weber's) as having fallen prey to "political fetishism" - to the belief that charismatic politics reflect the particular attributes and intrinsic, almost ineffable, attraction of an individual. Instead, he proposes that charismatic politics actually reflect a social process of representation.
Representation is here not simply a form of delegation: it is in fact a constitutive process whereby a leader is crucial to the genesis of the group itself. It is common, Bourdieu argues, to think that
the group creates the man who speaks in its name - to put it that way is to think in terms of delegation - whereas in reality it is more or less just as true to say that it is the spokesman who creates the group. It is because the representative exists, because he represents (symbolic action), that the group that is represented and symbolized exists and that it in return gives existence to its representative as the representative of the group.
(1991: 204)
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, "When the spokesperson speaks, it is a group that speaks through him, but one that exists as a group through that speech and its speaker" (2004: 41).
A key if somewhat paradoxical outcome of this relationship is that it can provide the leadership with power over the group even in the absence of direct processes. of delegation or legitimation. In a passage worth quoting at length, Bourdieu characterizes this process as one where:
Those responsible for the mobilization and manifestation of the group who,
• through speech or any other form of representation - verbal or enacted, theatrical - make tacit malaise and sufferings, unexpressed aspirations and expectations, pass from implicit to explicit state, to expressed "publicized" opinion[Jenjoy an absolute power of creation since they make possible, in a certain way, the group to exist as such by giving it a body, their own, a name, or "logo" as a quasi-magical substitute for the group.
(2004: 41)
This relationship need not be formally institutionalized. It can be evinced (and must, in fact, be continually recreated) by the production of belief, which is Simultaneously part of the production of the group. In informal, minimally institutionalized, or protean movements, the group relies on the leadership for its existence as much as the leader relies on the group. In these situations in particular (though not only these - think of the rallies and conventions of even the most , institutionalized political parties), continual, affirmations and manifestations of allegiance and thus of the existence of the group must be made." In a reciprocal relationship, the "mystery of the Ministry", the ability of the leadership to bring the group into existence (to re-present the group to itself, and thus to claim leadership of it depends also upon their ability to mobilize the group. For the leadership to
produce this effect, they must possess a power over the group which they derive from the group, a power of mobilization working as power to manifest the group as a visible and effective group, which they owe to the mobilized group upon which they wield that power.
(2004: 41)
Neither formal delegation nor direct institutional power is necessarily at work here. Instead, this
misrecognized circular circulation of recognition is at the root of the capital and symbolic power that the mandated agent, a symbol exerting a symbolic action of reinforcement of the symbol (like the flag and all emblems of the group, holds over the group of which he is the embodied substitute, the incarnation.
(2004:42)

“It is in what I would call the oracle effect, thanks to which the spokesperson gives voice to the group in whose name he speaks, thereby speaking with all the authority of that elusive, absent phenomenon, that the function of priestly humility can best be seen: it is in abolishing himself completely in favour of God or the People that the priest turns himself into God or the People. It is when I become Nothing - and because I am capable of becoming Nothing, of abolishing myself, or forgetting myself, of sacrificing myself, of dedicating myself - that I become Everything”

‼️‼️‼️meter primeiro :
To some observers, the most recent steps in the European integration process represent the sabotage of state sovereignty. As Paul Sharp notes in a critique of post-Cold War diplomacy, 'Representation - of sovereigns, interests, or ideas - was replaced by metaphors of constructing and building by which issues were to be managed and problems were to be solved' (Sharp 2004: 67). A critique of this development would begin with the argument that this brings us back to earlier forms of realpolitik, where actions were more those of individual leaders and their advisers than of nations or people; interests, yes - but not "national' as such (Adler-Nissen 2009). In this view, neither national nor European positions have the strength and absoluteness of interests with the weight of society behind them.
Stated more radically:
We see that sovereignty, as the forceful assertion of national interests and ambitions, is less appropriate to the actual behaviour of today's elites. On the contrary, European integration begins to look somewhat like Althusser's
"process without a subject. Sovereignty survives as performance, but its content is attenuated.
(Heartfield 2007: 127)
The problem with Heartfield's argument is that it assumes that sovereignty was once a 'forceful assertion of national interests and ambitions'. One should avoid falling into the opposite trap of essentializing the national interest as having a particular "vitality'. A focus on how the meta-capital of the state performs in relation to other capitals provides us with a sociologically informed understanding of sovereignty capable of grasping both continuity and change.

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