Je pense, donc tu suis
(I think, therefore you follow)
Men’s toilet at the Sorbonne, 1999
Pierre Bourdieu’s work as a whole illustrates the double strategy that an upcoming thinker had to engage in the French intellectual field in the 1960s: on the one hand, one had to take part in broader intellectual movements such as “structuralism” and the political radicalization in the university, including the critique of bourgeois order, on the other hand one had to craft one’s own niche and collaborative circles within these broader movements. This double movement is especially clear in Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism and those French intellectuals who were considered by many radical intellectuals as being its “official” representatives in France, Louis Althusser and his students (for a sharp critique, see Bourdieu 1982). Apart from the analysis of cultural production, it is perhaps in the analysis of political representation that Bourdieu’s adaptation of some of Marx’s (and Althusser’s) concepts is the clearest. The usage of Marxist concepts enabled Bourdieu to keep up his profile as a theoretically innovative sociologist who, although integrated into university and holding a position as a directeur d’études at the institutionally marginal but intellectually prestigious Ecole pratique des hautes études, was also politically radical, that is on the left and with the students. Combining empirical and theoretical analysis, he wanted to expand the area of sociological intervention to include politics and culture. Like other intellectuals of the 1960s, his work contained a radical critique of the state of French democracy as a bourgeois order that excluded the weak and powerless.
In Bourdieu’s theory of political representation, the right that its citizens have to formulate political opinions and emit political judgments is the fundamental characteristic of any democratic regime. In theory, democracy is composed of citizens who, with certain age limits, are all equal. However, as Bourdieu demonstrates in his numerous studies on political opinion (see for instance Bourdieu 1984a, 1984b: 397–465), socially the ability to produce a political opinion and to emit a political judgment is unequally distributed. The technical competence that has to do with political judgment is actually a social competence. This ability varies with educational qualifications and age, among other factors. As in other areas of social activity, in politics concentration of the objectified or embodied instruments of production of political opinions can be observed. In this sense, the French republic is already a selective democracy, as only part of the population has the symbolic means to produce a political opinion, to access the order of political discourse, and thus to fully partake in political culture.
Not every answer to a question considered as being political is necessarily the product of a political judgment. Bourdieu differentiates three modes of production of opinion (Bourdieu 1984b: 417–18). The first depends on class ethos, which enables the opinion provider to formulate coherent, common sense answers that follow the logic of everyday existence. Political principles, “slant,” or logos provide the grounding for the second mode of production of political opinion. Both modes are amenable to logical control and reflexive scrutiny. A third mode of production of political opinion consists of delegation of the formulation of political opinions to an organization providing a political line, such as a party, trade union, or other political organization. This delegation can be based on either class ethos or “slant.”
What differentiates the first mode of production from the second and the third is that in the case of class ethos the principles of production of political judgment are implicit. The relationship between class and opinion is direct and unconscious. In Bourdieu’s mind, this is very problematic, as “dispositions without consciousness are self-opaque and always exposed to seduction by false recognitions” (Bourdieu 1984b: 420). In contrast, the relationship between social class and political opinion is indirect in the second and third modes, mediated by the logos of either a specific political axiomatics or a political organization. Bourdieu provides a complementary division in the analysis of political opinion with production by proxy versus first-person production. He designates as production by proxy the delegation of the power to produce political opinions to a party or other political organization that represents the individual. By first-person production Bourdieu means that individuals use their own resources to formulate political opinions.
As the ability to formulate political opinions is unequally distributed, those with more educational resources are more likely to be able to formulate them than those who have none. In Bourdieu’s words, “The probability of producing a political response to a politically constituted question rises as one moves up the social hierarchy (and the hierarchy of incomes and qualifications)” (Bourdieu 1984b: 427). Bourdieu also analyzes the social mechanisms that influence the ability to produce an answer to a “political question” (Bourdieu 1977: 55–89). Variations in this ability depend less on technical expertise or on knowledge of politics than on the social competence that translates into the feeling of having the right to have a political opinion (Champagne 1991). In other words, the ability to imagine the political is as unequally distributed as political competence.
Bourdieu is interested in the role played by faith and trust in political judgment, especially in the case of production by proxy. An element of implicit faith is inscribed in the logic of political choice. The choice of representatives involves choosing not only among programs and ideas, but also among personalities. The first element of uncertainty concerns the object of judgment: is it a person or is it a set of ideas? Because a person is endowed with a certain habitus, that is ways of seeing and evaluating social events, s/he embodies certain ideas that might not be expressed at the moment of choice. These unexpressed ideas and opinions exist in an implicit mode. On the one hand, the representative expresses the already formulated ideas of his/her electors, and, on the other hand, s/he follows his/her own “internal program—or the specific interests associated with his position in the field of ideological production” (Bourdieu 1984b: 424). In some cases, there is correspondence between speech and spokesperson. However, even in these cases usurpation is possible, as the representative might bring into existence opinions that were not previously expressed and thus were not known by the electors at the moment they made their choice.
In surveys, the least competent persons in matters of political opinion must choose between answers that take on their meaning in relation to a political issue, that is, to a political position in the field of ideological production. Because these individuals can produce a “yes” or “no” answer to a question but cannot necessarily grasp the political meaning of the question asked, those asking the questions can impose on them a political position. In this way, “the respondents are dispossessed of the meaning of their response” (Bourdieu 1984b: 428), a response that is totally alien to their own opinion but which is nevertheless presented as being their opinion. These least competent persons either then respond to an alien question or answer the question as they understand it, retranslating it into their own language. Thus, “rationalization of budgetary options” becomes “not wasting money” (Bourdieu 1984b: 428). Through this mechanism, the respondent resorts to his or her class ethos and its unconscious presuppositions. Bourdieu underlines the conservative nature of these predispositions, tied to the world by practical logic. The task of formulating revolutionary political stances is left to political organizations.
In a Weberian fashion, the field of ideological production is the realm of professional politicians, an area from which the profanes are excluded. It is in this realm that political problems, programs, and ready-made solutions are produced. This production of political opinion and judgment attempts to achieve collective mobilization around common problems, to universalize certain particular interests by making their particular condition appear universal. However, part of the problem of translation of the implicit into the explicit is that there is a radical discontinuity between condition and discourse, between ethos and logos. That is, the unconscious character of practical logic, its inscription in bodily hexis, that is, in everyday schemes of perception and appreciation, and in the implicit political underpinnings of class habitus, do not necessarily translate into definite political stances or opinions understood as positions in the field of ideological production. It is precisely because of the indeterminate character of the relationship between ethos and logos that professional political agents of all kinds—politicians, journalists, publicists, etc.—play such a key role in the production of political opinion, shaping the world of the politically imaginable and the structures and main dividing lines of the field of ideological production.
Bourdieu’s theory of electoral and democratic politics concentrates on analysis of political representation and symbolic political struggles. Following Thomas Aquinas, Bourdieu discusses the delegation of political power by the people to a representative as a form of alienation (Bourdieu 2001: 101). The people alienate their original sovereignty to a plenipotentiary representative, a party and/or an individual. An isolated individual cannot make himself heard in politics unless s/he transforms this isolated voice into group voice. But this means s/he must dispossess him- or herself of a voice in order to escape political dispossession. In a landmark study entitled “Delegation and Political Fetishism,” Bourdieu analyzes the power of delegation as a purely political power that enables a group to form by delegating power to a representative (Bourdieu 1981: 49–55, 1991, 203–19). In very Durkheimian fashion, the process of delegation becomes a case of social magic in which a person such as a minister, a priest, or a deputy is identified with a group of people: the workers, the nation, believers, etc. The group no longer exists as a collection of individuals but rather, through this representative, as a social agent. In this case, delegation signifies alienation implicitly consented to by those represented and dissimulated usurpation by the representative. As Robert Michels put it in his ground breaking work on power in political organizations, “le parti, c’est moi” (Michels 1962: 220). Bourdieu reveals the double process of recognition and misrecognition inscribed in political delegation: “A symbolic power is a power which presupposes recognition, that is, misrecognition of the violence that is exercised through it” (Bourdieu 1991a: 209).
The representative exists in a metonymical relationship with the group. S/he is a member of the group, that is, a part of it, but at the same time s/he stands for the group as a whole, is a sign of the group. The representative represents the group and speaks in its name (Bourdieu 1981: 50), the relationship between representative and represented being similar to that between signifier and signified. But at the same time, those represented have a fides implicita in the representative. S/he is given a blank check. Bourdieu seems to say that this separation of rulers and ruled means that democracy is impossible. The paradox of the monopolization of collective truth is for Bourdieu the principle of all symbolic imposition: a person speaks in the name of the group and thus manipulates the group in its own name. (Bourdieu 1981: 52). The organization quickly supplements the group. “People are there and speak. Then comes the party official, and people come less often. And then there is an organization, which starts to develop a specific competence, a language all of its own” (Bourdieu 1981: 54–5, 1991: 218).
In his discussion of how groups function, Bourdieu sketches two approaches to the problem of political opinion and competence. The first type centers on markets, votes, and polls. In such approaches, individuals are demobilized and groups are reduced to aggregates (Bourdieu 2001: 85). In the case of individual speech or of voice, to use Albert Hirschman’s term (Hirschman 1970), the mode of aggregation is statistical or mechanical. It is independent of the individuals and the group does not exist politically, that is, as a political entity. Bourdieu contrasts this conception, which he calls liberal (Bourdieu 2001: 82), with Émile Durkheim’s corporatist conception of political opinion. According to Durkheim (1950: 138), and before him Jean-Jacques Rousseau, individual votes would ideally be animated by a collective spirit. They would express the community’s opinion, will, and constitute a relatively permanent and coherent group. The elementary electoral college should be not a collection of isolated individuals but rather a permanent and integrated group, a body with a spirit animated by tacit accord founded on complicity. For Bourdieu, this corporatist philosophy is the implicit philosophy of electoral democracy (Bourdieu 2001: 83).
Bourdieu analyzes political action as consisting mostly or even exclusively of symbolic action: speeches, writings, and other symbolic interventions. A key concept in Bourdieu’s sociology of domination is that of symbolic violence. Here he is not referring to symbolic systems à la Durkheim. Symbolic power does not stem from the illocutionary force of speech, as it does for Austin or Searle. Rather, words have an effect when they confirm or transform the vision people have of the world. Behind the words is belief in the person who utters them and in the legitimacy of the words being uttered. Who is speaking? is the first question that should be asked when the legitimacy of a political message is being evaluated. Symbols make visible and make invisible. They reveal certain aspects of reality while hiding others.
The working class does not exist as a physical entity. It is a symbolic construction that has become real because it has become an accepted part of political reality. The same goes for the state and most concepts that form part of political reality. These entities exist to the extent that representatives feel authorized to speak in their name, thus giving them real political force. Symbolic violence is the basic mechanism by which domination is unconsciously reproduced by the dominated. In Bourdieu’s theory, the dominated have to participate in the domination that is exerted on them otherwise it would not be legitimate. Reproduction of domination takes place with the consent of those dominated. Symbolic violence is transmitted in language and in social practices, and can be found in all human interaction. It is everywhere. Theoretically, at least, it can be contrasted with actions performed voluntarily. In practice, however, it is difficult to separate the two. The concept of symbolic violence can also be contrasted with that of physical violence, which is the monopoly of the state. In contrast to Michel Foucault’s work (see for instance Foucault 1977), Bourdieu barely talks about physical violence and mastery over bodies (Bon and Schemeil 1980: 1203), though the public control of this kind of violence is a key feature of state formation. Instead, Bourdieu emphasizes the symbolic aspects of domination and the symbolic violence exercised by the schooling system, art, law, and more generally culture.
Political action means acting on the social world, often by attempting to break with the world as a natural entity. Radical political action engages a radical epistemology (Bachelard 1980) that questions the world as it is usually interpreted. Like science, politics then has to do with the struggle over the legitimate definition of reality. For Bourdieu as for Foucault, the object of politics par excellence is knowledge of the social world. In the political arena, the value of an idea depends less on its truth-value than on its power to mobilize: ideas are power-ideas (idées-forces) (Bourdieu 2001). Power-ideas cannot be proven true or false. The only way for opponents to refute them is to oppose to them some alternative power-ideas. The political weight of power-ideas will depend on their capacity to mobilize, or to universalize which is the precondition for mobilization. In politics, saying is doing only to the extent that a political agent is politically responsible and capable of guaranteeing that the group will carry out the actions that the agent requires. Only then will political agents consider a political statement to be equivalent to an act. But the truthfulness of power-ideas is not verifiable or falsifiable when the ideas are expressed. Only if a statement such as “I will win the elections to the presidency” is realized in the future, will it be considered historically true.
Bourdieu’s analysis of political opinion, delegation, and the symbolic aspects of politics reduce politics to a struggle for domination, minimizing the transformations brought about by democratic politics. However, this conflict model is constructed on a harmony model based on the social characteristics of the agents involved in the struggle and their structural positions in various fields. The social field functions as the base structure of politics, the political game being the superstructure. In this vision that resembles in some aspects Derrida’s conception of politics (see for instance Derrida 1993), politics is about fetishism and the world of appearances. The real game is backstage in the social field, connected to the political field by any number of homologies or structural equivalences. In the social field as in any field of social activity, social class is the ultimate determinant of success or failure for any individual. Instead of the traditional dichotomy of the economic versus the cultural, one finds in Bourdieu’s theory of politics the dichotomy of the social versus the symbolic or the political.
Bourdieu’s analysis of social domination creates a uniform picture of social life (see Alexander 2001 for criticism). Although some might say that modern Western states including the French state keep a monopoly over physical violence through the army and the police, it is grossly exaggerated to say that the state holds the monopoly over symbolic violence. This is because while physical violence can be monopolized and its existence empirically verified, the same cannot be said of symbolic violence (Addi 2001: 950–54). The power over bodies is of a different nature than the power over minds, which cannot be dominated by just one institution. Families, religions, companies, the media, and various kinds of associations and organizations compete with the state and other public institutions for control of this kind.
Bourdieu succeeds in fusing sociological and political theories of bourgeois domination and power. But although he was one of the most visible young sociologists in the 1960s, his work, because of its empirical and social scientific character, never made it to the annals of “French theory” that has come to be defined as consisting of works in philosophy, literary theory or psychoanalysis. These composed the dominant elements in the alternative value hierarchy developed by many of the authors analyzed in this book (see also Dosse 1992).