Abstract
A few words of caution before beginning this review. If you have purchased and/or read Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment, by Michael Burawoy and Karl von Holdt, do not purchase this book. Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu is largely the same book, though with some interesting updates and without von Holdt’s commentary on Bourdieu’s relevance in South Africa. David L. Swartz (2014) has offered an excellent review of that book in this very journal.
Now, if you haven’t read the earlier book, then by all means do read Symbolic Violence. This is the kind of book that, if you are a college professor wrapped up in the demands of teaching and administrative service, will remind you of the best moments of graduate school. If you are a graduate student stressed about completing your degree and finding work in today’s horrible job market, it will remind you why you went to grad school in the first place. If you are an undergraduate student who is considering graduate school, it portends the best kind of intellectual stimulation that is to come. And if you are anywhere else in life and want to get in on deep intellectual fun, Symbolic Violence is the place to be.
Burawoy provides us with the best kind of intellectual stimulation: deep and sustained critical dialogue between committed thinkers. He puts Bourdieu into conversation with a variety of more-or-less Marxist theorists, with at least two underlying goals. First, he uses these theorists to imagine a Bourdieusian sociological project after Bourdieu. In the same way that Marxists have developed Marxism after Marx, Burawoy wants to know where theoretical development will come in an approach that Bourdieu himself often thought others were unable to fully grasp.
The second goal is more ambitious, as Burawoy uses these theorists to think about the political and emancipatory potential in Bourdieu’s work. Burawoy wants to get beyond what he sees as Bourdieu’s critical pessimism that leads to a gap in his theory and practice (p. 12). While Bourdieu often spoke of his scientific work as a tool that will enable us to understand where and why social change is necessary, he didn’t offer much of a way to make that change occur, even in the more explicitly political writings that he produced late in his life. Burawoy believes that the place we can begin to think about this potential is in conversations with Marxists that will point to limitations in Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence.
It is sometimes the case with a book like this that there will be variations in the quality across chapters. How can one master the ideas of thinkers as diverse as Gramsci, Fanon, Beauvoir, and Burawoy himself, among others, all in a book about Bourdieu? Burawoy can and has, and the book is strong throughout. I focus in this review on two conversations because they highlight ways in which Bourdieu’s very approach limits the ways he can think about potential futures.
First, Burawoy puts Bourdieu and Fanon into conversation about Algeria in order to highlight the temporal orientation of their two approaches. While Fanon sees “Algeria from the vantage of a romantic future,” Bourdieu sees it “from the standpoint of a romantic past” (p. 88). While Fanon’s approach makes him a revolutionary theorist, Bourdieu’s makes him a theorist of habitus and, at least in more developed societies, the misrecognition that comes with symbolic violence. According to Burawoy, Bourdieu can tell us how we got into that violence, but his approach says little about ways we can get out.
In a later chapter, Burawoy uses his own work to contrast Marx’s theory of mystification and Bourdieu’s theory of misrecognition. The former refers to “the social process that produces the gap between experience and reality for all who enter a specific set of social relations (p. 153, emphasis in original), while the latter is “constituted through a deeply implanted habitus at least partially independent of . . . particular social relations” (p. 156, emphasis in original). Burawoy contrasts factory workers in Hungary (Burawoy and Lukács 1992) with those in the United States (Burawoy 1982). In Hungary there is no mystification, and Burawoy finds workers who are aware of their own exploitation. Without mystification, state socialism creates dissent rather than consent. The consent to domination found in the Chicago factory where Burawoy did his participant observation was the result of mystification and not misrecognition.
While I believe Burawoy’s operationalization of social structure as state socialism in Hungary is overly simplistic, the comparison with U.S. workers is in itself helpful for understanding both the theoretical concepts and the applicability of Bourdieu’s ideas across historical contexts. Burawoy implies that social orders are maintained by either mystification or misrecognition. However, I come out of this chapter wondering if it must be just one or the other. Can we either find or anticipate societies in which both are in play?
Other chapters are equally suggestive of ways of thinking with and about Bourdieu, but I close this review by returning to my opening account of graduate school. In the first chapter of Symbolic Violence, Burawoy suggests dialogue—the method he employs in writing this book—as an alternative to dominant models of science and perhaps speech itself, such as combat, à la
Bourdieu, and consensus, à la Merton and, I would add, Habermas (pp. 30–31). In my own experience, graduate school was the exemplary locale for such an approach to learning and knowledge production. The conversations I had there, whether with professors or other graduate students, or when trying to compare and contrast thinkers that would have greatly benefited from the dialogue model that Burawoy offers in this book, I have rarely experienced either before or since. They truly resulted in “mutual clarification” (p. 35).
Dialogue as a model of science offers great promise. The question for Burawoy, though, is, how do we create similar social conditions and the appropriate habitus for such scientific practice? How do we create intellectuals who do something other than serve as the dominated segment of the dominant class? Burawoy is rightly skeptical of Bourdieu’s “Internationale of intellectuals,” but in Symbolic Violence he does not offer an alternative means of achieving his goal other than to just do it.
Marx and Bourdieu are among our most prescient theorists of social structure, and they both tell us that social conditions matter. How do we change those conditions when the neoliberal academic institutions that produce most intellectuals today want something very different? To change the ways in which we do science would be a symbolic revolution indeed. The benefits of such a revolution, as this book shows, are worth the effort to figure out ways to make it happen.