Abstract
Michael Burawoy’s recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu’s own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master’s thought, and set about revising and extending it, in the same way as Marxists did of their own master. This article responds by doing precisely that. After clarifying a different reading of misrecognition, symbolic violence and habitus, it draws out a Bourdieusian theory of social change and a ‘thicker’ conception of contemporary social orders that can accommodate or dissolve Burawoy’s arguments while maintaining fundamental separation from the Marxist project.
Introduction
Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on sociology around the world today is enormous. Not only are his core concepts of habitus, capital and field ubiquitous, but his specific understanding of class and domination is widely adopted and applied in numerous studies of varied methodology and national provenance. It might even be said that, outside of the most technical quantitative elements of stratification research, Bourdieu has supplanted Max Weber as the major alternative to Marxism when it comes to studying structural inequality, struggle and oppression. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Marxists have begun to grapple with his work with increasing intensity. Nicos Poulantzas (1978: 177) could get away with a brief dismissal of Bourdieu in the 1970s as a confused yet ‘impenitent Weberian’, but as Bourdieu’s intellectual programme developed and his ideas became more popular within and beyond France, it became necessary to wrestle with his research and concepts so as to either accommodate them or undermine them. Bourdieu seemingly became the latest exemplar of ‘bourgeois sociology’ to be chided, stripped of any useful insight he might have happened upon, subordinated to the Marxist project and buried. Engagements range from Gartman’s (1991) critique of Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) through the critical considerations of Rancière (2004), Hobsbawm (2007), Karsenti (2011) and Desan (2013) to the fierce rejection of Riley (2017), the overall aim in all cases being to reassert the importance of materialism and/or the capacity for critical resistance to the system. This, of course, while others (Marxist and non-Marxist) have claimed Bourdieu to be a neo-Marxist (Alexander, 1995; Fowler, 2011)!
The most detailed, sustained and considered Marxist engagement with Bourdieu has undoubtedly been offered in recent years by Michael Burawoy. He explains the reasons for this depth of engagement himself: at first dismissive of Bourdieu, like Poulantzas (and Erik Olin Wright to the end), the growing appeal of Bourdieu to his students at Berkeley forced him to take the Frenchman more seriously (Burawoy, 2019: 1 ff.). Cheekily signing up to the ‘Bourdieu boot camp’ run by his colleague and Bourdieu aficionado, Loïc Wacquant, he delved into the full range of Bourdieu’s writings and became impressed yet, at the same time, remained concerned by what were, from his point of view, omissions and oversights in Bourdieu’s analysis of domination. He determined to work out the differences between Bourdieu and the Marxist tradition via a series of imaginary ‘conversations’, or rather comparisons, between Bourdieu and a string of notable Marxists. Starting as assignments for Wacquant’s class, these conversations were then developed into lectures and then, from there, into articles, chapters and, finally, a book. 1
Burawoy’s conversations are provocative, probing and peppered with quotes from a wide selection of Bourdieu’s writings to support his points. They demand consideration and response, much as Burawoy respectfully believed Bourdieu’s work did, not least because they provide a chance to settle some accounts with the Marxist tradition generally. This I intend to offer in the present article. By no means do I aim to dismiss the critique outright, nor do I want to engage in an exercise in reinterpreting the quotes used by Burawoy or offering new quotes to give a different reading. What Bourdieu wrote here or there is far less important than the logic of his framework – oriented around a ‘hard core’ of (mis)recognition, relationalism and a dispositional vision of practice – and its capacity for reasoned extension, elaboration and revision. So, I will offer suggestions for how a self-identifying Bourdieusian can think through the problems Burawoy raises, if indeed they are problems, while remaining within the basic intellectual parameters of Bourdieu’s framework and maintaining fundamental differences from Marxism.
I will begin by restating the bare bones of Bourdieu’s conception of social life for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it. Then I will outline Burawoy’s critique, including his specific reading of Bourdieu’s key concepts. Much of the polemic revolves around the interconnected issues of subaltern resistance and consciousness, indicating Burawoy’s conspicuously Gramscian construction of the Marxist tradition. Others who sit awkwardly with that emphasis – structural Marxists, the early Frankfurt School or analytical Marxists, for example – are thus notable by their absence from the parley. Yet Burawoy repeatedly telescopes out to broader Marxist starting points, not least by reference to Marx himself, including the materialist conception of human practice, the centrality of exploitation, adequate conceptions of social structure and the characteristics of a good theory/method, allowing for a wider confrontation with Marxism per se via its basic premises. I will, therefore, elucidate the concepts of misrecognition and habitus, outline and develop Bourdieu’s theory of change and resistance and work through the interrelation of social structures, but along the way I will need to engage in questions of philosophical anthropology, suggestively redefine value and exploitation and consider what makes for a good social theory. The overall result is not merely a rebuttal of Burawoy and defence of Bourdieu, however, but a reconstruction and refinement of Bourdieu’s framework that accommodates Burawoy’s concerns, including by underscoring the myriad struggles and strategies of those not positioned at the apex of the class structure.
Bourdieu: The basics
The reason Bourdieu vexes Marxists so is because class is at the heart of his conception of social relations. He conceived this very differently from the classic Marxist model, however: not in binary or even categorical terms, nor as a purely economic force, but as a ‘social space’ defined by possession of multiple tokens of value or ‘capitals’ – economic capital (money, wealth), cultural capital (mastery of symbolic systems) and social capital (connections). The space is multidimensional because not only volumes but compositions and transformations of capital matter, it is relational because directions and distances of deviation are crucial and it challenges the realist/nominalist divide because while there are no hard or fast boundaries between people in the space it underpins the way in which people themselves draw perceptual boundaries, imagine ‘classes’ and even try to mobilise people in their name and make ‘classes’. The sociologist, too, can carve classes out of the space for the purpose of practical analysis, defined in suitably relational terms (dominant/intermediate/dominated), but must recognise that these are merely ‘classes on paper’ rather than substantive entities.
Position in the social space shapes one’s ‘habitus’, usually defined, in brief, as a system of dispositions to think and act in certain ways, most famously in relation to culture (art, films, music, etc.). These dispositions are the product of adaptation to the possibilities and probabilities inscribed in the conditions of existence associated with one’s capital stocks and are typically said to generate ‘practices’, the education system being a fundamental force for reproducing class inequalities insofar as differences in capital are translated into perceptions of innate ability. The picture is complicated, however, by what Bourdieu called the ‘field of power’. At the top of the social space is a collection of ‘fields’, understood as spaces of struggle for forms of capital relatively autonomous from those of the social space. Art, politics, religion, business and so on are major examples. They exist within a ‘meta-field’, the field of power, wherein agents ultimately struggle to impose their own core principle of value – economic capital or cultural capital – as the dominant one. They succeed insofar as people generally ‘misrecognise’ possession of cultural and/or economic capital as symbols of inherent worth and legitimacy, with ‘symbolic violence’ occurring when people perceive their own lack of capitals and associated practices negatively.
Burawoy on Bourdieu
Such is a rudimentary sketch of Bourdieu’s contribution. So, what of Burawoy’s critique? The scene is set in his first conversation comparing Bourdieu not with a Marxist but with Talcott Parsons. The logic of that juxtaposition is that both had similar styles and influence as well as shared interest in explaining social order rather than social transformation, even if Bourdieu was more sensitive to empirical research, more critical of the status quo and less appreciative of the classics or, indeed, any other sociologist's contributions than Parsons was. Burawoy is particularly frustrated that Bourdieu tended to treat Marx as exhaustive of the Marxist tradition and dismiss him (and thus it) summarily, as if no one had subsequently revised and elaborated Marx’s ideas to fit the realities of the 20th century. He then expresses the theme around which much of the critique and conversations will hinge: unlike the Marxist tradition, Bourdieu could not conceive that the dominated can become conscious of their oppression. This is despite his own later political practice, which saw him join with workers to demonstrate against neoliberalism. Instead, Bourdieu’s political writings place faith in intellectuals as bearers of universal truths and values, which sits wholly at odds with his sociological analyses of art and education as systems of domination. Ultimately, these contradictions are said to rest on his theory of symbolic violence and misrecognition: domination is internalised and embodied in the habitus, and thus operates below the level of conscious awareness and articulation. Burawoy asks more than once whether Bourdieu’s advocates will be able to acknowledge the limits of their master’s thought and revise it, just as Marxists did for Marx, or whether their stubborn defence will consign it to the same oblivion that swallowed Parsons.
The basic argument then cascades through the following conversations, taking on different forms and with different emphases and sub-criticisms in dialogue with different Marxists and, finally, with the politicised Bourdieu of the 1990s. By far the most important of these are the comparisons of Bourdieu with Marx, Gramsci, Burawoy himself and the later Bourdieu. 2 The Bourdieu/Marx face off lays much of the groundwork, covering as it does the fundamental divergence underpinning all else: while both vaunted practice as an alternative to idealist philosophy, for Marx this takes the form of labour, and faith in the working class, but for Bourdieu it takes the form of habitus, or the internalisation of domination. More specifically, symbolic violence and misrecognition equate to automatic acceptance, ingrained through socialisation and schooling, of the social order and the ideas/way of life of the dominant as natural, self-evident and unquestionable. This turns Bourdieu away from the working class since they are simply unable, by definition, to comprehend that they are dominated.
Burawoy then proceeds to contrast Marx and Bourdieu on history, social change, symbolic violence and politics. On history, the succession of modes of production is distinguished from the progressive differentiation of capitals and fields, which provides Burawoy (2019) with opportunities to lament Bourdieu’s lack of attention to exploitation, the confinement of fields (art, politics, law, etc.) to the dominant class alone (p. 42), the absence of a theory of the economy and its ‘expansive tendencies’ (p. 43) and dearth of consideration of how fields interrelate – that is, are interdependent and hierarchised – within a ‘totality’ (p. 43). On social change, the mounting contradictions of capitalism are contrasted with Bourdieu’s analysis of hysteresis, wherein crisis in a field is engendered by rapidly changing circumstances, such as an overproduction of university graduates. The latter is cast as a mere description of events rather than a theory of social change per se (p. 47), however, and Burawoy suggests a need to produce a theory to explain why and when people within a field rebel, resist and actively pursue change – a ‘defiant habitus’, as he calls it (p. 57). On symbolic violence, Burawoy separates Marx’s notion of ‘mystification’, in which the truth of things is hidden from people no matter their personal dispositions by specific social relations, such as the organisation of production and the nature of market exchange, from Bourdieu’s ‘misrecognition’, which depends on non-conscious incorporation of the classifications defining subjugation (pp. 48–9). With the former, the working class can become conscious of their situation, whereas with the latter they cannot – only intellectuals have that capacity. This brings us to politics, with Marx’s analysis of class struggle on one side and, on the other, Bourdieu’s self-contradictory belief in traditional state-employed intellectuals as diviners of universal truth and only likely leaders of the dominated. Marx may have been too hopeful, but Bourdieu ends up a flawed Hegelian.
After Marx comes Gramsci, who tried to tackle head-on vulgar Marxism’s limitations and the seeming complicity of the working class. The main difference here, according to Burawoy (2019: 66), is that Gramsci saw culture as the terrain of class conflict whereas Bourdieu saw culture as dissolving class conflict. Otherwise, though, the same points made in the conversation with Marx resurface in a different guise: Bourdieu’s focus on the field of power amounts to a partial conception of the social whole insofar as it excludes the dominated from social struggles, in stark contrast to Gramsci’s notion of civil society; the concept of hegemony entails an assumption that workers have a kernel of ‘good sense’ about their situation that can be worked up, in dialogue with organic intellectuals, into an alternative vision and programme for change, but symbolic violence does not; and Bourdieu places too much faith in traditional, elite intellectuals, who Gramsci – like Bourdieu much of the time – recognised are driven by class (bourgeois) interests.
Later, Burawoy turns to direct comparison of his own work with Bourdieu’s. The impetus is an apparent similarity between Bourdieu’s (2000a) comments on exploitation in Pascalian Meditations, where he says it is masked by investment in social games (i.e. fields), and Burawoy’s (1979) own arguments in Manufacturing Consent. In the latter book, Burawoy argued not only that companies had ‘internal labour markets’ and ‘internal states’ rewarding and regulating specific practices and exchanges but that workers invented ‘games’ to make their jobs bearable. This leads Burawoy (2019) to identify a tension in Bourdieu’s work between the game- or field-playing element of agency (Homo ludens), which can be likened to Marx on mystification, and the focus on the internalisation of domination via incorporated dispositions (Homo habitus). Burawoy advocates dumping the habitus element. Putatively, this is on scientific grounds: symbolic violence via misrecognition cannot make sense of the difference between western capitalism and state socialism. The former is marked by mystification: the organisation of social relations, including workplace hierarchies and games, operates to hide exploitation no matter the specific socio-demographic background and associated dispositions of workers (p. 162). The latter, on the other hand, lacked any apparatus of mystification, meaning workers knew full well they were being exploited by an inefficient system, engendering a mismatch of expectations and reality and therefore agitation. Hence state socialism was so unstable, whereas western capitalism persevered. Burawoy even grants that fields are useful for making sense of the collapse of socialism, particularly the notion of a Soviet political field in which agents pursued clashing strategies. Yet habitus cannot make sense of any of this. In the end, however, habitus is rejected because it is held to be a pseudoscientific dressing up of spontaneous, folkish notions of personality and an unverifiable ‘black box’ unobservable except via tautology: person A does practice B because she has a habitus inclining her towards practice B, which we know because she does practice B. Burawoy instead favours Gramsci’s take on consciousness: workers consciously consent to their domination but are also characterised by a ‘common sense’, which may in part be invaded by ideologies but which also bears that grain of ‘good sense’, that is, a sense granted by their practical activity in the production process (i.e. their labour) that they are being exploited and that the world could be different (p. 169, also p. 70). His only addition is that Gramsci did not sufficiently appreciate the depth of mystification.
Finally, Burawoy turns to The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al., 1999), which is held up as a contradiction of Bourdieu’s theoretical project insofar as the interviews it contains demonstrate people are not only consciously aware of their unfavourable situations but that, with a little help from intellectuals with similar backgrounds (i.e. organic intellectuals), they can provide sophisticated analyses of their own plight. Re-analysing the interviews, Burawoy notes that the common theme is a dissolution of anything like symbolic violence because of a mismatch of expectations and opportunities, or habitus and field, accompanied by political alienation (which Bourdieu rightly saw as a by-product of delegation). Such mismatches appear to stem, adds Burawoy, from the clashes and contradictions within or between fields, leading him to note – with an explicit nod to Bernard Lahire (2011) – that people pass through multiple contexts, or fields, to a greater extent than Bourdieu ever supposed. The difference between The Weight of the World and Distinction is, to Burawoy, partly due to methodology: the qualitative research of the former reveals things hidden by survey research, which in Bourdieu’s hands became an instrument of symbolic violence. Also implicated, however, is a change in socio-political context, that is, the rise of neoliberalism and precarity since Distinction. Yet Bourdieu, for all his critique of neoliberalism’s effects, had no theory of its origins, expansion or crises (Burawoy, 2019: 189). As a closing shot, in fact, Burawoy argues that insofar as Bourdieu shunned the working class, left capitalism per se unanalysed, failed to produce a theory of an alternative society, vaunted the power of traditional intellectuals to defend universal principles and had faith in the state, his perspective, in the end, only reproduces capitalism (p. 196). It is, in short, ideological.
Reconstructing Bourdieu
Many of Burawoy’s major and minor points – the non-conscious nature of habitus/domination, the inability to conceive of resistance, the contradictions in Bourdieu’s critique and defence of art and education, the focus on single fields and so on – have been raised before, in one form or another, by others. That includes not just the Marxists cited earlier but non-Marxist scholars of varying levels of sympathy with Bourdieu’s general project, such as Boltanski (2011), Jenkins (2002), Lahire (2011), Lane (2000, 2006), Skeggs (2004) and Swartz (1998). Burawoy’s intervention is framed as a much more profound statement, however; as a sort of fork in the path of Bourdieu’s legacy, and a judgement on its fate, since he effectively states Bourdieusians either respond and revise or die (intellectually speaking, that is). There is, however, a fundamental hypocrisy here: he chides Bourdieu for reducing Marxism to Marx, while at the same time engaging only with Bourdieu’s texts and personal practice – which sometimes veers towards ad hominem critique – and ignoring the vast bulk of Bourdieusian scholarship applying and revising the key ideas. One gets the feeling that Burawoy’s archetype of a ‘real Bourdieusian’ is Wacquant, but Wacquant is only one Bourdieusian with a particular reading of Bourdieu, albeit one often presented as the ‘true’ reading because of proximity to the man. 3 There is, in fact, one point where Burawoy (2019: 206 n3) does acknowledge feminist revisions, but then – in direct contradiction to his statement that survival and progression of Bourdieu’s theory will only come about through revision – he suddenly and summarily claims that, in separating Bourdieu’s concepts from symbolic violence, feminists have ‘let Bourdieu off the hook’. Bourdieusians cannot win.
Clarifying misrecognition and habitus
I will offer a reading of Bourdieu, based on the overriding logic and spirit of his framework, which dissolves or accommodates Burawoy’s criticisms while maintaining fundamental separation from Marxism. 4 At root is a different interpretation of misrecognition and habitus from Burawoy’s and, more generally, of philosophical anthropology and the major wellsprings of action. Burawoy presents habitus as equivalent to labour for Marx, but that skips a preceding step: the contrast between Marx’s materialism and Bourdieu’s emphasis on recognition as the starting point of the human condition. For Bourdieu’s (1990: 196–7; 2000a) turn to Blaise Pascal is not just about emphasising practice, practical mastery and corporality, as important as they are. Pascal also offers a baseline vision of human beings as seeking diversion and purpose in a life defined by finitude and contingency through recognition as worthy or valuable in the eyes of others (including anthropomorphised or imaginary others, e.g. gods). This is itself rooted in humanity’s unique capacity for symbol and sign use and, with that, intersubjectivity and the possibility of raising questions about the ‘beyond here and now’, all of which begin to develop in the first year of life.
Misrecognition occurs because certain arbitrary yet unequally distributed properties and possessions (capitals) become, through a specific work of legitimisation, taken for granted as symbols of value worth striving for. What is misrecognised is a product of historical struggles: martial capacity, professed mastery of and/or favour within spiritual/religious symbol systems or productive surpluses may all have played their part in ancient history or pre-history, over time transforming and culminating today, in capitalist societies, in the distribution of economic and cultural capital. Symbolic violence is the perception that what others have, and the indirect symbols of that possession (in the form of lifestyles, for example), makes them inherently worthy or admirable and that one’s relatively low possession or lack therefore makes one less worthy, with those in possession of ample capital – upholding or justifying their own worth and purpose – having an interest in maintaining this misrecognition order (or at least no interest in challenging it). People without money or educational credentials nevertheless take for granted that money and certified masteries have a certain value, and that their holders are thus ‘successful’ and ‘better off’ than they are, perhaps because of ‘natural gifts’ or ‘merit’. This is, however, an empirical question rather than a theoretical assumption – a point I will return to later.
Habitus comes into the picture via practical sense. Bourdieu himself did indeed, as a reaction against idealism, tend to overemphasise the bodily dimension of practice – that has already been suggested by many otherwise sympathetic to Bourdieu, and numerous conceptual solutions have been proffered (e.g. Crossley, 2001; Noble and Watkins, 2003; Sayer, 2005; Atkinson, 2010). My own view is that since the notion of practical sense is borrowed from the phenomenological tradition, ultimately rooted in Husserl’s analyses of protention and synthesis, then that heritage is worth emphasising. Practical sense, or the ‘feel for the game’, thus becomes the sense of the probable, possible and feasible co-given with perception in the present – an intuition of the forthcoming inscribed in the horizons of perception, generated by past experiences (which may have been forgotten), which disposes one to think and act towards things, events and people in certain ways. This takes place in the context of fields, or the desire to accumulate or maintain capital as tokens of worth: some activities and projects, as components of strategies, are opened up or closed down to consciousness depending on the state of play, though the sense of the possible is often fuzzy because of contradictory experiences and can be jammed by specific discourses. So, what is habitus? A means of making sense of the fact that some people within a field have a similar practical sense, or similar dispositions, and thus activities/projects/strategies, because of similar experiences given by similar locations. It is, in short, a useful tool for identifying ‘classes’ of practical sense. If all this still strikes some as pseudoscientific or black-boxing, it is worth remembering that disposition formation and activation can be understood in terms of brain plasticity, synapses, neurotransmitters and neurochemical activity (Bourdieu, 2000a: 136; Changeux, 2006), as can phenomenological description of temporal perception and intersubjectivity (see, for example, Lizardo, 2007; Ratcliffe, 2009; Varela, 1999).
Now comes the comparison with Marxism. The prevailing view is that Marx grounded human nature in productive activity – transformation of nature to ensure the survival and, because of humanity’s distinctive (self-)consciousness, flourishing of oneself and one’s species (see Geras, 1983). How we get from that to the motivation of practical activity in capitalism – to the interests of concrete capitalists chasing profits, that is, or of intellectuals in upholding the status quo – was always murky. Unless, of course, one posits a unifying, underpinning facet of humanity, a precondition for wanting to be and wanting others to be: finding diversion and purpose in (mis)recognition from others. Without recognition, without purpose, whether that be derived from work, kin, a god or something else, there is no engagement in production or competition, not even a desire to survive and persist, but withdrawal, apathy and suicide. Of course, humanity’s biological corporeality – the need to eat, drink and so on to subsist – is a condition of possibility of symbol use and recognition. Yet recognition nevertheless trumps material production for several reasons: (1) wanting oneself and others to live depends on it; (2) corporeality can be wilfully negated depending on one’s sense of worth and purpose, whether in the form of apathetic suicide or mission-based suicide (e.g. dying for one’s country, god, children or honour); and (3) bodily existence makes possible multiple elementary forms of misrecognition (martial, sexual, affective, spiritual, honourable) of which possession and distribution of productive surpluses can be one, but one that can be subordinate to others (e.g. production and surpluses are controlled by a spiritual leader or warlord, land is allocated according to honour, etc.). All this might seem like standing Marx on his head, and a return to (a thoroughly ‘de-scholasticised’) Hegel, or perhaps a logical extension of some of Marx’s own comments on human needs, flourishing and species-being.
Many Marxists, including Cohen (2000) and Elster (1985), have elaborated or criticised Marx’s conception of human nature, often appealing to a version of homo economicus (which Bourdieu criticised at length), but humanity’s inherent sociality – again, presupposing intersubjective recognition – nearly always comes to the fore. Burawoy himself posits Homo ludens, explaining not only mystification for workers – they enjoy playing ‘games’ with one another or getting ahead of others at work – but perhaps competition between capitalists and intellectuals too. Since the game-playing nature of human beings ineluctably points towards diversion and necessarily depends on recognition from others, this defers to Bourdieu’s starting point. It is misrecognition rather than simply mystification, however, because it inevitably depends on perceiving specific properties or stakes, which are in reality arbitrary, as valuable and, therefore, worth pursuing. Moreover, habitus inescapably enters the equation because playing the game depends on a sense of what is possible and feasible and adaptation thereto. We will return to this, but for now we can note that this reading of habitus, as expectations, underpins a contradiction in Burawoy’s assessment of the term: he refutes it in one place, but then, when re-analysing the interviews in The Weight of the World, he recognises its usefulness for articulating the mismatch between field conditions and expectations.
If exploitation occurs, as Bourdieu said it does, it is not via extraction of surplus value. That presupposes the labour theory of value, which is not part of Bourdieu’s framework. 5 A full comparison with Marx’s detailed analyses of value is beyond the scope of this article (cf. Beasley-Murray, 2000; Desan, 2013), but we can at least say that ‘value’ for Bourdieu – whether exchange value or use value – is not reducible to an objective yardstick but a stake in misrecognition struggles, with some possessing the capital, and symbolic power, to make their definition prevail. The economic value of labour (wages) and of goods (prices) – and the difference between the two – are determined in the struggles and strategies within the economic field and political field (and other fields discussed later) in the context of homology with the social space and the demands it generates. One does not need to be a Marxist to describe wage depression, or non-redistribution of price markups, in order to maximise profits, which are then handled without worker participation, as ‘exploitative’, because it is not impossible to find an underpinning non-productivist benchmark for critique: the organisation of a social space (not necessarily of production) is objectively worse for some members than others, can be made worse or better, could be organised otherwise and so on given the distribution of physical and mental suffering, which should be minimised.
Bourdieu himself may not have sketched an alternative to capitalism, but the merits of a social theory should be judged on the robustness of its logic, its fit with evidence and – if it claims to be a critical social theory – its capacity to identify unnecessary suffering rather than its ability to invent imaginary social orders. Still, an equitable social order would surely be one in which principles of recognition – of which economic value is but one – are as equally distributed and freed from material and symbolic violence as possible, and a system-wide, institutionalised reflexive awareness of misrecognition as a general human tendency would be essential for thwarting the emergence of new forms of domination. Bourdieu’s (2001) notes on ‘pure love’ are a gesture in this direction, acknowledging as they do that it does seem possible to have recognition without misrecognition, but they are realistic enough to register its frailty and liability to fall back into misrecognition. Whether this possibility can be stabilised and generalised into the kind of agape favoured by Boltanksi (2011) is an open question.
Resistance and social change
So far, I have offered a reading of misrecognition and habitus different from that marshalled by Burawoy while accommodating and extending on many of his own assumptions. But what about resistance and social change? First of all, Bourdieu does have a theory of social change and transformation. It is not hysteresis, nor is it differentiation of capitals/fields or integration of social spaces – these are indeed, as Burawoy suggests, descriptions of historical processes, or (intended or unintended) outcomes of the driving force of human history. Just as Marx saw class struggle – the clash of owners and producers – as the motor of social change, so Bourdieu effectively saw misrecognition struggles as the motor of social change. To be more specific, fields are, as Burawoy acknowledges, inexorably arenas of strategies to accumulate or maintain capital and, as part of that, to either conserve or subvert and transform the field, the projection and success of which depend on the state of the field (Atkinson, 2019; Fowler, 2020). To give one example from Bourdieu’s (2014) writings, the development of secular cultural capital and the differentiation of the legal and intellectual fields were both by-products of royal strategies to bolster monarchical symbolic capital against potential usurpers via codified, rational legitimation. The rise of economic capital, or the commodification of land and labour, as well as the emergence of a relatively autonomous national economic field, can also be seen as the product of intermeshing strategies among declining aristocracies to maintain position, state actors to raise revenue via taxes and mercantilism, and so on (Atkinson, 2020a, 2022).
The social space, or the space of class relations, is a field like any other, just at a certain (national) scale – or at least this is how it is most usefully interpreted. There are strategies for accumulating and maintaining capital, and strategies refracted throughout the field of power oriented towards conserving the rules of the game, but also subversive or ‘defiant’ strategies, all of which spring from the feel for the game. Historically, subversion strategies among workers, or the dominated, and their representatives were greatest in the early stages of capitalism, that is, the consolidation of economic capital and the national economic field, when agitation (strikes, walkouts, riots) was perceived as a possible and even feasible strategy for resistance, and collective organisation (formation of unions, socialist/communist/anarchist political movements and parties) intuited to be a workable strategy for potentially changing the rules of the game. The dominant, via participation in and influence on state activity, pursued two conservation strategies in response: first, violent and legal subjugation, and then when that failed, integration or ‘domestication’ – securing commitment to the existing game (i.e. illusio) – via the institutionalisation of class conflict (franchise extension, legal recognition of unions and labourist parties, etc.), welfare provision and expansion of education provision (Bourdieu, 2014; Atkinson, 2022; cf. Fantasia and Voss, 2004). This opened up justificatory discourses – or what Bourdieu called ‘sociodicies’ – around fairness, mobility and meritocracy rearranging and individualising the sense of the possible and desirable (the context for Reproduction [Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Later diversification of the market of symbolic goods with post-war consumerism differentiated the array of markers acting as symbols of ‘success’, ‘intelligence’ and so on, and one’s place relative to them (the context for Distinction). Eventually, neoliberalism emerged, with its emphasis on the sovereign individual, welfare retrenchment and the wisdom of market logic (the context for The Weight of the World). Bourdieu may have focused more on the effects of neoliberalism than its genesis – though he did offer some directions in his analysis of the global economic field (Bourdieu, 2005: 223 ff.) – but Bourdieusians have offered causal accounts implicating a mesh of conservative and subversive strategies across multiple fields (Dezaley and Garth, 1998; Atkinson et al, 2012; Atkinson, 2022).
Unquestioned belief in the power of individual merit, and thus one’s own lack of merit if one has not ‘made it’, is the aspect of symbolic violence that Burawoy focuses on, and evidence suggests that this is indeed so widespread today as to be ‘common sense’, or doxic (Atkinson, 2020b). Yet it is an empirical question – the depth and breadth of symbolic violence is always variable depending on the state of the game. Even in today’s capitalist social spaces, of course, there are subversive attitudes and those holding to anti-capitalist principles, though they tend to be rare, probably sense that actual subversion is highly unlikely given the current state of the game and (mostly) still misrecognise the value of economic capital and cultural capital in calling for their redistribution. 6 If broadly socialistic tendencies are still detectable among swathes of the dominated class, as a sense of how the game could be rearranged more favourably, they not only co-exist with the doxic belief in merit but also – as Burawoy notes – lack effective representation in contemporary capitalist social orders because of the decline of trade unions, the rightwards shift of leftist political parties and the emergence of national populist figures to fill the void, as so many products of struggles within national political fields.
What does all this mean, then, for the key issue of whether the dominated are by definition ‘dupes’ or have ‘good sense’ that the system is stacked against them? Clearly, having a feel for the game, one’s place within it and whether subversion is feasible or not implies that they do indeed have a form of ‘good sense’. Their practical sense is not necessarily ‘wrong’ but merely a situated point of view on a space that the sociologist endeavours to map out in full, like a sports analyst diagramming a play undertaken in the moment by a player. That point of view comes with its own constructions – its own discursive articulation of divisions in the space – and these can be influenced by the justificatory narratives of the dominant, via media/political discourses, to the point of becoming ‘common sense’. These discourses can be questioned and criticised in light of disjunctive events and dialogue with others, for sure. Those others may include sociologists or the sociologically trained (social workers, activists, journalists, etc.), in which case the dominated may appropriate and reinterpret certain sociological ideas – whether Marxist, Bourdieusian or something else – to comprehend their situation. If all this sounds like Burawoy’s Gramsci, however, it is worth making clear that the ‘good sense’ of the dominated, or the feel for the game, derives not from their labour, the link with which is tenuous to the point of mysticism (and also exclusive of non-labourers), but by virtue of adaptation to their position within the distribution of capital. There are, moreover, resolutely structural conditions of possibility for counter-constructions and dialogue. Feminist and post-colonial critique and action, for example, have surely been facilitated by the diffusion of cultural capital, and the symbolic masteries it entails, and increasing (if still unequal) female/non-white participation within fields of power.
Finally, both ‘traditional’ intellectuals (academics and cultural producers) and those otherwise trained in humanities and social sciences may be particularly privileged dialogue partners or spokespeople – as Burawoy’s own drive for ‘public sociology’ presupposes – because social critique, alterity and reasoned exchange of ideas in the search of ‘better’ or more ‘truthful’ understandings of the world are built into those disciplines, that is, part of the rules of the game in those fields (Bourdieu, 2004a). That does not mean they are free of distortion and domination. Yet the characterisation of fields of cultural/scientific production as sites of domination and as engines for the production of insights into suffering and truth – the latter, with Bachelard, being an unattainable end towards which agents strive, and which they can better approximate with their constructions, via the clearing away of errors and myths – represents a structural tension, not a conceptual contradiction. And it is a tension that, according to Bourdieu, can be countered by constant engagement with alternatives and by reflexivity, or self-socioanalysis, informed by dialogue with others – perhaps including, to democratise Bourdieu’s approach, those outside of cultural/scientific production (not least in the form of qualitative research).
Totality, civil society and multiplicity
Next, we come to what might be described as Bourdieu’s ‘thin’ conception of social structure: a collection of fields within a social space reserved for members of the dominant class alone and with no theory of their interrelationship within a totality or their multiplicity and contradiction in individual lives. This compares unfavourably, in Burawoy’s mind, with Gramsci’s conception of civil society – trade unions, organisations, schools, the family and so on as arenas of contestation – as well as, in all probability, the structural Marxist conceptions of social formation and conjunctural articulation. Several points can be made in response. First, the structural relationship between fields within the field of power – that is, which are dominant and dominated and which are aligned more with economic or cultural capital – can be and has been mapped empirically (e.g. Denord et al., 2011; Hjellbrekke et al., 2007). Second, although Bourdieu explicitly rejected the idea that there are any ‘transhistorical laws’ of the relationship between fields, favouring case-by-case investigation (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 109–10), he also noted, with Dumézil, the recurrence of the organising opposition between ‘spiritual’ powers and ‘temporal’ powers (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1993: 24), which may just be rooted in humanity’s capacity for symbol use (generating religious/secular masteries) and corporeality (generating physical/productive dominance).
Third, interdependencies between fields can be conceptualised readily enough. Bourdieu (1996, 2000a, 2004b) himself posited the notion of ‘legitimation chains’ – the chains of recognition and delegation leading from a legitimating authority to an act of legitimation (awards, prizes, promotions, etc.). Originally emanating from the king to his ministers, extension of chains over time, involving delegation of ever more authority to ever more people, resulted in greater relative autonomy of field struggles from the ultimate source of authority (which mutated from being a royal ruler to state nobility in the meantime). On top of that, though, it is possible and desirable to think through the concrete linkages and interdependencies between fields within a social order, including commodity chains, in terms of not only interpersonal networks but what might be called ‘circuits of symbolic power’. Goods, ideas and demands produced in the course of struggles within one field, wending over time and space, generate necessities and possibilities within other fields, and where circuits are particularly dense and reciprocal between fields – potentially mappable with network analysis and even time-geographical/geospatial techniques – and oriented towards similar domains, they might be said to form distinguishable (if overlapping) ‘worlds’ in Howard Becker’s (2008) sense. The artistic field, the field of critics, the field of galleries, the field of production of artistic supplies (a sub-field of the economic field) and so on, for example, would make up the ‘art world’.
More generally, though, most fields within contemporary capitalist fields of power are marked by a twofold dependence: on the state and on the market, that is, on the bureaucratic field and the economic field. Both provide the conditions of possibility for the existence of relatively autonomous fields of art, literature, philosophy, science and so on insofar as they furnish the recognition (via legitimation chains) and distance from necessity (via funding/purchase) required for participation in such activities, claims for independence and differentiation of associated conceptions of value (Bourdieu, 2000a: 17 ff.). The twofold dependence is also the source of the opposition between autonomy and heteronomy within fields, the balance between and form of those poles varying relative to the overriding character of the bureaucratic/political fields (whether despotic, democratic socialist or liberal, for example) and the relative dominance of the economic field within the field of power (and thus the extent of private funding and marketisation). Dependence is not determinism, however, nor does recognition of the economic field’s pivotal role today automatically render one a Marxist.
Fourth, fields need not be confined to the dominant class alone. True enough, Bourdieu was generally oriented towards analysing the field of power, and sometimes operated with a conception of fields revolving around production of goods or ideas for a consuming market. In later works, however, Bourdieu’s understanding of fields became broader, and arguably more fruitful, once he began to think of them more simply in terms of observable struggles between a set of agents over forms of misrecognition, or capital, irreducible to others. The family became a field of struggle (Bourdieu, 1998: 68), the individual firm or workplace became a field of struggle (Bourdieu, 2000a, 2005) and others (e.g. Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008) have generalised the logic to conceptualise organisations and institutions – trade unions, churches, schools and so on – as fields, or at least field-like formations (they may not always function as fields – that is another empirical question). Some of these also nestle within higher-order fields (e.g. the field of higher education institutions or the political field), and some of them co-constitute specific worlds, but all of them are situated within concrete circuits of symbolic power. Some Bourdieusians may not like this broader reading of fields – Wacquant (2019), for example – but it proves highly effective for making sense of people’s everyday struggles and contradictions.
Conceptualising the firm/factory as a field, for instance, integrates Burawoy’s interest in workplace games and internal states/labour markets, so long as we clear up any ambiguity and consider all workers to be part of the field, with varying levels of capital (including in the form of collective representation via unions) and thus space for subversion. Workers have a feel for the game, and dispositions, within the organisation analytically separable from dispositions attuned to the social space, just as Burawoy claims, though there is likely to be some degree of homology and harmony. ‘Defiance’ and resistance – from the go-slow or secret break to the strike – may be generated at the firm level, as a counter-strategy to management strategies, but whether collective action at the firm level leads to a general strike, or other wider action, depends on all kinds of mediating forces, inter alia the place of unions/leftist parties within the political field, struggles within and between the unions/parties, their resultant capacity and inclination to offer discourses and classifications appealing to the ethos of the dominated, and so on.
Another consequence of recognising a broader range of fields is giving greater prominence to multiplicity, that is, the effects of people being situated within more than one field, with more than one space of possibilities open to them and more than one set of pertinences and desires, which may clash and generate anxiety, stress and so on: the workplace, the economic field, the social space, the family and so on. Burawoy sees this as a problem for Bourdieu, as does Lahire, and again it is true that Bourdieu gave it little attention. He did acknowledge it though, and even proffered a concept to make sense of an individual’s collection of dispositions across fields – the ‘social surface’ (Bourdieu, 2000b: 302–3). It may have remained a suggestive idea, and it has required conceptual work to become productive, but the point is that space can be made for structural and dispositional multiplicity and contradiction within Bourdieu’s framework. 7 One possibility it opens up is analysis of compensatory sources of value – compensation for domination in the social space, for example, by investment in the workplace (‘getting ahead’ or ‘having a laugh’) or the family (‘what really matters’).
Conclusion
Burawoy’s Marxist critique of Bourdieu is thorough, trenchant, provocative and, insofar as it covers similar ground to many others, representative of broader currents of dissatisfaction. It warranted, therefore, a comprehensive response. This I have tried to offer, not in the form of a rebuttal of Burawoy’s arguments, though I have tried to emphasise unfavourable readings and contradictions in his account, but in the form of a reconstruction of Bourdieu’s framework that evades the problems or integrates the themes highlighted by Burawoy – perhaps giving the ‘later’ Bourdieu appreciated by Burawoy greater prominence and clearer foundations – while maintaining distance from Marxism. This involved interpreting Bourdieu’s writings in a specific way, emphasising certain influences and running with ideas he merely broached, just as Burawoy might have hoped, while remaining true not to the letter of Bourdieu’s texts but to the fundamental premises of Bourdieusian sociology, that is, (mis)recognition, relationalism and practical sense.
I have proposed, therefore, a reading of misrecognition in terms of perception of specific properties and possessions as valuable, of symbolic violence as an empirically variable phenomenon rather than an inflexible theoretical a priori and of practical sense and habitus in (neuro)phenomenological terms. A theory of history as misrecognition struggles and possibilities for subaltern resistance or defiance in the form of subversion, including within the social space qua class structure, was also identified, even while symbolic violence and doxa remain powerful and empirically verifiable notions. To make sense of totality, civil society and multiplicity, I posited circuits of interdependence, including interdependences with the economic field, and pointed to the broader conception of fields (or field-like formations) covering smaller-scale struggles implicating not just the dominant class but the dominated, and others, too.
In all these respects, then, Marxism offers nothing substantively useful that cannot be integrated into Bourdieusian sociology, although of course it is only via dialogue with Marxism that such integration, which does represent advance, is prompted. At the same time, Bourdieu’s starting points are fundamentally different – (mis)recognition rather than materialism, a non-labour conception of value and a phenomenological rather than labour-centred view of consciousness – and thus avoids some of the pitfalls that have long plagued Marxism, such as economic reductionism, homo economicus, teleology and so on. Rather than fit Bourdieu within a neo-Marxist mould, therefore, as some have tried to do, it might be more fruitful, for the sake of constructing a logically sound and empirically productive yet critical account of the social world, to absorb selected pointers from Marxism into the Bourdieusian framework instead.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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