Abstract
Classification Struggles is the English translation of Bourdieu’s first lectures at the Collège de France, published in 2015 as Sociologie Générale Vol. I (Paris: Seuil, pp. 703); it should be noted that the lectures translated here represent only April–June 1982 (i.e. only pp. 7–194 of the French volume). 1 However, the value of this book is much enhanced by the scholarly glosses from the editors of the original French volume, Patrick Champagne, Julien Duval, Franck Poupeau and Marie-Christine Rivière, as well as from the translator, Peter Collier.
It is worth noting the context of these lectures at the Collège de France. We are informed by the French editors that they were unusually well-attended, but also that they posed particular pressure on Bourdieu, given that the audience spanned both academics and the general public. Indeed, without naming himself, he offers a clue at one point as to the many taxing demands he faced. Remarking on the reproduction of symbolic power, he states that this could be undertaken with ease by absolutist kings, such as Louis XIV. A modern Party’s Central Committee faces more onerous tasks, yet: it is still easier than having to ensure the reproduction of your prestige by having to appear on chat shows, writing masterpieces, telling everyone what they should think of society, avoiding all error, and bringing happiness to the people, at the very least [!] (p. 110)
Bourdieu also contends that in contemporary societies agents operate with semi-conscious practical classifications, as first formulated in Durkheim’s and Mauss’s so-called ‘primitive classification’. For him, social differentiations continue to be made on an everyday basis between the sacred and the profane. Moreover, such categorisations are sometimes surprising. For, as he discovered in interviewing, an underlying resonance of male manual workers’ classification of the social world is that bourgeois and professional men are to be derided as effeminate (p. 62).
The course offers fresh resources for a rich appreciation of Bourdieu’s ‘constructivist structuralism’, which he characterised in these lectures as ‘genetic constructivism’. In brief, he retained certain elements of structuralism, such as the emphasis on the deep internalisation – even doxic biologisation – of social institutions (such as masculine domination), and thus the homologies between mental structures and specific social structures. But, crucially – and in a break with Lévi-Strauss – these affinities are examined through a diachronic (historical) focus.
This particular lecture series refers only briefly to his earlier empirical research, so as to concentrate on clarifying his conceptual and theoretical advances. The originality of his thought emerges clearly as he synthesises skilfully the classical founding fathers together with later theorists, such as Goffman and Garfinkel. He also appropriates the philosophical tradition, both its Continental and the Anglo-American analytical subcultures, from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Austin’s linguistic phenomenology; indeed, he uses these philosophers to extend a sociological imagination, in a way that may well be unprecedented.
The lectures translated here seek to explain how groups (including social classes) are constituted, including, most importantly, the principles of such groups’ vision and division of the world. But, even as he fought against various forms of ‘chic relativism’ or postmodernism, Bourdieu was always keenly aware that his own ideas were socially situated. He championed rigorous methodological principles that would reveal the deep social structures that many agents wanted to conceal: indeed, he remarks in a later lecture, ‘The fact of objectivating [oneself or others] is an extraordinary liberty’ (Sociologie Générale Vol. I: 448). But he accepts that ultimately his own analyses and conclusions could not be entirely immune from historical conditioning, even with such methodological protocols.
His 1982 course starts by exploring the differential weight of various actors’ definitions of the social world. Certain utterances – such as the drunk man’s wild outpouring of random insults – lack any authority to make actions happen, due to their idiosyncratic or isolated context. In contrast, he clarifies how certain speech utterances do certainly possess performative force (to use John Austin’s terms), particularly when they are ratified under the law or legitimated by State-backed educational qualifications. Bourdieu’s most telling example of this is the prophet’s authoritative classification; often initially solitary and rejected, he is, famously, a figure who may come to define the world for others. It is particularly prophetic interventions, whether coded in sacred or secular terms, that galvanise social movements into unified action, most notably at times of crises, thus contributing importantly to his theory of social transformation. A few hints of this theoretical development are in evidence here.
Interestingly, he makes a distinction between those who can verify, in practice, their classifications of the world, due to their position of social power, and those who can reasonably claim to validate their own classifications as scientific theories. In terms of the latter, he elaborates further on his The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990 [1980]), stipulating that an adequate sociological theory must possess first, an objectivation of the social world (such as the stark relationships shown to exist between students’ social origins and their choice of academic discipline), second, an analysis of actors’ subjective meanings (including their practical classifications or world-vision) and third, a wider situating of actors (showing how objective structures and subjective meanings are constructed historically, including in relation to the reigning theoretical orthodoxies).
In other words, unlike many thinkers who were breaking with structuralism to ‘return to the subject’ via phenomenology, he insists that there must be a thorough objective analysis, including analysis of the social relations underlying economic capital. In this context, it may strike some readers as surprising that Bourdieu acknowledges here the importance of Marx’s theories of surplus-value extraction (p. 66; cf. also Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000 [1997])). He does so by offering a tragic dimension, suggesting that the lived experience of workers often leads this aspect of their material reality to go unrecognised, leaving social scientists alone to convey these facts: In the case of labour, if we reduce the whole truth of labour, that is, both its objective and subjective aspects, to its objective truth according to the Marxist tradition, that is to a producer of surplus value, we forget that failure to recognise the objective truth of labour as producer of surplus value is part of objective truth of labour. If Marx had discovered the whole truth about labour, everyone would be a Marxist and there would be no need for political analysis or argument. (p. 66) I believe that the truest scientific proposals are socially the weakest. (p. 133)
Bourdieu contends that social class classifications are most well-founded when they are ‘pencilled in [from] social reality’, thus revealing the major cleavages in lived experiences. He advances here his now familiar conceptual criteria: the key explanation of lived experience is actors’ possession (or lack) of economic, cultural and social capital, including their conversion of these into symbolic capital. As is well-known, it is the volume and structure of these various capitals which shape the dispositions of social agents, in other words, their habitus.
However, in making a vital break with ‘mechanistic’ materialism, for him there is a certain ‘autonomy of the social’. That is to say, actors deprived of capitals are not simply bearers of ideology, like the Althusserian bearers of existing social structures. Rather, the dispositions of the habitus give what he calls ‘room for manoeuvre’ (2019: 72) (cf. Pascalian Meditations’ later ‘margins of freedom’ (2000: 234–236)). These make actors susceptible to soliciting by those offering different, competing worldviews – including worldviews in which existing social reality is either thoroughly naturalised as doxa or those in which the maintenance of power is challenged. Hence, politics possesses a degree of autonomy. For the habitus – determined by objective position in relation to the possession of capitals – is endowed with a ‘relative autonomy’ as to how symbolic power impinges on it and thus shapes practices: the move into politics occurs when we leave the doxa […] and move to an orthodox or heterodox experience […] It is in this […] that there is room for manoeuvre. (2019: 72)
Bourdieu acknowledges here Marx’s importance in being the first sociologist of knowledge and in having demystified a basic mechanism of capitalism, namely, the general law of capital accumulation. But since, as we have seen, extraction of surplus value tends often to remain hidden as a form of domination, the two constructed theoretical classes (capital and proletariat) may not coincide with agents’ lived experience. Thus Marx, he claims, oscillated between two alternatives – first, a mechanistic developmental theory of the inevitability of explosion under conditions of crises and, second, a ‘spontaneist’ theory of the development of class consciousness, particularly favoured by those Bourdieu calls ‘militants’. Marx’s brilliance – he suggests – was in detecting concealed realities, but his weakness, as we have seen, lay in his inability to put back into his theory all those preconstructed notions or illusions he had worked through to achieve this.
Bourdieu goes on to critique some subsequent thinkers, such as E. P. Thompson, for also having a regrettably ‘spontaneist’ tendency in his account of the making of the English working-class. This seems to me unjustified: although Thompson repudiates theories of inevitable social development, he also emphasises the austere demands of communication and political organisation which alone made plausible a new consciousness of class, enquiring precisely into when this occurs in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he detected alternating cycles in the 1820s–1840s between the actions mounted by the politically-based labour movement and those other prophetic figures – male and female – leading radical forms of religious dissent, such as Primitive Methodist revivals.
Absolutely key to Bourdieu’s relative autonomy of the political are the struggles to shape popular beliefs, pitting priests against prophets. Priests’ consecrated knowledge, supplemented by rituals like the mass, mould taken-for-granted doxa into orthodoxies, theological doctrines into emotions saturating the body. But – displaying his theoretical debt to Weber – Bourdieu stresses that prophetic figures also emerge, including secular prophets. Indeed, this is crucial to his analysis of social transformation. For at times of crisis, prophets are able to explain cogently the sources of people’s suffering and to open up a divergent and heterodox future. Further, the poet, like prophets, in precapitalist societies, is ‘invested with a social mandate and the mission of naming the world when it becomes unnameable, that is to say, in the difficult, tragic circumstances which leave the common man struggling for words’ (p. 81). Bourdieu’s relational analysis in these lectures goes beyond the well-known Weberian model. For he insists that there is a complex feedback process at stake: namely, that the spokesperson is not simply someone who speaks for the social group; rather, he is the social group. For the group creates the creator (such as the prophet) who in turn creates and unifies the group. Hence the struggle for symbolic power. This, at its most acute, involves personal consecration and setting up new institutions – often by going back to the scriptural sources. Intriguingly, his audience is encouraged to apply this logic to social classes (p. 117).
The greatest accumulation of symbolic power is via control over the State. The State, for Bourdieu here, represents the ‘geometral point of all perspectives’, a privileged, apparently neutral site. The representative of the dominant group may even be the incarnation of the nation: (De Gaulle’s) ‘I am La France’, for instance, was felt ‘to pluck at the heart-strings’ (p. 116). Such embodiment facilitates the most legitimate new forms of orthodoxy, the enacting of thought into law. At its most conspicuous, the State acquires the power to make groups visible and to divide them from one another, even – he is perhaps thinking of the German 1935 Nuremberg laws, barring Jews – to exclude entire groups from public service.
Such an ‘alchemy of transubstantiation’ often contains with it the ‘possibility, even the probability of usurpation’. Symbolic capital – and the extraordinary performative power of words it confers – can be manipulated by spokespersons so as to frustrate and undermine the interests of the subordinate groups.
Now, for Bourdieu, this is only a consistent tendency, not a reiteration of Michels’ iron law of oligarchy. Nevertheless, the collapse of the initial Left turn of the French Socialist Party under Mitterrand’s Presidency (1981–1995) and the sense of an ending of France’s social democratic compromise following the ‘trente glorieuses’ no doubt contributed to his reluctance to specify any enduring source of countervailing power against those provoking such disenchantment. For while charting the suffering of the world (‘la misère’), he also grasped the double truth that he was to state later in these lectures: ‘The social world fills you with heartfelt gaiety where it wants you to go’ (Sociologie Générale Vol. I: 578). Yet while proffering a bleakly demystified sociological vision, he simultaneously offered a series of insights into historical sources of social transformation.
Later, in 1998, he would write openly of a ‘feasible utopia’. In these early Collège lectures, he confines himself to a disturbing alternative: “social science is an absolute challenge” he remarks, “we have to choose between social order or social science.” (p. 73)
