Sociology as a Martial Art*: Remarks on Bourdieu

 

Me demonstrating ude kime nage 

I was an unapologetic "theory head" in my later years of college and first years of graduate school. I devoured theories as soon as I heard of them, pouring through books by Lyotard, Deleuze, Agamben, Adorno, etc., Some of these stuck with me and became lasting obsessions, and some just went by the wayside. For a long time Pierre Bourdieu was in the former. I read a few things, his book on a theory of practice, some of his polemics about the market, etc., but never really connected. However, I been driven to a kind of belated appreciation of Bourdieu as of late. This is driven by two very different areas of inquiry. The first, predictably, has to do with the way that Bourdieu has become an implicit or explicit point of reference in what I think of as Spinozist social thought.  More or less implicit in case of someone like Frédérique Lordon, who uses problems and terms like "symbolic violence," and more explicit in someone like Chantal Jaquet, who takes up what many see to be Bourdieu's central problem, that of reproduction, and Jacques-Louis Lantoine, who examines the connection between Spinoza's concept of ingenium and Bourdieu's habitus. The second point of reference, also belated is Michael Buroway, whose book on/with Bourdieu is one of the best things I have read all summer. 

Those are the converging lines that have brought me to Bourdieu, but, as I have indicated earlier, the specific problem or provocation, that I have been trying to think through is the connection between the transformation of knowledge and the transformation of society, to put it broadly. To be more specific, I know that ideology has been around as long as there have been politics, and even agnotology has been around longer than the neologism would suggest, in other words that the social order and the order, or disorder of knowledge, have always intersected. I also know that attacks on the authority of science, especially as science questions the interest of capital, and on the university, I still remember when we called "woke" "political correctness", are not new. Nonetheless, it seems to me that we are living through something new, something which demands a rethinking of precisely the connection of social relations and knowledge.  This has been an obsession of mine as of late. Of course I know that every era tends to overemphasize its own importance, believing that the transformations it is living through are the most important just because they are the transformation it is living through. However, I look around at an administration which seems to reject some of the most basic aspects of modern science, and college administrators openly embracing a technology that leads to decreased comprehension and retention, and feel as if it is no hyperbole to argue that we are living through the social destruction of literacy and collective knowledge. 

That is bigger than what I can say with one blogpost. One of the merits of Bourdieu's work is that he foregrounds the connection between the social order and epistemic structures. All thinking about society happens in society, and thus in some sense reproduces the very social order that it theorizes. There are two particular passages from Bourdieu's lectures, the second volume, titled Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2, Lectures at the Collège de France. The first is as follows: 

"When a theory is theoretically weak but socially dominant it is because it fulfills some eminent social functions, and because it has the social order and mental structures on its side. We cannot then be satisfied with a theoretical criticism that is bound to lose because it comes up against social forces. We must also try to understand the social forces that make the strength of very weak theories. When you work in and on the social world there is no scientific opponent more difficult than one who is theoretically weak and socially strong.” (Lecture of November 2, 1982) 

A great deal has been said recently about the supposed bias of universities, about the predominance of left wing ideas on campuses, and the need to restore some kind of balance. There is a lot to be said about this idea, to start colleges would seem to be the only institution that is supposed to duplicate on a miniature scale the distribution of opinions in society. One does not ask the same thing of boardrooms, barracks, or police stations, but that is beside the point. Bourdieu's comment gets at something more essential. The division between campus and society is not a matter of distribution of opinions, but a division between those ideas which are socially dominant but intellectually weak, and those ideas that are socially weak but theoretically strong. This seems to be both a more accurate and helpful account. When people say that they want more "conservative voices" on campus they do not mean that they want more people teaching Burke, Hayek, and Strauss, they often just mean that they want college to reinforce the already existing ideas of the prevailing social imaginary. Part of the reason that sociology and anthropology have come under increased scrutiny is because they necessarily violate this imaginary: the fundamental tenet of sociology, the thing that gives us its particular object, is that we are not individuals, kingdoms in a kingdom, but part of a society, and that our thoughts, desires, and actions, even the most intimate are determined by social relations. Anthropology, we are told again and again, is guilty of relativism, ignoring the possibility that much of what we take as universal about humanity, is not as universal as we would like to believe. 

I would argue at this moment one of the most crucial questions where knowledge in the university comes into conflict with  knowledge outside the university, where what is socially weak but theoretically strong contradicts what is socially strong but theoretically weak, has to do with the very question of what is universal and particular in humanity, namely the divisions of humanity in terms of race and sex. This is a point where the common sense outside of the university, a common sense which argues for the biological rather than social basis of race and gender, is at odds with what one often finds in a classroom, which in different ways argues that what we think of as the facts of race and of gender are more social than natural, more something we do than what we are. 

This brings me to the second passage. While a lot can be said about the tension between the university and society as a tension between two different types of knowledge, which is to say, two different ways for producing and disseminating knowledge. The university is one space, favoring what Bourdieu calls theoretically strong positions, evidence (of various sorts) and arguments (of various sorts), which is not to say that there is knowledge production outside of the university. Much of the day to day knowledge that people rely on is in some sense founded on, and legitimated by the existing social relations. Although this immediate experience has its mediations, race and gender, which seem to be right there in front of us on the body have an entire history. It took a lot of work for us to see race, and to see it in such a way that it overwhelms any other way of understanding society. This brings me to my second passage. The knowledge in the university and the knowledge in society are not always opposed along the axes of theoretical strength and social power. There are intellectuals, philosophers, historians, and so on, who have given themselves the tasks to offer a theoretical basis for existing imaginaries. Bourdieu's example of this is Montesquieu. Bourdieu argues that Montesquieu's writing on the different character of Northern and Southern people, is nothing more than an giving a scientific veneer to existing myths of racial differences; Montesquieu even chilled a sheep's tongue to make some point about the effects of climate on the body. As Bourdieu writes, 

“What constitutes the Montesquieu effect then is this combination, on the one hand of an apparatus that is structured like a scientific discourse and, on the other hand, of the mental structures of the brains of the readers. To take this analysis a little further: I think that the mythical thought these days no longer flourishes merely on the terrain of archaic societies. It seems to me that the ‘savage mind’ analyzed by Lévi-Strauss, which has been more or less eliminated from our thinking on the natural world, has taken refuge today in our thinking on the social world. There are two terrains where we spontaneously mythologize: the social world and our discussions of other people—especially their bodies.” Lecture of November 23, 1982

Of course there are many modern day Montesquieus who have a whole conceptual vocabulary, IQ, genes, etc. in the place of sheep tongue, a vocabulary to reinforce by means of "science" what exists first as social myth. The conflict of forces outside of the university is also internal to it. Which does not mean that there are not different criteria, different standards, inside and outside. As I mentioned above, much of the contemporary criticism of the university boils down to the fact that ideas that have strength outside of it are relatively weak inside of it. It is an attempt to get the production of knowledge inside the university to match the spontaneous ideology of society. 

With respect to both instances, Bourdieu focuses on the dual nature of knowledge, its own internal strength or weakness, and its relation to social forces. Michael Burawoy has focused on Bourdieu's concept of the "twofold truth of labor," a concept which reflects his own interest in the way in which capitalism simultaneous exploits surplus labor and conceals that exploitation. Bourdieu's reflections on the twofold truth is developed across two studies that are in Pascalian Meditations. To start with the first example, that of the gift, Bourdieu writes the following,

"This dual view is never, perhaps, more necessary than in the case of the experience of the gift, which cannot fail to strike on by its ambiguity. One the one hand, it is experienced (or intended) as a refusal of self-interest and egoistic calculation, and an exaltation of gratuitous, unrequited generosity. On the other hand, it never entirely excludes awareness of the logic of exchange or even confession of the repressed impulses and, intermittently, the denunciation of another, denied, truth of generous exchange--its constraining and costly character. This leads to the question of the dual truth of the gift and of the social conditions that make possible what can be described (somewhat inadequately) as an individual and collective self-deception."

The gift can be seen, and needs to be seen, as both an individual act, one of generosity and intention, and a structural relation, one of exchange and reciprocity. These two truths, which make up two very different theories or understandings, one phenomenological the other structural, are both necessary and necessarily misrecognized. In order for the economy of gifts to function it must not be thought of as an economy. This simultaneous recognition and misrecognition of the conditions of one's action is part of the very disposition and habitus that sustains it. The gift and its logic is well known, but it sets up another example that of labor. As Bourdieu writes,

"Like the gift, labour can be understood in its objectively twofold truth only if one performs the second reversal needed in order to break with the scholastic error of failing to include in the theory the 'subjective' truth with which it was necessary to break, in a first para-doxal reversal, in order to construct the object of analysis. The objectification that was necessary to constitute wage labour in its objective truth has the fact which, as Marx himself indicates, only becomes the objective truth in certain exceptional labour situations: the investment in labour, and therefore misrecognitoin of the objective truth of labour as exploitation, which leads people to find an intrinsic profit in labour, irreducible to simple monetary income, is part of the real conditions of the performance of labour, and of exploitation."

This double truth, can be understood as a kind of double shift. In order for exploitation to be possible it is necessary for it to be eclipsed, at least in the minds of workers, who focus instead on their pay, promotions, and everything else which makes them believe in their own agency, their own activity, and in a system which would reward it. Burawoy's own ethnographic research, working both in the US and Hungary, reveals to what extent capitalism motivates by misrecognition. As Burawoy writes, 

"Thus I argue that capitalist hegemony requires and obtains mystification as its precondition, which makes it relatively stable, whereas state socialism, unable to produce such a mystification, could not sustain hegemony and instead alternated historically between coercion and legitimation--an unstable arrangement that, in the final analysis, proved to be its undoing."

This probably raises more questions than I can address here, but one of the focuses of Burawoy's ethnographic work is how capitalism produces its own particular legitimation, producing consent at the cite of production, by enlisting the agency of workers. Work was organized in such a way as to emphasize individual contributions, rather than collective conditions, and individual agency, rather than structural conditions. Mystification is both the condition and the effect of capitalist labor relations. As Burawoy argues the various "games" of capitalist factories, that give people some control over their schedule and rates, work to produce consent by making people feel as if they have more agency than they do. 

At this point it seems that I have wandered very far from the question of the organization of knowledge, the university, and theory. It might be worth thinking of the double truth of the university, both in terms of students, who have to believe in the idea that education will secure a better job and a better future even as structurally they are simply taking on debt to pay for their own accreditation, as well as faculty, who have their own ideas about critical thinking and educated citizens, but structurally are part of that process of accreditation and debt. In a larger way I definitely agree that the university, and those that work there, need to take into consideration the changing nature of knowledge in society, but not, as it is often claimed, by simply hiring the Monstesquieu's of our time, those who are willing to give scientific form to existing myths. We need a double truth of the university, recognizing that whatever knowledge is produced there is always going to have limited efficacy compared to the knowledge that is affirmed by social forces more powerful than the teacher's lounge. This is the lens through which I see the crackdown on the campus protests against the genocide in Gaza, students made a claim which came from their knowledge in the classroom, in classes on genocide, and outside of it, made possible by the dissemination of images, and for the most part faculty presidents told them that their knowledge did not match the worldview that the world required. 

Lastly, since I started the post this way,  I want to say something about the pleasures of being "a theory head" and its limits. Bourdieu's double truth entails two movements. First, there is the movement away from the everyday consciousness and common sense. This is part of the thrill of theory, it sees other forces, other relations, the capitalist mode of production, the symbolic order, dispositifs of power, desiring machines, and so on, pick your theory, where everyday common sense just sees individuals and the way the world is. That is the first reversal. However, it needs to be followed by a second reversal, a movement back into the world of everyday common sense, its motivations, and understanding.  In other words, words that will function as something of conclusion, the response to the revival of theories of racial hierarchies, to the criticisms of vaccine science, and the germ theory of disease, is not to simply open up the floodgates to those ideas, but to study the social transformations that have given rise to them, to both reverse and return to the world that produces such fictions.  

*= I got this title from the documentary about Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art which I admit that I have never seen and now seems hard to find. Michael Burawoy argues that the English title is a mistranslation of the Le sociologie est un sport du combat. As Burawoy writes about the mistranslation. "I can only conjecture that this is a maneuver to attract an English-speaking--and especially an American--audience for whom labeling an academic discipline a combat sport would discredit both sociology and the film...In the United States...the academic world is at once more insulated from the public sphere and more professional. It is dominated by by ideologies of consensus formation and peer review. Here, martial art, which its connotation of refinement and science, is a more appropriate and appealing metaphor." Speaking of martial arts, and in some sense justifying the images I selected. Bourdieu has the following to say about the martial arts in the collection of lectures. Bourdieu uses the divisions and rivalries between different sports, and different martial arts, as an illustration. As he writes, 

"A very good example is this: if you study the space of sports activities which function to some extent as a field, it is interesting to study the terms in which the adepts of one sport discuss rival sportsmen--for instance, in the space of the martial arts, what wrestlers say about those who practice aikido or judo; or in a wider context, what these martial athletes say about those who play rugby or football."

This is probably more of a sociology of martial arts than sociology as a martial art. I thought about sprinkling this blogpost with some martial arts references, thinking in terms of how a weaker force can defeat a stronger one, but I left that for the pictures. One day I will write something about aikido again, something I have been doing for as long as I have been blogging.