The Philosopher and his Pugilists, part 1

 

I will be away from blogging for a few weeks, as I will be teaching cultural theory at Ljubljana University as a visiting professor, but I wanted to share part one of a two or three part piece that will ultimately be engaging with Loic Wacquant's 'carnal ethnography' as an approach to the body, learning and knowledge. Part one requires setting out the terms of Ranciere's critique of Bourdieu. The subsequent instalments will read Wacquant's work on the community of a boxing gym, Body and Soul, in terms of Ranciere's critique of Bourdieuian sociology. So, the first instalment is what follows. Parts 2 and 3 will appear in June.  

1. Introduction: The Philosopher and His Body and Soul

 

In 2004, two very different books appeared, in two very different disciplinary contexts. One was Loïc Wacquant's Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Wacquant 2004). This is an ethnographic sociology carried out within and around a boxing gym in an extremely poor, predominantly black ghetto in Chicago's South Side. It proposes an approach to sociology that Wacquant calls 'carnal sociology', the theoretical and methodological propositions of which are still making waves in sociological, anthropological and ethnographic contexts a decade on. The other book was the English translation of Jacques Rancière's 1983 work Le Philosophe et Ses Pauvres – The Philosopher and His Poor (Rancière 2004).

 

Wacquant, a former colleague of Pierre Bourdieu, presents Body and Soul as a continuation and development of Bourdieu's approach to ethnography. Rancière's The Philosopher and His Poor, on the other hand, contains a long essay organised by a fundamental critique of Bourdieu's entire orientation.

 

I juxtapose these two books here because, in their respective disciplinary universes, and during approximately the same time periods, and specifically in the English language, the works of Wacquant and Rancière have made – and continue to make – significant waves. Wacquant's 'carnal sociology' continues to be debated by ethnographers, sociologists and anthropologists, and to reorient many methodological practices. Body and Soul was immediately translated into half a dozen languages, and within the following few years, into half a dozen more. As a consequence, Wacquant's approach to the study of habitus, power, agency, and the establishment of sociological knowledge has produced both many followers the world over and stern critics. Meanwhile, Rancière's work grows in prominence across the fields of continental philosophy, cultural theory, aesthetics, art, history, archival research of all kinds, cultural studies, film studies and political theory. The English translation of The Philosopher and His Poor was just one instalment in a widespread movement of the rapid translation of Rancière's many works into many languages.

 

However, perhaps because of the enclaving effects of disciplinary demarcations or perhaps because of a fundamental disciplinary 'differend' (or immanent mutual antipathy) between between 'sociology' and 'philosophy', the nature of Rancière's philosophical critique of all things Bourdieuian is not at the forefront of debates about and within (post-)Bourdieuian sociology. At the same time, and for the same reasons, Rancière's critique of Bourdieu can often be taken at face value within non-sociological philosophical and theoretical circles. Hence, all things Bourdieuian may well be stereotyped and pigeonholed by certain parties, on the strength of the philosophical critique delivered by Rancière.

 

However, the simultaneous appearance in English of Wacquant's influential continuation and development of a Bourdieuian orientation, on the one hand, at the same time as the emergence of a text which for the first time in English articulates at length a philosophical critique of a Bourdieuian orientation, surely deserves attention, however belatedly. It deserves such attention in at least three contexts:

 

·      The first would be within any Bourdieu-inspired sociology and ethnography circles concerned to explore and take seriously criticisms of and challenges to its orientations.

·      The second context would be that of any Rancière-inspired work concerned with the ethics and pragmatics of verification – and Rancière has been nothing if not unequivocal on the need to be rigorous in attending to the means and methods by which the terms of any dispute are verified and established as correct and incorrect.

·      Finally, the third context that should be concerned with an appraisal of the relations between Wacquant's work and Rancière's critique of Bourdieu would be any that claimed to be situated within or to traverse the disciplinary fields of 'theory' and 'practice', and to be concerned with such matters as the body in society and the politics, ethics and pragmatics of academic method and the establishment of knowledge, such as cultural studies in the tradition of Stuart Hall (a cultural theorist and institutional activist who also became a professor of sociology).

 

In what follows, I will set out the essential thrust of Rancière's critique of Bourdieuian sociology, before moving on to evaluate Wacquant's work in terms of the Rancièrean critique. My warrant for this is Wacquant's consistent affirmation, since its publication, that 'Body and Soul offers an empirical and methodological radicalization of Bourdieu's theory of habitus' (Wacquant 2009: 118). In light of this assessment, I will reflect on the significance of this for the three contexts just mentioned – post-Bourdieuian sociology, Rancièrean theory and scholarship, and cultural studies.

 

2. Rancière's Critique of Bourdieu

 

My own research in the 1990s into matters of politics, ethics and power as they impact on and orientate the production of academic discourses (specifically cultural studies (Bowman 2007)) led me to focus more on Rancière's work than Bourdieu. I had dipped into Distinction (Bourdieu 1984) and Homo Academicus (Bourdieu 1990), but these works had not had an impact on me at that time. However, in 1999 I read the English translation of Disagreement (Rancière 1999). Shortly thereafter I read The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière 1991). The latter offers a critique of both traditional schooling and other forms of institutionalised pedagogy. And although Bourdieu is not mentioned by Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Kristin Ross's 'Translator's Introduction' sets out both the context and the core of a critique of Bourdieu that Rancière had set out in works during the 1980s, such as Le Philosophe et ses Pauvres (Ross 1991). Ross's summary of Rancière's critique of Bourdieu is elegant, and deserves to be quoted at length.

 

Discussing an essay of Rancière, in which we find his opening salvo against Bourdieu, Ross writes:

 

Rancière … attacked Bourdieu and the new sociology as the latest and most influential form of a discourse deriving its authority from the presumed naïveté or ignorance of its objects of study: in the realm of education, the militant instructors in La Reproduction who need the legitimacy of the system's authority to denounce the arbitrariness of that legitimacy; and the working-class students excluded from the bourgeois system of favors and privilege who do not (and cannot) understand their exclusion. By tracing the passage from Les Héritiers to La Reproduction, Rancière uncovered a logic whereby the social critic gains by showing democracy losing. It was, for example, all too obvious, he wrote, to say that working-class youth are almost entirely excluded from the university system, and that their cultural inferiority is a result of their economic inferiority. The sociologist attained the level of 'science' by providing a tautology whose systemic workings, veiled to the agents trapped within its grip were evident to him alone. The perfect circle, according to Rancière, was made 'via two propositions':

 

1.Working-class youth are excluded from the University because they are unaware of the true reasons for which they are excluded (Les Héritiers).

 

2.  Their ignorance of the true reasons for which they are excluded is a structural effect produced by the very existence of the system that excludes them (La Reproduction).

 

The 'Bourdieu effect' could be summed up in this perfect circle: they are excluded because they don't know why they are excluded; and they don't know why they are excluded because they are excluded. (Ross 1991: xi)

 

Accordingly, Ross continues, quoting Rancière, via the workings of this tautology, 'the sociologist placed himself "in the position of eternal denouncer of a system granted the ability to hide itself forever from its agents"' (xii). Rancière's depiction of the Bourdieuian sociologist is as a character who not only believes she can 'see' what others cannot, but also that she can see these things 'because' the others cannot see them (xi). Thus, write Ross: 'Wasn't the ultimate concern evinced by the logic of the new sociology, Rancière suggested, that of reuniting its realm, legitimating its specificity as a science through a naturalizing objectification of the other?' (xii)

 

So, the other is objectified in a way that proves the rectitude and superiority of the objectifier. However, this damning interpretation of the institutional truth of sociological work is not reserved exclusively for Bourdieu. Rancière has been discerning what he regards as the reductive and hierarchizing objectification of the other in the work of philosophers, poets, thinkers and sociologists for decades. Arguably this began with his rejection of all things Althusserian after their early collaboration (Rancière 1974). Rancière split from Althusser when he came to the conclusion that Althusser was ultimately a thinker of and for the status quo (Ross 1991). This was based on Althusser's dismissal of the voices of any he deemed to be less than fully informed via the right knowledge and the right ways of thinking. For Rancière, such a view is always both inegalitarian – it institutes a hierarchy, with university professors at the top – and unable to think politics. Indeed, picking up on Foucauldian terms, Rancière argued that rather than being 'political', this perspective is that of 'the police' (Rancière 1999). A police perspective is one that implicitly assumes a hierarchy of voices and identities in a geometrically structured social order, and Rancière traces this perspective back to Plato and Aristotle. It is the traces and effects of this ultimately inegalitarian mode of thinking that Rancière discerns in Bourdieu.

 

However, Bourdieu is significant for Rancière not just because be believes his thought to be organised by the very disease it claims to combat (hierarchy or inequality). Rather, Bourdieu is significant to Rancière because Bourdieuian thought caught on within French state politics in various ways. As Ross puts it:

 

The sociological theories of Bourdieu and Passeron offered something for everyone. For the enlightened reader, the disabused Marxist, they offered the endlessly renewable pleasure of lucidity, the frisson of demystification and the unveiling of the clockwork mechanics of a functionalism usually reserved for the structuralist interpretation of fiction. But for the progressive educator they offered the justification for a series of attempts to reform the social inequities of the school system and this especially after François Mitterrand and the socialists were elected in 1981. (xii)

 

In other words, Rancière singled out Bourdieu's sociology not just because he deemed it to be incorrect in some 'merely academic' sense, but because it became so influential in 'pro-egalitarian' French social policies whilst nevertheless, to Rancière's mind, having inequality inscribed within it. According to its very orientation, argues Rancière, only the sociologist can know what is best for 'the poor' – or, that is, everyone and anyone who needs to be 'managed' or 'policed', not just the masses, but everyone from schoolchildren to delinquents to the unemployed to convicts. The fact that variants of 'Bourdieu-ism' caught on and were employed in various ways in French social and educational institutions in attempts to eradicate or reduce inequality clearly struck Rancière as deeply problematic. This is because, relying on hierarchy and authority for their own operation, they were doomed to fail and to reproduce hierarchy, authority and structural inequality.

 

In The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière regards the figure of 'the poor' – in its many guises – as both the raison d'être and alibi of many influential thinkers and projects. The editor of the English edition puts it like this: Rancière's question is 'Why is the history of philosophy – from Plato and Marx to Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu – the history of so many figures of the poor?' (Parker 2004: vix) Rancière's answer, he continues, is this:

 

Rancière argues that in Bourdieu as much as Plato, the poor comprise in their very exclusion from the vocation of philosopher the condition of philosophical possibility. Present as objects rather than subjects of knowledge, appearing only in the guise of philosophy's exempla, the poor enable the philosopher to constitute himself – as other than the poor. (xiii)

 

In the terms offered by a related vocabulary, we might say that categories like 'the poor', 'the masses', 'the people', 'the workers', etc., whilst seeming to be actually-existing entities in and of the world, are always essentially, first and last, the discursive construct of the philosopher or sociologist. The poor are 'his poor' because they are 'his' focus and abiding concern. However, they are also, on Rancière's account, first and last his literary construction, onto or into whom are projected or written certain attributes. These are not first and last 'individual identity' attributes. Rather, they are structural attributes. That is, 'the poor' are attributed a place in the structure. One place. This is something that Rancière perceives time and again – across the history of 'political philosophy' in particular – the poor (or any of their lower class cognates) are construed as being 'locked down' in the sense that they can only occupy one place in the social structure. As Parker puts it, on Rancière's reading:

 

For Pierre Bourdieu … 'the poor' can do only one thing at a time – and this even though he is widely known as a critic of class privilege. Though Bourdieu's sociology is hostile to Plato and to philosophy's masking of social distinction, Rancière argues that this sociological reversal of Platonism is 'only the confirmation, indeed the radicalization, of its interdictions' (204). As explained in the Afterword, The Philosopher and His Poor mounted its lively critique of Bourdieu at the moment when the new Socialist government of the early '80s, committed to reducing inequality in education, took Bourdieu's The Inheritors, Reproduction and Distinction as its program. As these books are more influential today than ever, Rancière's critique retains its point. Perpetuating the hierarchy it purports to reduce, Bourdieu's sociology assumes an inequality even more obdurate than Plato's since, for Rancière, its logic is now necessary rather than arbitrary – and this is a logic only the sociologist can read (204). (Parker 2004: xvi)

 

Put into the slightly different terms that Rancière uses elsewhere (Rancière 1999), the argument here relates to the tenacious hold that certain geometrical conceptions of society can still have on thinking. Geometrical in this sense refers to the idea of entities having a definite place within a definite structure. In it, the workers are only ever workers: they are not poets; they do not want to be poets; indeed, they probably do not have any comprehension of what it is to be a 'proper' poet, intellectual or scholar.

 

Such implicit or explicit structuring presuppositions have long been Rancière's target (Rancière 1989), especially any ideas involving the claim that those 'above' can 'look down' and comprehend the lives of those 'below', while for 'those below', the lives of 'those above' are completely opaque or incomprehensible. And Rancière sees the orientation of sociologists like Bourdieu to be organised around the tacit assumption that this is true: that the worker, the native, the child, the poor, etc., will not be able to comprehend what the sociologist or philosopher can comprehend.

 

These are the two key attributes projected or written onto 'the poor': they are unitary and they are inferior. To appropriate a phrase from Gayatri Spivak: we believe that 'they are simple', while we know that 'we are complex'. Thus, writes Parker: 'Even while condemning philosophy for its naturalization of class distinctions, the sociologist-king presupposes that the poor can only ever do their own business, for such homogeneity is what Bourdieu's notion of habitus entails (178)' (xvi-xvii).[1]

 

Of course, sociologists may baulk at the suggestion that habitus is a term that might be based on and might reproduce a hierarchical and hierarchizing paradigm. Nevertheless, this is Rancière's claim. Moreover, the accusation has extra dimensions. For, as well as perceiving inequality to organise the 'philosophical' underpinnings of Bourdieu's approach, Rancière goes on to argue that the presumption of inequality actually played an active role in the sociological method of Bourdieu in his most influential work.

 

In his discussion of Bourdieu's method vis-à-vis establishing matters of taste and distinction, Rancière contrasts his sociological approach with that of a certain pianist. Rancière recounts the story of a pianist who also wanted to find out whether uneducated proletarians could appreciate the most supposedly elevated forms of culture. They proceeded to try to find out by simply taking a grand piano into the communities and playing music to the people. However, writes Rancière:

 

the sociologist is not a well-meaning pianist who runs from village to village to find non-representative samples of people, polled in the non-scientific manner of the Son of Man. [Instead, Bourdieu] will give representative samples of each socio-professional category a questionnaire to fill out that includes three music questions: opinions to choose among (for example, 'classical music is not for people like us', which is what Estrella's peasants probably would have answered if they had known what classical music was); a test of knowledge concentrating on fourteen musical works; a choice of three of these works. No surprise, the workers answer en masse that classical music is not for people like them, show only limited knowledge, and select The Blue Danube, whereas distinguished people claim that 'all music of quality' interests them, know all of the titles, and choose The Well Tempered Clavier. (Rancière 2004: 187)

 

Such are the key coordinates of Rancière's critique of Bourdieu. Rather than raking through the texts from the 1980s that so bothered Rancière, it seems more important today to enquire not into whether Rancière was right about Bourdieu, but whether Rancière's challenges to Bourdieuian sociology might have any currency today.

 

The most important heir to Bourdieu, to my mind, and in terms of my concerns, has to be Loïc Wacquant. Accordingly, it is to and appraisal of the work of Wacquant in relation to these Rancièrean charges that we will turn next.

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[1] Parker adds: 'The hybrid writer-intellectuals of The Nights of Labor would be inconceivable on this model since "the denunciation of the schole also denounces the parvenu who arrogates to himself the leisure to study that he does not have" (175). If no one ever strays here from his or her habitus, this is only because sociological analysis demands "the suppression of intermediaries, of points of meeting and exchange between people of reproduction and the elite of distinction": "Everything happens as if the science of the sociologist-king had the same requirement as the city of the philosopher-king. There must be no mixing, no imitation" (189). Nowhere, then, is there the slightest chance that "the popular gestus could, by accident or fraud, meet up with the bourgeois gestus" (191). Impervious to the poor's "aesthetic and militant passion for reappropriation," Bourdieu resists making room for "an allodoxia that is the only way to heterodoxia" (200). It is rather Kant and Schiller who can make such room in offering, Rancière concludes, "a fiction of the possible responding to the fiction of the impossible, a utopia opening again the space bolted shut by the myth of the three metals" (199)' (xvii).