The Philosopher and His Pugilists, part 2
Wacquant spent three years training in a boxing gym in Chicago's South Side. Initially he regarded the gym as a way 'in' to the local community an entry point, viewing station or vantage point. However, he quickly became sucked wholeheartedly into the lifestyle, the pleasures, the pains, the aims, the aspirations, and everything to do with the life of boxing that he was involved in. Habitus was his central concept and tool. However, there are at least two senses in which his deployment of habitus differs from the sense invoked by Rancière/Parker. Wacquant explains in an interview published in 2009:
the question of whether or not to do fieldwork never presented itself to me in terms of a methodological avocation. Rather, it is the method that came to me as the best suited for resolving the concrete research problem I confronted which, in Chicago, was not just to 'get closer' to the ghetto to acquire a practical and lived knowledge of it from within, but also to gain an instrument for the deconstruction of the categories through which America's Black Belt was then perceived and portrayed in the scholarly and policy debate. My initial intention was to rely on an ethnography of the urban scene of the South Side to pierce through the double screen formed, first, by the prefabricated discourse on the ghetto as a site of social disorganization – a space of violence, deviance, and void, characterized by absence and lack – flowing from the externalist and exoticizing point of view adopted by conventional sociology, and, second, by the academic tale of the 'underclass', that fearsome and loathsome category that crystallized in the 1980s in the social and scientific imaginary of America to explain in perfectly [115à116] tautological fashion the breakdown of the black ghetto by the 'anti-social behavior' of its residents. (Wacquant 2009: 115-16)
In other words, Wacquant's project was organised in part by the aim of piercing the key terms of journalistic, media, political and 'folk' discourse about 'the ghetto'. It was, in other words, orientated in such a way as to deconstruct and complicate received categories of discourse in order to challenge the problematic media and political analyses and diagnoses based on stereotypes and wrong assumptions about 'the ghetto' and its 'types', or stereotypes:
I wanted to quickly find a direct observation post inside the ghetto because the existing literature on the topic was the product of a 'gaze from afar' that seemed to me fundamentally biased if not blind. That literature was dominated by the statistical approach, deployed from on high, by researchers who most often had no first-hand or even second-hand knowledge of what makes the ordinary reality of the dispossessed neighborhoods of the Black Belt, and who fill this gap with stereotypes drawn from common sense, journalistic or academic. I wanted to reconstruct the question of the ghetto from the ground up, based on a precise observation of the everyday activities and relations of the residents of that terra non grata and for this very reason incognita. (Wacquant 2009: 107)
In the terms of Rancière's critique, it seems that at most Wacquant's conceptualisation of 'the poor' might be regarded as double. For, on the one hand, he is explicit that his aim was to deconstruct the falsities and hence put pressure on the moralistic or panic discourse constructed around folk devils by offering a counterdiscourse about the ghetto. So, he wants to explode the myth of 'the poor' – the poor of the media, of moral entrepreneurs and of the political/interventionist discourse of the time:
I deemed it epistemologically and morally impossible to do research on the ghetto without gaining serious first-hand knowledge of it, because it was right there, literally at my doorstep (in the summertime, you could hear gunfire going off at night on the other side of the street) and because the established works seemed to me to be full of implausible or pernicious academic notions, such as the scholarly myth of the 'underclass' which was a veritable intellectual cottage industry in those years. (Wacquant 2009: 107)
The potential double status of this myth-busting project derives from the possibility that although Wacquant may be deconstructing the dominant figures of the poor, he may be doing so in the name of his own figure of the poor. This would be a slippery accusation to make, and one which boils down to the necessity for some kind of predicative or signifying stability (the specification of an object) even whilst seeking to put that object into question. In other words, it is perhaps an accusation that could be leveled at anyone who is required to structure their discourse by way of a term that they may ultimately seek to complicate or even reject – just think of the problematic status of 'woman' in poststructuralist feminism, for instance, 'the text' in deconstruction, 'the native' or 'the nation' in postcolonial theory, and so on.
According to the logic of Rancière's critique, one might expect the status of 'the poor' in Wacquant's Bourdieuian ethnographic sociology to be established in and through the discussion of 'their habitus' – with 'habitus' constructed and depicted via the sociologist's 'tautology', mentioned earlier. However, a slightly complicating factor in this regard is the way in which the focus of Body and Soul, whilst diverse and shared out across many figures – the boxers, the trainers, and also, crucially, Wacquant himself, as the 'apprentice boxer' undergoing a transformative process – is not simply a person or a group of people; rather, the focus of Body and Soul is the gym itself, as a material institution – a machine, which produces boxers.
In fact, theory and method are joined to the point of fusion in the very empirical object whose elaboration they make possible. Body and Soul is an experimental ethnography in the originary meaning of the term, in that the researcher is one of the socialized bodies thrown into the sociomoral and sensuous alembic of the boxing gym, one of bodies-in-action whose transmutation will be traced to penetrate the alchemy by which boxers are fabricated. Apprenticeship is here the means of acquiring a practical mastery, a visceral knowledge of the universe under scrutiny, a way of elucidating the praxeology of the agents under examination – and not the means of entering into the subjectivity of the researcher. It is absolutely not a fall into the bottomless well of subjectivism into which 'autoethnography' joyfully throws itself, quite the opposite: it relies on the most intimate experience, that of the desiring and suffering body, to grasp in vivo the collective manufacturing of the schemata of pugilistic perception, appreciation, and action that are shared, to varying degrees, by all boxers, whatever their origins, their trajectory, and their standing in the sporting hierarchy. The central character of the story is neither 'Busy' Louie, nor this or that boxer, and not even DeeDee the old coach, in spite of his position as conductor: it is the gym as a social and moral forge. The intellectual model here is not Carlos Castañeda and his Yaquí sorcerers but the Gaston Bachelard of Applied Rationalism and of the materialist poetics of space, time, and fire. (120)
This orientation and approach clearly differs from the statistical and questionnaire based approach about which Rancière complains in The Philosopher and His Poor. Indeed, as we have already seen, Wacquant himself is highly critical of precisely such approaches, as they involve a gaze from outside and 'from afar'. Moreover, it can even be said to be a clear advance on the 'go-and-play-them-some-classical-music-on-a-piano-and-see-if-they-like-it' approach that Rancière proposes as an alternative to the distribution of questionnaires. Indeed, Wacquant's methodological approach inverts and displaces many features of the oft-stereotyped sociological or anthropological orientation. The object is not 'othered', is not hypostatized, is not fixed in time or place (Fabian 1983). The sociologist is not 'supposed to know', does not pretend to 'know', and in fact has his 'ignorance' impressed upon him during every workout.
Rather than in terms of fixities, habitus is approached as a material process of becoming (as it is so easy now to say, in the wake of Hurricane Deleuze). The material conditions of production, development and maintenance of the boxing habitus include factors such as relatively stable domestic situations and certain moral and ethical dispositions deriving from this, and then, once within the boxing gym itself, the pulls, pushes, pleasures and pains of the internal workings of its own technical, aesthetic, ideological and ethical rhythms and processes. In other words, habitus is construed as material and relational, rather than relating to 'identity' construed as some kind of fixed, essential or produced property. Indeed, the discourse of 'identity' is studiously avoided by Wacquant. As he writes elsewhere:
Body and Soul is moreover written against the grain of postmodernism and at crosscurrent with the narcissistic irrationalism that has informed auto-ethnographic efforts of the past decade. It firmly grounds its subjects in an objective social structure of material forces and symbolic relations. It studiously shuns the hoary notion of identity and sidesteps the issues of 'voice and authenticity, and of cultural displacement' and 'resistance' that have preoccupied contributors to that current to the point of obsession. (Wacquant 2005: 470)
The ethnographic method that emerged not only from his immersion in in a context and a lifeworld, but also from his status as novice and apprentice led him, writes Wacquant 'to effect a double rupture, with the dominant journalistic-cum-political representation as well as with the current scholarly common sense, itself heavily contaminated by the national doxa' (Wacquant 2009: 116). Ethnography, then, becomes an 'instrument of rupture with the political and intellectual doxa … and as tool for theoretical construction' (116).
Thus, the focus is not simply on 'the others' – the sociologist's 'poor' – but rather on a surprising range of problematics. These problematics stem from those of constructing the object of enquiry or knowledge itself, to that of writing about bodily knowledge, and out to problematics of macro-scale governmentality. Wacquant indicates much of this range and scope in the interview from which I have already been quoting, 'The Body, The Ghetto, and The Penal State'. On the one hand, one set of problematics coalesce around problems of engaging with, thinking about and conveying in language bodily knowledge and skill:
How to go from the guts to the intellect, from the comprehension of the flesh to the knowledge of the text? Here is a real problem of concrete epistemology about which we have not sufficiently reflected, and which for a long time seemed to me irresolvable. To restitute the carnal dimension of ordinary existence and the bodily anchoring of the practical knowledge constitutive of pugilism – but also of every practice, even the least 'bodily' in appearance – requires indeed a complete overhaul of our way of writing social science. (Wacquant 2009: 122)
On the other hand, the sociologist who gained insider knowledge of the workings and interactions of individuals and communities within one ghetto was able not only to illuminate but also to offer informed formulations that could be proffered to try to reconfigure the terms of macro-social, media and political debate and even policy:
When I asked the residents of Chicago's ghetto and La Courneuve's projects [in Paris], two zones of relegation four thousand miles apart, 'What do people in this neighborhood do day-to-day to survive when they're on the outs?' they immediately responded in nearly identical terms: 'Hey, me, people in the neighborhood, I don't know them. I live here, but I don't belong here'. In other words, I am not 'like them'. They demarcated themselves from their neighbors and reassigned onto them the degraded image that public discourse gives them. On both sides of the Atlantic, residents of districts perceived and lived as urban purgatories hide their address from employers and public agencies, avoid asking friends to visit them in their homes, and deny being part of the local microsociety. Only fieldwork could reveal the pervasiveness of this feeling of indignity in the two locations and recourse to the same strategies for managing territorial stigma, including mutual distancing and lateral denigration, retreat into the private sphere, and flight into the outer world as soon as one acquires the means to move. These strategies tend to undermine yet a little more the already weakened collectives of the impoverished urban zones and to produce the very 'disorganization' which dominant discourse claims characterizes these zones in the first place. Territorial stigma also encourages the state to adopt special policies, in violation of conventional procedures and national norms, which more often than not reinforce the dynamic of marginalization that they claim to combat, to the detriment of the residents. (117)
In light of Rancière's critique of Bourdieu about the presumption and reinforcement of inequality, Wacquant's observations at the end of this passage about the perverse logic of the policy-based intensification of marginalization should strike a chord. That chord suggests that perhaps in its main dimensions, Wacquant's elaboration of a Bourdieu-inspired sociology not only bypasses but also obviates (sublates?) the Rancièrean critique of certain of the problems subtending some of Bourdieu's work. However, we have not yet exhausted the full implications of the Rancièrean critique of inequality as it may pertain to Wacquant's ethnography, and it is to this that we will turn next.
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