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 istinguished
French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, succumbed to illness on Wednesday
January 23. He was 71. Bourdieu held the chair of sociology at the
Collège de France, the highest instance of independent French
research, where he had been teaching since 1982. Author of some 25
books, he also founded the leading sociological journal, "Actes
de la recherche scientifique" [sic] in 1975.
Part of the generation of thinkers called poststructuralist in Anglo-American
countries, Bourdieu revolutionized sociology by creating an alternate
set of categories whose task was to bring object status to symbolic
systems. He sought to accomplish such a move without, for all that,
reducing the contents of symbols to merely functional tags in a vastly
deterministic system. In Bourdieu's perspective, society and power
are not only crossed by class struggle or through imposition of the
ruling class' hegemonic will to representation. Instead, the struggle
for power in the context of social regeneration seeps into the complete
symbolic systems that marshal integration into institutions, media
and interpersonal relations.
Nor did his work on symbolic systems
ever decline on naming names. His analyses spread over distinguished
institutions of French culture such as the Ecole National de l'Administration
(a rough equivalent to Harvard Business School in the US), as it does
to French farming culture, as well as the media. 1995's "On Television"
represents one of the pivotal works in transforming analysis based
on symbolic systems. Away from the open-ended semiotics of Roland
Barthes, or the 'terrorist' aesthetics of the situationists, "On Television"
is undaunted in its portrayal of gagged journalists, pundits and other
functionaries as a trickle-down effect from the concentration of media
resources in a handful of major conglomerates.
Bourdieu's early work dealt with a type
of ethnological research that explicitly restored dialogue and category
sharing with French structuralist philosophy, thereby countering the
work of Claude Lévi-Strauss' scientific ethnology. Despite
the category sharing, Bourdieu, a devoted rationalist, joins numerous
French philosophers to reject the poststructuralist, not to mention
postmodernist, appellation imposed on his work as if to shrink its
timber and scope.
Above all, Bourdieu's work has always
been committed to a radical study of society-in Marx's sense of taking
it 'by the root'. In 1993, he published "La Misère du Monde"
(translated in 1999 as "The Weight of the World: Social Suffering
in Contemporary Societies"), a collective work in which theoretical
analysis from researchers shares time and space with their subjects'
self-analyses. Masterfully edited, the book is one of the few to have
shown the particles playing off each other in the void otherwise separating
academia from the poorest reaches of society. Turning sociology toward
its own foundations and interests as an academic institution is the
stimuli peeling it open to a scientific study of its reflexive parti
pris and compromises. The theme of his last seminar was Pierre Bourdieu
himself: a reflexive analysis of the institutional beams bolstering
his discourse and allowing it to stand. But the ambiguity-and vulnerability-of
the intellectual in France ended up passing on its flame to him in
1995. The most important general strike affecting the public sector
since the seventies had ground France to a halt for a week and a half.
Bourdieu took the podium at the Gare de Lyon, honoring the workers
of the French national train service, the SNCF, who stood up against
the plan to privatize the rails. A risky proposal for any intellectual,
Bourdieu was applauded throughout by those who sparked the flame leading
to the resignation of prime-minister Alain Juppé, a leading
French advocate of the neo-liberal shift that swept the wealthy G7
countries and beyond in the 1990s .
Bourdieu went on to rally a political
stream he called the "gauche de la gauche", the left of the left.
This was a French precursor to the anti-globalization movement. From
its inception, his idea was derided by intellectuals close to France's
RPR, the right-of-center party of Juppé and current president
Chirac. But Bourdieu's ideas were far more threatening to France's
traditional and institutional PS, socialist party. His legacy on the
political platform will, doubtless, be felt most strongly in the movement
he has helped to create from among PS renegades and other radicals: ATTAC.
The central line of Bourdieu's political
and economic analyses treats the revolts of the late 1960s as demands
being waged by the middle-class toward increased democratic power.
Spearheaded by the student movement, it was most often driven into
violence by the State-a situation not unlike what has befallen the
anti-globalization movement since Seattle. Still, in Bourdieu's view
the pressure on the 1960s social structure, matched with the unseen
prosperity in France of the "Glorious thirty years", aimed at extending
middle-class values less into commercial dominance than into political
change. Bourdieu's numerous analyses of the deciding bodies of the
G7 economies trace a deliberately applied policy of conservative social
and economic channeling at the highest level. These policies were
to become the much-vaunted 'pragmatic' turn of reaganomics. The illusory
growth from the over-inflating stock market, and chanting the triumph
of growth in corporate productivity, largely at the expense of massive
downsizing, were to have a calculated effect in the shorter than long
run. They aimed at spreading fear and insecurity among the over-confident
middle-class over wage and labor loss in an economy perceived as chaotic-pitting
employee against employee. The trade-off was to be the media promoted
illusion of the power of the middle-class buck, reason enough for
intellectuals to tow the line by declaring that class struggle was
dead, gone-or unfashionable.
This background also provides the underpinnings
to Bourdieu's rejection of the postmodernist label. His attachment
to a representation of society as a struggle of symbolic forces largely
relies on the conviction that truth is a factor of interpretation
and structural recasting. The upshot can be that truth lies at the
mercy of the key facts withheld from circulation, undermining the
theoretical consistency of analysis that seeks to base truth as the
outcome of rightfully connecting the facts like so many dots. Sociological
inquiry in the Bourdieu vein, though, rarely shows facts as being
withheld per se. They circulate in symbolic networks of partnership
and corporations in which the individual wills to speak them are shaped
through the collective values they are compelled to repeat.
Bourdieu's commitment struck a common
cord among many intellectuals active in economic and political research,
those who have gone on to join ATTAC. Propelled by the independent
radical and very serious monthly, 'Le Monde diplomatique', ATTAC is
represented by the journal's editors, Ignacio Ramonet and Bernard
Cassin, as well as by distinguished author and activist, Susan George.
In preparation for the second meeting of the anti-globalization movement
in the southern Brazilian town of Porto Allegre, a democratic and
peaceful haven in Brazil's young democracy still battling with oligarchic
concentration of power and wealth, ATTAC held a general assembly in
Paris on January 19. To its organizers' surprise, attendance toped
6 000 at a venue otherwise used for pop music concerts.
As the French presidential campaign swings
into full steam, ATTAC confronts a situation similar to other critical
economic movements. Their lobbying power seems to be greater to what
they can achieve as part of a left-alliance. Yet the lobby group configuration
does not disappear under headings of a Civil Society Organization.
ATTAC, like its counterparts, the Congress of Canadians and Ralph
Nader's Greens, must work to grow before seeking accreditation as
a party, at the risk of never hoping to overcome destiny as an alliance
member. The ineffective performance of the French environmentalist
party, Les Verts, in alliance with the Socialists and Communists,
not to mention the drastic deception of Germany's Green party faced
with Chancellor Schroeder's full-hearted acceptance of the American
invasion of Afghanistan, proves the vulnerability of small radical
parties to the election route. The prestige of holding office is never
reason enough for ideals to be forsaken to the so-called realities
of the harsh world.
In the meantime ATTAC continues issuing
its low-priced publications at "Mille et une nuits". In support of
a Tobin Tax, it is also lobbying hard to break the client secrecy
that has made Lichtenstein, among other countries, a haven for shell-companies,
secret bank accounts and money fleeing from public taxation. It is
has long been clear that tax haven accounts holding wealth from legal
sources have grown indistinct from those holding funds from criminal
activities. Contrary to what the media sheepishly like to report,
President W. Bush has shown that governments are more than able to
influence the operations of tax havens-when there's a will. This should
stand as no surprise: its executive members are most likely their
most cherished clients. Which is one of the prime lessons of Pierre
Bourdieu's legacy. In the power struggle waged within symbolic structures,
through which the middle-class's aspiration for increased power has
seen itself crushed under the menace of massive poverty, theory has
to aim for nourishing the will on its hard path to diminishing and
neutralizing interest and gain.
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