Abstract
If confronted with the question whether the role of relations of domination can be overestimated, Pierre Bourdieu’s answer would undoubtedly be ‘no’. Jacques Rancière, by contrast, would oppose all forms of critique that focus on such relations. Unfortunately, the two French intellectuals never discussed their views together, at least not in public. All we have is Rancière’s fervent critique of Bourdieu in The Philosopher and His Poor and an aside in the Preface to the second French edition of this work.2 However, in what follows I will try to stage a dispute between Bourdieu and Rancière in order to put their respective accounts of the role of domination and its critique into perspective. On this basis I will present both approaches as complementary, yet irreconcilable parts of a conception of critique that can account for the intricacies of critical practices. Whereas Bourdieu rightfully reminds us of the difficulty, if not — in some cases — the impossibility, of an effective critique of relations of domination, Rancière emphasises precisely the possibility of successful critique and resistance even in contexts of crass forms of domination. Moreover, in contrast to Bourdieu, who focuses on how things should not be, Rancière’s mode of critique consists in affirming emancipatory moves.
What you say about the capacity for dissent is very important; this indeed exists, but not where we look for it — it takes another form.
Pierre Bourdieu in a conversation with Terry Eagleton1
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Notes
P. Bourdieu in a conversation with T. Eagleton, ‘Doxa and the Common Life: An Interview’, in S. Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 265–277, 269.
J. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, translated by J. Drury, C. Oster and A. Parker (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003);
J. Rancière, Le philosophe et ses pauvres, 2nd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), xiii.
P. Bourdieu, The Algerians [1958] (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962).
Cf. J. Jurt, Absolute Pierre Bourdieu (Freiburg: orange press, 2003), 29.
Cf. F. Schultheis, P. Holder and C. Wagner, ‘In Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu’s Photographic Fieldwork’, Sociological Review, 57, 2009, 448–470;
F. Schultheis and C. Frisinghelli (eds), Pierre Bourdieu: In Algerien. Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung (Graz: Camera Austria, 2003);
C. Calhoun, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and Social Transformation: Lessons from Algeria’, Development and Change, 37/6, 2006, 1403–1415.
P. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 [1977] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979).
Bourdieu is well aware of the fact that he is criticising the Marxism(s) of his days rather than Marx himself. It is not by coincidence that he quotes the third of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach at the beginning of his Outline of a Theory of Practice: ‘The principal defect of all materialism up to now — including Feuerbach — is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object or an intuition; but not as concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way.’ P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice [1972], translated by R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), vi.
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice [1980], translated by R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990);
P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations [1997], translated by R. Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
P. Bourdieu and L. J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 127–128.
J. E. Goodman, ‘The Proverbial Bourdieu: Habitus and the Politics of Representation in the Ethnography of Kabylia’, in J. E. Goodman and P. A. Silverstein (eds), Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 94–132, 95.
P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1979], translated by R. Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1984);
Homo Academicus [1984], translated by R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1988).
Cf. e.g. J. Alexander, ‘The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu’, in J. Alexander, Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 128–217;
T. Bennett, ‘Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu’, New Literary History, 38, 2007, 201–228;
J. Butler, ‘Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency’, in J. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 127–163;
R. Celikates, Kritik als soziale Praxis: Gesellschaftliche Selbstverständigung und kritische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2009);
A. Honneth, Die zerrissene Welt des Sozialen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990), 156–181;
B. Lahir, L’homme pluriel: Les ressorts de l’action (Paris: Nathan, 1998);
B. Lahire, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics, 31, 2003, 329–355.
P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture [1970], translated by R. Nice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972);
P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, The Inheritors [1964], translated by R. Nice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
J. Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); Ch. 6 has been translated by
M. Jordin as ‘On the Theory of Ideology (The Politics of Althusser)’, Radical Philosophy, 7, 1974, 2–15.
A good case in point is Rancière’s publication of the collected writings of the floor layer and poet L.-G. Gauny: J. Rancière (ed.), Louis-Gabriel Gauny: Le philosophe plébéien (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires, 1985).
‘I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity,’ J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible [2000], translated by G. Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 12.
J. Rancière, Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France [1981], translated by J. Drury (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989). Quoting Rancière, D. Reid writes in his ‘Introduction’ to the English translation that: ‘The politics of The Nights of Labor is thus not an “allegory of despair … but on the contrary an invincible resoluteness to maintain, in a life devoted to the constraints for the demande prolétarienne and to the hazards of political repression, the initial non-consent”’ (xv–xxxvii, xxxv). For the original source cf., ‘Entretien avec Jacques Rancière’, in
C. Delacampagne (ed.), Entretiens avec ‘Le Monde’ I. Philosophies (Paris: La Découverte/Le Monde, 1984), 158–166, 165.
J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy [1995], translated by J. Rose (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Cf. T. May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
J. Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, in J. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by S. Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 27–44, 37.
L. Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, translated by G. Elliott (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), 23;
C. Nordmann, Bourdieu/Rancière: La politique entre sociologie et philosophie (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2006). The latter is an excellent study as far as the dispute between Bourdieu and Rancière is concerned.
P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations [1997], translated by R. Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 239 ff.
L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, translated by C. Porter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster [1987], translated by K. Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
P. Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society [1993], translated by P. Parkhurst Ferguson et al. (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999).
‘In speaking of archaeology, strategy and genealogy, I am not thinking of three successive levels which would be derived, one from the other, but of characterizing three necessarily contemporaneous dimensions in the same analysis’ (M. Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, in M. Foucault, The Politics of Truth, edited by S. Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) 2007), 65); see Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation.
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Sonderegger, R. (2012). Negative versus Affirmative Critique: On Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_15
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