Arendt and Bourdieu Between Word and Deed

Keith Topper Northwestern University

Evanston, IL k-topper@northwestern.edu

Work in progress: please do not cite or circulate without the author’s permission.

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Introduction

“Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech

is what makes man a political being.”

--Hannah Arendt1

“Words are also deeds.”

–Ludwig Wittgenstein2

For many years now, students of social and political thought have been fascinated and

perplexed by the idea that in some fundamental sense politics itself is a language system and

language itself is a political system, that speech is often a form of action and action a mode of

speech.3 Departing from the classical positivist and representationalist view that language is, or

ideally should be, a neutral medium of communication, representation, or expression,

contemporary social theorists have increasingly conceived of language and discourse as

constitutive of both politics and identity. Speaking very broadly, two quite different lines of

thought have emerged, each of which accents one or another aspect of the complex, inconstant,

and promiscuous operations of language and speech. On the one hand, poststructuralists,

postmodernists, and some feminist theorists have focused on the rhetorical, constitutive and

power-laden dimensions of linguistic utterances. Thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault and

Catharine MacKinnon, for instance, have notoriously accented these aspects of language, albeit

in very different ways and for very different purposes. Each has sought to highlight the manner

1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 3. 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 146e.

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in which language and discourse actively constitute and alter the very practices, institutions, and

relationships they ostensibly describe and represent. Politicizing Heidegger’s oft quoted

assertion that “language is the house of being,” Foucault, in his account of discursive formations,

and MacKinnon, in her reconceptualization of speech act theory, both conceive of language as a

form of power that in varying degrees produces subjectivity while enacting domination,

subordination, and exclusion.4 In short, Heidegger’s epigrammatic remark now reads rather

differently, as something like “power/language is the architect of the house of Being.”

On the other hand, Jürgen Habermas and other proponents of discourse ethics and

deliberative democracy have sought to expose what they perceive as the performative

contradictions and political dangers implicit in the former view. Frankly acknowledging the

ways in which everyday linguistic exchanges are corrupted by manipulation, distortion,

insincerity and strategic intent--and particularly so in situations where power relations are

unequal--Habermas sets out to reconstruct the normative basis of communication by identifying

the pragmatic presuppositions of it. Thus, in his theory of communicative action Habermas

looks to the “ideal speech situation” as a universal normative standard for assessing the integrity

of deliberative processes oriented toward understanding. In short, by locating imperatives built

into the very nature of linguistic communication itself, Habermas believes he can not only halt

the irrationalist impulses of linguistic models such as those associated with Foucault and

3 J.G.A. Pocock, “Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech,” Political Theory 1 (February 1973): 28. 4 This is to say that for Foucault and MacKinnon language (and for MacKinnon speech in particular) is inextricably connected to conduct. For Foucault, this implies that language is a mode of government in that it designates “the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed.” See Michel Foucault, “Afterward: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 221. By contrast, MacKinnon draws on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative speech to argue that some forms of speech, notably, pornographic speech, “require understanding . . . more in active than in passive terms, as constructing and performative rather than as merely referential or connotative.” These forms of speech can be, and often are also, actions. See Catherine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 21.

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MacKinnon,but also provide an ahistorical justification of the core values of democratic

societies.

While both of these approaches have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly

interest, each is burdened by important limitations. Foucault’s account of discursive (or

disciplinary) power, for instance, rightly foregrounds the ways in which formal bodies of

knowledge constitute and are constituted by relations of power, thereby installing hierarchies,

exclusions, and modes of disciplinary control that escape the notice of rights-based theories of

politics. At the same time, however, Foucault’s “capillary” conception of power, which pictures

power as thoroughly diffused throughout the social order, renders problematic any effort to study

systematically the politics of institutional structures. Ironically, his conception of

power/knowledge either makes the study of particular institutions misconceived (since modern

power is always dispersed through “infinitesimal mechanisms,”5 rather than gathered in specific

institutions), or too narrowly limits the scope of institutional analysis to an investigation of total

institutions and the institutions of the modern human sciences.

By contrast, MacKinnon’s radicalization of speech-act theory, by holding that

pornographic speech and representations are performative, i.e., they are neither true or false

statements nor reports of events but are types of conduct, effectively foregrounds the very real

psychic and physical injuries that these seemingly “immaterial” utterances and images can cause.

Nonetheless, MacKinnon’s account of the manner in which pornographic representations and

speech figure women as sexual subordinates grants to speech acts a highly questionable

ontological fixity and power. Pornography, MacKinnon argues, enacts subordination, depriving

the addressee not just of what Judith Butler calls the power of resignification, but of the very

5 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 99.

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power to speak at all. The pornographic speech-act, in other words, is both a sovereign and

unilateral action, simultaneously imposing its own unequivocal meanings on women while

silencing, reinterpreting and discounting the speech of those who seek to resist them.6

While MacKinnon is certainly right to highlight these instances of silencing, when they

are woven into a general theory of language that deprives entire classes of utterances of

equivocal or contestable meanings, something has clearly gone wrong. Indeed, reading

MacKinnon’s account of injurious speech-acts, one senses that she has locked all the exits except

her own and yelled “fire!” That is, having positioned the addressee in a structural relation that

precludes the possibility of defusing, subverting, or deflecting the intended effects of

pornographic words and images, MacKinnon advances legal prohibitions as the only viable

response to them. As Judith Butler has summarized it, only the word of the law and the state,

i.e., legal prohibitions, can effectively combat the power of injurious representations.

Furthermore, due to her narrow analytic focus--in Only Words the analysis is limited to cases of

hate speech, sexual harassment and pornography, that is, to what are often considered paradigm

cases of intentional and overtly hostile and degrading forms of speech--MacKinnon’s insights

into the operations of power in speech are less helpful for diagnosing forms of exclusion and

domination that occur in more mundane everyday encounters, and often in the absence of any

intention to exclude, subordinate, intimidate and the like.

Finally, Habermas’ effort to reconstruct the “universal-pragmatic infrastructure” of all

speech and action, however heroic, remains beset with important problems of its own. In

addition to the deeply contentious question of whether Habermas’ proceduralist and

transcendental tack yields a normative standard that at best is too “thin” to be of any real use, one

6 It is precisely this power of pornography to impose meanings and silence women that lends force to MacKinnon’s juridical prescriptions. Because the addressees of pornography cannot speak for themselves, it is

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might wonder whether he cedes too much to cognitivism and thus embraces, whether

intentionally or not, something like a Platonic distinction between reason and rhetoric.7 Indeed,

by excluding passion and rhetoric from the domain of communicative action and by discounting

the productive role that agonism and discord play in politics, Habermas arguably deprives

himself of critical resources for constituting shared experience and sustaining moral and political

vitality. Moreover, by underestimating the role that the body plays in everyday communicative

practice, Habermas fails to attend adequately to forms of exclusion and silencing that operate not

through coercion, the denial of rights, covert manipulation and the like, but rather through a

relationship between situated and embodied persons and particular norms and social structures.

To circumvent and overcome some of the difficulties accompanying these theoretical

perspectives and to better explore the specific set of questions I want to raise in this paper,

namely, questions about the relationship between language, speech and political institutions, in

the following I shall bring into conversation two rarely linked thinkers, Hannah Arendt and

Pierre Bourdieu. I do so because in spite of their superficial and at times not so superficial

differences, each provides conceptual and analytical resources missing in the work of Foucault,

MacKinnon, Habermas and others.8 Instead of restaging yet another confrontation between

necessary for the law to speak in and on their behalf. 7 On this point see, for example, James F. Bohman, “Emancipation and Rhetoric: The Perlocutions and Illocutions of the Social Critic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 21 (1988): 185-204; William Rehg, “Reason and Rhetoric in Habermas’s Theory of Argumentation,” in Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 358-377; and Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ch. 2. 8 Although it would surely be a mistake to deny or underemphasize differences of intellectual and political context, narrative style, and theoretical orientation, it is equally important not to exaggerate these differences. Unfortunately, the disparaties in Arendt’s and Bourdieu’s thought are typically easy to spot, while the continuities are less readily identifiable. In this latter regard, it is worth noting that both thinkers share, among other things, an important, if also ambivalent, intellectual debt to the thought of Martin Heidegger. In Arendt’s case, Heidegger was the most influential of her many distinguished teachers, a figure whom she described late in her life as “the hidden king” who “reigned therefore in the realm of thinking.” See Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 295. While Arendt eventually became deeply critical of Heidegger’s philosophical politics, aspects of his thought continued to inform much of Arendt’s work, such as her theory of political action. For a thoughtful

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these thinkers, it may be useful to examine the conjuncture between these importantly distinctive

and less well mined currents of thought. Not incidentally, such an investigation may also reveal

important dimensions of Arendt’s and Bourdieu’s thought that are often neglected or obscured in

the voluminous commentaries on their work. On the one hand, it may provide an alternative

perspective on, and a challenge to, interpretations of Arendt as a type of anarchist who is at best

uninterested in, and at worst hostile to, questions of what I call institutional form, that is,

questions about the general structure and overall architecture of political institutions and their

role in sustaining both political action and practices of political freedom.9 On the other hand, it

may yield a deeper understanding of the significance of Bourdieu’s sociology of power for

democratic theory today.10

More generally, Arendt is not only an important source of inspiration for Habermas’ own

thinking about language, speech and the public sphere, but in some ways provides a more

compelling account of these relationships.11 Not only does Arendt display a fuller appreciation

discussion of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s thought see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Similarly, Bourdieu has stated that “in philosophy Heidegger was his ‘first love.’” See Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 9. Like Arendt, Bourdieu’s assessment of Heidegger’s thought–and his political thought in particular–was hardly uncritical. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Nonetheless, both his phenomenologically informed view of social and political activity and his conception of the social field owe much to Heidegger’s work. See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 9. In addition to the strong Heideggerian influence on their thought, Arendt and Bourdieu display striking affinities in their normative orientations. As I shall argue below, Bourdieu’s ideal of “non-violent communication” closely resembles Arendt’s account of the conditions of possibility of political speech. 9 For a view of Arendtian politics as anarchist, see Miguel Vatter, Between Norm and Form: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). For a broader discussion of this issue, see Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 100 (February 2006): 1-14. 10 In the secondary literature on Bourdieu’s work, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to this topic. For one recent attempt to begin exploring Bourdieu’s views of democracy, see Loïc Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: The Mystery of Ministry (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005). 11 As Benhabib notes, Habermas’ intellectual debt to Arendt is apparent in the opening pages of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. It is also apparent in what is arguably his most important work of the past two decades, Between Facts and Norms. See The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry in to a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,

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of the constructive role that rhetoric, agonism, and dissonance play in political discourse, but she

also provides a richer account of the links among public speech, action and identity-formation,

one that anchors her spirited defense of the intrinsic value of a vibrant public sphere. In The

Human Condition, for instance, Arendt holds that the very essence of politics is speech--public

speech made possible by a shared language. Indeed, for Arendt, public speech and action are

definitive of a human life in the sense that deprivation of them is literally the denial of human

existence itself.

Bourdieu, on the other hand, shares with Foucault the idea that language is a form of

power, one that operates through social relations and inscribes itself in the very constitution of

individuals. Like Foucault, he also recognizes that these operations are not just repressive but

also productive. Unlike Foucault’s capillary conception of power, however, Bourdieu maintains

that power tends to concentrate in particular institutional sectors and zones of social space.12

Thus, Bourdieu’s investigations of the politics of language are anchored in detailed sociological

analyses of specific institutional domains--e.g., schools and universities--that are particularly

crucial elements in the reproduction of economic and cultural capital and the subversion of

democratic forms of life.

At the same time, I want to suggest that reading Arendt and Bourdieu both with and

against one another allows us to better grasp each writer’s the peculiar strengths, tensions, and

omissions. For instance, while Arendt provides what is arguably the most compelling modern

account of the relation between speech, politics and human identity, one of the qualities which

makes that account both so intriguing and elusive is its highly abstract mode of articulation.

MA: MIT Press, 1991); and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. by William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 12 See Loïc J.D. Wacquant, “On the Tracks of Symbolic Power: Prefatory Notes on Bourdieu’s ‘State Nobility,’” Theory, Culture & Society 10 (August 1993): 12.

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Indeed, Arendt is uninterested, at least in The Human Condition, in issues of how manipulation

and domination operate concretely in language, how persons are rendered speechless even when

they are not formally excluded from discourse and discussion, or how private and “social”

conditions affect one’s capacity for public participation. These, however, are precisely the issues

that concern Bourdieu. In this essay I argue that Bourdieu complicates Arendt’s views by

examining concretely how power relations operate in actual linguistic exchanges.

Bourdieu’s work on “symbolic violence” (an embodied but non-coercive, linguistic

“violence” that is exercised through misrecognition on the part of the participants of the

meanings implicit in their speech) and the politics of language explores in detail the ways in

which persons lacking the linguistic competences valorized in particular social and institutional

domains are de facto excluded from participation in them. In such instances symbolic forms

cease to operate as communicative links or modes of self-disclosure. Nor do they empower

otherwise isolated and alienated persons, thereby preserving and augmenting the public realm

and the peculiar freedoms it provides. Instead, these forms become sources of structured

inequality which effectively dissolve the political realm as Arendt defines it. Moreover, these

mechanisms of exclusion represent a unique and uniquely vexing challenge to students of

political thought and political institutions. This is not only because what I term (slightly

rewriting Judith Shklar) “ordinary violences” are so inconspicuous and “gentle,” but also

because they defy the standard liberal dichotomies of freedom and constraint, will and coercion.

Insofar as these violences fail to issue from overt force, conscious intention or the formal denial

of consent, they appear categorically to be freely willed (or consented) and legitimate, although

this is clearly a misleading formulation as well.

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If, however, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence spotlights surreptitious mechanisms

of domination and institutional exclusion which remain either under- or unexamined in Arendt, it

is also the case that Arendt provides students of politics and institutions with important resources

missing from Bourdieu’s conceptual vocabulary. Specifically, her normative construal of power

as a collective property inhering in an “ability not just to act but to act in concert”13 supplements

Bourdieu’s detailed account of symbolic violence. Accenting the diverse ways in which agents

are empowered through public speech oriented toward collective action, Arendt reveals the

positive and productive potential of language and speech “to establish relations and create new

realities.”14 Thus, while individually incomplete, when viewed in tandem Bourdieu’s and

Arendt’s accounts of language and speech emend and supplement one another, providing one

both with important analytical tools, and insight into what constitutes a legitimately political

form of public speech.

I

Arendt on Language, Institutions and the Ontology of Politics

Notoriously, in recent years students of social and political life have rediscovered the

time-honored truth that “institutions matter.” From the plethora of rational choice theories of

institutional determinants to the sundry “historical approaches” to the seemingly countless

proposals for new forms of deliberative democracy, the same idea constantly reappears: far from

being mere arenas for the aggregation of individual and group interests, epiphenomenal effects of

exogenous forces, or insidious mechanisms for stealing our most basic liberties, institutions are

the precious and fragile mediums through which we secure those liberties. That this recent

attentiveness comes at a time when large sectors of the public, as well as the elites of both major

13 Hannah Arendt, On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 143.

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parties in the US, appear zealously eager to destroy, privatize or at a minimum dramatically

“downsize” social and political institutions is of course an irony not easily missed. With

politicians inveighing cynically against the very institutions that they are charged to protect and

preserve, one cannot help but wonder if it is in part the imperiled status of institutions that has

summoned the recent interest in them.

If, however, one acknowledges the importance and distinctive value of institutions, a

number of questions follow. If institutions matter, precisely how and why do they matter? How

do and should they function in democratic orders? If, as the Founding Fathers urged, institutions

are necessary to “establish justice,” to “secure the blessings of liberty,” and to “form a more

perfect union,” then what kinds of institutions promote and procure these lofty goals? Is it not

also true that institutions often subvert the very quest for justice and liberty they are designed to

facilitate? Do they not, as Foucault has powerfully argued, normalize as well as enable, pacify

as well as empower?

While the possible rejoinders to these questions are myriad, one particularly provocative

view is articulated in the writings of Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition and elsewhere,

Arendt proffers an account of politics that identifies speech and action as the primary modes of

political activity, and political institutions as supplying the crucial framework for speech and

action. Without this framework politics and the fragile space of political activity would literally

disappear, expunged by both violence and the relentlessly expansive momentum of what she

terms “the social.” And since, as she repeatedly insists, politics and political action are neither

convenient outlets for the unalloyed pursuit of self-interest, nor burdensome if necessary civic

duties, but are instead constitutive features of any uniquely human and humane existence, then

the eclipse of politics simultaneously entails the disappearance of human existence as such.

14 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 200.

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Arendt’s theory of politics and political action begins with the proposition that politics is

a distinctive sort of activity, one that depends upon certain preconditions, and yields singularly

human experiences and artifacts. According to Arendt, political life is possible only in a

particular type of public space and community, one composed of distinct and equal citizens

engaged in common deliberation with others and for the sake of all concerned. If citizens are

unequal, then mutual understanding and common action are impossible. If they are identical,

then politics would lose both its object and impetus. Deprived of plurality and the multiple

perspectives it yields, political action would lose its peculiar disclosive quality--i.e., its revelation

of “who” as opposed to “what” a person is--and could no longer function as a unique field in

which one’s identity is disclosed to others and to oneself thorough others. Divested of shared

objects viewed from a variety of different perspectives and in its different aspects, what Arendt

terms “wordly reality” would utterly vanish. This indeed is exactly what happens in totalitarian

regimes, where the eradication of plurality and the consequent extirpation of the political realm

yields not a common world but an atomized and lonely “worldlessness,” one in which all

common referents, stable perspectives and sources of human solidarity are unmoored and

eviscerated.15

In addition to the preconditions of equality, distinctness and commonality, political life

for Arendt is distinguished by its peculiar content. Political existence, unlike the mundane and

tedious preoccupations of the life process, is by definition free from the twin dictates of

instrumental reason and biological necessity. Political action, Arendt controversially argues,

aims not at objects or ends beyond politics itself, but rather is its own subject and object. When

instrumental concerns, interest group bargaining and economic demands generally become the

15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 475-476.

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stuff of everyday “politics,” then politics, which for Arendt is the sole activity in which humans

distinguish themselves from nature, loses both its existential and ontological significance. Thus,

quite unlike typical definitions of politics as a play of competing interests in pursuit of personal

or group gain, or as “who gets what, when, and how,” both of which are in Arendt’s view

paradigmatically nonpolitical activities, politics is precisely about the human creation and

preservation of a space in which the natural impulses toward self-preservation and self-interest

are throttled. What distinguishes politics and political action is its freedom from the relentless

biological imperatives that humans share with all other animals, and its construction of an

artificial arena within which all that is distinctive of the human condition can flower unimpeded.

As Arendt urges, it is only through speech and action in the public realm that one is able to

disclose one’s unique identity, for only within an arena where one is “with others and neither for

nor against them”16 can one do rather than behave, persuade rather than coerce, know and be

known rather than command and obey, initiate the new rather than confirm the probable. Given

that humans are fragile creatures endowed with the burdensome knowledge of their own

mortality, only the intense, meaning-giving activities of political speech and action can possibly

vindicate the otherwise unendurable pain and anguish of this existential weight.

Within this distinctive sphere with its singular content and redemptive possibilities,

language and especially speech play an absolutely vital role. For Arendt, speech is the sine qua

non of politics because it is the principal mode of political action. As the primary vehicle

through which individuals express their intentions and announce their appearance and actions in

the world, public speech and especially storytelling reaches beyond its typical function as a

medium of communication or representation and becomes instead a necessary conduit to

16 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 180.

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individual and collective self-disclosure. Finding the right words at the right time, for instance,

involves something more than communicating discreet bits of information. It entails a sensitivity

to audience, texture, and tone, an ability to express, illuminate, and even constitute that which is

common (in the sense both of reestablishing contact with others and articulating common

meanings that make such contact possible) in a world of distinct but related beings. For Arendt,

therefore, public speech does not merely represent objects but is partly constitutive of the shared

meanings which are simultaneously a precondition and product of it. Politics is literally

sustained only through the revelatory powers of speech (which, Arendt reminds readers, is in

such instances also action17), and where speech disappears so does the body politic and

distinctive human identities.

Moreover, precisely because political life is defined by a shared commitment to

adjudicate all issues “through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,”18 the

capacity to speak, and hence to listen, to persuade and be persuaded, becomes the preeminent

political capacity. In its absence genuine mutuality disintegrates, and politics devolves into

inegalitarian and prepolitical relations of ruling, commanding, administering and coercing, thus

precluding any possibility of self-disclosure. As George Kateb has aptly remarked:

Those who use violence or force do not talk and hence do not reveal themselves; their

victims are not revealed. Those who rule (and the rest) do what they do instrumentally,

exploitatively, and manipulatively. They do not engage a world by which they come to

17 Ibid., p. 26. 18 Ibid.

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be known or come to know others; and thus the speech embedded in those relations is not

revelatory.19

The upshot of this brief discussion is fourfold. First, from Arendt’s point of view, speech

and agency are ineluctably linked (though not identical), such that one who is rendered

speechless is also dispossessed of all agency. As Arendt writes, “Speechless action would no

longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is

possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words.”20 Second, Arendt holds that public

speech and action are uniquely definitory of a human life. To be deprived of speech and action,

of “word and deed,” is to be deprived not of a political right but of a human identity. As she

eloquently puts it, “A life without speech and without action ... is literally dead to the world; it

has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.”21 Third, Arendt places

strict limits on the functions of political speech and hence the preconditions of politics. Most

importantly, she maintains that public space and public speech exists and flourishes only to the

extent that those within it seek not to manipulate, deceive or dominate, but to persuade.22 For

this reason, she argues that power, as opposed to force, strength or violence, “is actualized only

where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but

to disclose realities, and deeds not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create

new realities.”23 Finally, speech as the primary mode of political action is also linked closely

19 George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanhead, 1983), p. 23. 20 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 178-179. 21 Ibid., p. 176. 22 Ibid., p. 200. 23 Ibid.

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with freedom, which Arendt terms “the raison d’être of politics.”24 For Arendt, freedom,

understood as the capacity to initiate new and unexpected projects and processes, is precisely

what distinguishes the political from the social, where humans act in predictable, “automatic”

and causally stable ways. Indeed, like the physical and organic processes of nature, man-made,

historical processes tend over time to become stagnant, routinized, natural and “automatic,” thus

hiding their origin in acts of human innovation.25 When this occurs, speech and action, both as

modes of recalling and rejuvenating the “unnatural” sources of a now petrified political life and

as unmined repositories of novelty and transformation, function as perhaps the most formidable

bulwarks against the extinction of the often dormant faculty of freedom.

Having delineated these affinities between speech, politics, identity and freedom, how are

they related to broad questions of institutional form and structure? In short, what role do

institutions play in this account? At first glance they may appear to play virtually no role at all.

After all, Arendt is often accused of constructing a conception of public space that is almost

entirely bereft of institutional detail. Seyla Benhabib, for example, makes just this charge,

arguing that Arendt’s conception of public space is “institutionally unanchored, floating as if it

were a nostalgic chimera in the horizon of politics.”26 While I would agree that there is some

truth in Benhabib’s claim, especially if one focuses exclusively on The Human Condition, I

believe that she overstates the case. At a minimum Arendt’s extensive writings on

totalitarianism present a richly detailed portrait of institutional forms that destroy systematically

24 Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 146. 25 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” pp. 168-169. 26 Sheila Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 198. Hanna Pitkin remarks similarly that “Arendt was, on the whole, not much interested in institutional arrangements.” See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 257.

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the public realm. Thus, if only in a negative sense, it cannot be said that Arendt disregards the

crucial role of institutions.

Moreover, her discussions in On Revolution of both various council systems and

Jefferson’s ward system of government point clearly toward an institutional model in which

public spaces of participation are multiplied dramatically, thus sustaining institutionally the

experience of common deliberation and the delicate practices of public freedom. In contrast to

centralized bureaucratic institutions--which Arendt denounces as “really the rule by nobody”27--

and the party systems that seek to organize them, the disparate experiments with councils aimed

simultaneously to diffuse power and build it up from below.28 Such “elementary republics”

would not, as some have supposed, require the elimination of the more familiar institutions of

representative democracy and the forms of citizenship they presuppose and sustain. Rather, they

would function, among other ways,29 as instruments of resistance against the concentrating,

bureaucratizing and homogenizing tendencies of modern political institutions and mass

society.30 As seedbeds of grassroots politics and political participation, these diverse public

spaces yield forms of political life that dramatically transfigure the political landscape and moral

27 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 327; see also Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 289. 28 Ibid. 29 Perhaps anticipating the charge that her description of the council system, as well Jefferson’s of ward government, fails to specify in sufficient detail the precise functions and modes of operation of this institutional arrangement, Arendt quotes, and then supplements, Jefferson himself: “‘Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments’--the best instruments, for example, for breaking up modern mass society, with its dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political mass movements, or rather, the best, the most natural way for interspersing it at the grass roots with an ‘élite’ that is chosen by no one but constitutes itself.” This of course does not fully absolve Arendt of the accusation that her conception of the public realm remains institutionally vague, but it does perhaps draw attention to the paradox of specifying in advance institutional details that in her view must emerge from public deliberation taking place in specific cultural and historical settings. In Arendt’s mind, such efforts would undoubtedly represent yet another anti-political effort to import political “foundations” from outside of politics itself. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 279.

17

topography of mass society, interspersing among the mute dreariness and arid instrumentalism of

the private and social, living gardens of “public happiness” and political freedom. Indeed, in a

putative distillation of Jefferson’s views, Arendt sums up the political logic animating her own

preferred institutional scheme: “The basic assumption of the ward system ... was that no one

could be happy without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his

experience in public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy or free without

participating, and having a share, in public power.”31

While it is difficult not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of this political vision, it is

equally difficult to avoid posing a number of perplexing questions about it. Many of these are no

doubt familiar to Arendt’s readers. Questions, for instance, about the strict division between the

private realm of necessity and the public realm of freedom, the ostensible exclusion of

instrumental and strategic concerns from the political realm, and the durability and viability of an

institutional form which Arendt herself concedes “never was tried out,”32 are appropriate and

clearly worthy of exploration in their own right. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I

would like to return to our original queries about the relationship between politics, language and

institutions. If, as Arendt submits, it is only through speech and language that humans become

both political and distinctively human beings; if, in some basic sense, our identities are

constituted only through political speech and action; and if, as she also proposes, elementary

republics counterpoise to the “machinery of government” diverse spaces for public speech and

action, then how does one prevent social distinctions embodied in and expressed through speech

from corrupting both speech and participation in these political institutions? If indeed this

30 This argument is developed in greater detail in Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics,” in Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 100-122. 31 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 255.

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leakage occurs, does it not contaminate the public sphere that Arendt seeks heroically to reclaim?

And if so, is it not also the case that Arendt’s account of the linguistic nature of political life

requires concomitantly something like a political sociology of language? These are the questions

that are addressed in Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of linguistic competence and exchange.

II

Bourdieu and the Politics of Language

As with Arendt, Bourdieu’s writings pivot around questions of language and politics.

From his early analyses of gender relations in his native village of Béarn to his study of the

multiple meanings and complex processes of euphemization and sublimation in Heidegger’s

Being and Time, from his exegeses of the politics of academic discourse to his accounts of the

political history of linguistic unification in France, from his investigations of the production and

reproduction of legitimate language to his critiques of Chomskyian and Saussurian linguistics,

Bourdieu’s varied inquiries exhibit what Isaiah Berlin might term a hedgehog-like ambition to

delineate the social and political implications of defining human beings as language animals.

Similarly, Bourdieu shares with Arendt the conviction that the specifically political functions and

content of language cannot be understood adequately by theories which regard it exclusively as a

vehicle of communication, representation, or the exchange of information. What, however,

clearly distinguishes Bourdieu’s views of language from Arendt’s is his acute focus on the ways

in which modes of domination and exclusion are enacted and sustained through concrete

linguistic exchanges. Thus, while Arendt exalts the disclosive and revelatory aspects of public

speech, the ways in which public narratives both reveal a person’s identity and forge associative

bonds that sustain a space in which such revelation is possible, Bourdieu focuses instead on

different forms of “distinction” that operate in and through language, namely, those distinctions

32 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” p. 327.

19

that work as unnoticed conduits of exclusion. While Arendt extols the way that words and

public speech bond and constitute political communities, Bourdieu explores the ways in which

they quietly wound and dissolve them.

Bourdieu’s account of what he terms “linguistic competence” therefore begins from an

assumption that may appear uncontroversial but which he argues is neglected by most linguists

and philosophers of language--that language is not simply a medium of communication, but is

also an instrument of distinction, domination and violence.33 As such, the ways in which

language is used, the social relations of the speakers, the forms of speech, the setting of speech,

and the style in which speakers speak--things that are irrelevant to those who construe language

exclusively as a medium of communication--are all potentially crucial to an understanding of the

meaning of linguistic exchanges.

In elaborating his political sociology of linguistic or symbolic domination, Bourdieu

deploys a variety of concepts that he has continually refined and enriched over many years, the

most important of which is that of habitus. This concept, which the Scholastics used to translate

Aristotle’s hexis, is revived by Bourdieu in an effort to describe the process through which

“habits” become incorporated in the body in the form of “durable, transposable dispositions.”34

As a system of “socially constituted dispositions”35 lying at the intersection of social structures

33 While Bourdieu himself never makes the point, the one-sided accent on the communicative and integrative functions of language and symbolism is also characteristic of much work in political science, particularly the literature on political culture. Likewise, current rational actor theories of political phenomena are strikingly neglectful of the symbolic uses of language. See, for example, the definitions of political culture in Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1966), p. 50; and Donald J. Devine, The Political Culture of the United States (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1972), pp. 15-24. 34 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 53. 35 Axel Honneth et al., “The Struggle for Social Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu,” Theory, Culture & Society 3 (1986): 42. For Bourdieu, the term “disposition” is employed specifically because of its rather rich semantic content. As he explains, “The word ‘disposition’ seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions). It expresses first the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as structure; it also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially

20

and practical activity, the habitus is the embodied product of an individual’s history, experience

(and especially early childhood experience), and social location, becoming over time an ethos, a

set of flexible and enduring “mental structures” and “bodily schemas” that serve to organize,

orient and direct one’s comportment in private and public space. Initially, it is defined in terms

of objective potentialities in which it is situated--i.e., “things to do or not to do, to say or not to

say”36--all of which are in turn shaped by objective structures of social existence, e.g.,

“hierarchies of age, power, prestige, and culture.”37 As it is gradually modified in accordance

with the ever-changing circumstances of one’s life, however, the habitus generates regular and

immediate responses to a wide array of situations without necessarily being the product of either

strategic calculation, or the methodical execution of rigid rules.

If the habitus is Bourdieu’s conceptual vehicle for describing the genesis and generation

of agents’ practical sense (le sens pratique) and comportment in everyday life, “field” and

“market” are his preferred terms for describing and conceptualizing the specific settings and

social contexts in which individuals act. According to Bourdieu, specific practices and

individual acts are generated neither by an independent, unconstrained habitus, nor by

deterministic external or environmental forces, but rather through the relation between the

habitus and specific social contexts. These fields or markets are themselves conceived as semi-

autonomous social spaces, each of which contains specific regulative principles and prescribes

particular values. Moreover, breaking with analytically empty and abstract concepts such as

“society,” Bourdieu emphasizes that these spaces are neither uniform nor homogenous but rather

of the body), and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination.” See Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 214. 36 Ibid., p. 76. 37 Ibid., p. 25.

21

are socially structured arenas of conflict,38 with each field or market containing a variety of

“social positions” occupied by specific agents, i.e., individuals or institutions. These positions,

as well as the relations among them, are determined by the degree of “capital” within each field

or market. Importantly, for Bourdieu “capital” includes not just economic capital (material

wealth of a type that is “immediately and directly convertible into money”39), but also social

capital (social connections with prominent or influential persons), cultural capital (cultural

knowledge or educational credentials) and symbolic capital (social honor and prestige).

Moreover, these forms of capital, while not automatically “convertible,” often can be converted.

So, for example, middle-class parents lacking the economic or social capital requisite for

securing certain types of lucrative jobs for their children often seek to send them to prestigious

schools in order to convert that capital into highly esteemed, well paying jobs.

Bourdieu’s purpose in making such distinctions is to permit an analysis of various social

settings and institutions as differentiated, dynamic and mutable, without thereby embracing the

untenable view that social and political space is essentially anarchic or mercurially fluid. By

utilizing the concepts of field, market and capital, Bourdieu avoids the idea that all social and

political relations obey a single logic or form part of a seamless totality, while nevertheless

insisting that relations are structured and can indeed “obey an economic logic,” though not

necessarily one based on “narrowly economic interests.”40

38 Here too there are important similarities and differences between Arendt and Bourdieu. Just as Arendt interpreted the Greek polis as an “agonistic” space or stage intended to provide an outlet for self-display and self-definition, so Bourdieu views social fields and markets as spaces of conflict and competition organized around a quest for distinction defined in terms of the “profits” valorized in a specific field or market. The difference, of course, is that the agonism of the Greek polis was ideally oriented toward a fusion of personal distinction and the well-being of the political community, whereas Bourdieu’s concepts of field and market contain no notion of community. 39 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), p. 243. 40 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 50.

22

Employing these central concepts in his analysis of “linguistic exchanges,” Bourdieu

argues that just as the habitus inculcates a system of durable dispositions that govern our

practice, so there is also a secondary, linguistic habitus that instills durable dispositions that

govern our linguistic practices. As the product of a specific habitus, these dispositions are

inscribed in the body as part of a “total body schema,” one in which “one’s whole relation to the

social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, is expressed.”41 Through

various forms of linguistic-bodily discipline, individual agents develop what Bourdieu calls an

integrated “articulatory style” which reveals their class position, social position, and at times

more specific group identities. While these distinctive and contrasting styles are revealed

principally in accents, gestures, intonations and other bodily techniques for speaking, Bourdieu,

for example, points out that in France they are also manifested in two different words for the

mouth, each of which has its own cluster of popular usages. Members of the french lower

classes, for example, typically speak with a large and open mouth (la gueule), which is

associated with “manly dispositions” that rule out censorship (as well as “feminine” traits such as

“prudence and deviousness as well as ‘airs and graces’”), and valorize a virility that frequently

manifests itself in verbal or even physical violence (casser la gueule, ferme la gueule--”smash

your face in,” “shut your face”). By contrast, members of the bourgeois classes typically speak

with a more closed, pinched mouth (la bouche), one that is “tense and censored, and therefore

feminine.”42

Importantly, Bourdieu emphasizes that among the dispositions inculcated by the habitus

is a sense of the value that one’s “linguistic products” will have in specific markets such as

school or the labor market. He maintains that within particular social fields, differential values

41 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” Social Science Information 16 (6): 660.

23

are accorded to linguistic products, meaning that although there may be no formal barriers to

speech within a particular field, there are practical barriers to authoritative speech, i.e., speech

that is recognized as legitimate and worthy of attention. As Bourdieu states, “A speaker’s

linguistic strategies (tension or relaxation, vigilance or condescension, etc.) are oriented ... not so

much by the chances of being understood or misunderstood (communicative efficiency or the

chances of communicating), but rather by the chances of being listened to, believed,

obeyed....”43 In other words, hierarchies of linguistic legitimacy and authority (what Bourdieu

terms “a high or low acceptability level”44) informally regulate the operations of linguistic

markets, privileging certain linguistic competences as “correct” and “acceptable,” while

censoring others.

According to Bourdieu, agents lacking the linguistic competence valorized in a particular

social or institutional domain are faced with essentially three possibilities. First, and least

commonly, they can contest the legitimacy of the dominant language by refusing to recognize it,

thus initiating what Bourdieu calls “linguistic conflict.”45 Such instances, he asserts, are most

likely to occur during “crisis situations,” where “the tension and corresponding censorships are

lowered.”46 Secondly, they might try to euphemize their expressions by casting them into the

forms that are positively sanctioned by the market. These efforts, however, are typically futile,

simply because linguistic competency involves not only grammar and diction, but “all the

properties constituting the speaker’s social personality.”47 Unlike articles of clothing, these

42 Pierre Bourdieu, “Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits,” in Language and Symbolic Power, op. cit., pp. 86-7. 43 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” op. cit., p. 654. 44 Ibid., p. 656. 45 Ibid., p. 664. 46 Ibid., p. 663. 47 Ibid., p. 655.

24

“properties”--accent, pronunciation, bodily comportment--are inscribed in the body over the

course of a lifetime and cannot be exchanged or jettisoned without great efforts of will.

Furthermore, even in those instances where euphemization is possible, it is often achieved only

by negating (or being perceived as negating) aspects of one’s own social or personal identity,48

or by narrowly circumscribing the range and content of what can be expressed.49 Finally, and

most typically, speakers lacking the sanctioned forms of competence in a particular social

domain may simply withdraw themselves from those domains, as in the case of the peasant who,

“in order to explain why he did not dream of becoming mayor of his village even though he

obtained the biggest share of the vote, said (in French) that he ‘didn’t know how to speak’

(meaning French), implying a definition of linguistic competence that is entirely sociological.”50

Less anecdotally, Bourdieu writes that

Speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social

domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence. What is rare,

48 Bourdieu notes, for example, that among working-class males in France the adoption of an articulatory style characteristic of the dominant classes is often perceived as both a betrayal of one’s own social identity (“docility toward the dominant is also disloyalty toward the dominated, a disavowal of one’s ‘own flesh and blood’”) and a negation of one’s sexual identity (since, as noted above, such styles of speech are frequently considered effeminate). The result of these restrictive demands from both above and below is an existential paradox in which, on the one hand, one’s speech is recognized only on the condition that one negates one’s class and perhaps sexual identity, while, on the other hand, one’s class identity is maintained only at the cost of social recognition or mobility and a more permeable, less aggressively masculinist conception of sexual identity. In a somewhat different manner, Beate Krais has used Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to explore symbolic violence in gender relations, suggesting implicitly that even in those linguistic markets where more censored modes of speech are authorized, women’s speech often remains unrecognized. Summarizing studies done in recent years on the symbolic aspects of gender relations in the academic world, she holds that “In university courses, as well as in meetings and conferences, it has been observed that women are regularly overlooked when they wish to make a point; they are interrupted when they speak; male speakers refer to contributions of other male speakers, but not those of women; if a woman has said something that seems interesting to a male speaker, he refers to this by attributing it to a male participant; nonverbal, reinforcing communication behavior of men as addressed to men, but not to women; and so on.” See Ibid., p. 667; and Beate Krais, “Gender and Symbolic Violence: Female Oppression in Light of Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Practice,” in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma and Moishe Postone, eds., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, op. cit., p. 173. 49 Bourdieu holds “that each field draws the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable (or unnameable) which defines its specificity. In other words, the form and content of discourse depend on the capacity to express the expressive interests attached to a position within the limits of the constraints of the censorship that is imposed on the occupant of the position, i.e., the required formality.” Ibid., p. 657.

25

then, is not the capacity to speak, which, being part of our biological heritage, is universal

and therefore non-distinctive, but rather the competence necessary in order to speak the

legitimate language which, depending on social inheritance, re-translates social

distinctions into the specifically symbolic logic of differential deviations, or, in short,

distinction.51

What is so disturbing about these forms of censorship and exclusion is not only the fact that they

raise difficult questions about the de facto and de jure basis upon which any shared or authorized

language is constituted, and hence about the basis of politics itself, but also the fact that these

exclusions and silences frequently operate in ways that escape conscious recognition on the part

of those involved. As Bourdieu submits:

The distinctiveness of symbolic violence lies precisely in the fact that it assumes, of those

who submit to it, an attitude which challenges the usual dichotomy of freedom and

constraint. The ‘choices’ of the habitus ... are accomplished without consciousness or

constraint, by virtue of the dispositions which, although they are unquestionably the

product of social determinisms, are also constituted outside the spheres of consciousness

and constraint. The propensity to reduce the search for causes to the search for

responsibilities makes it impossible to see that intimidation, a symbolic violence which is

not aware of what it is (to the extent that it implies no act of intimidation) can only be

exerted on a person predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it, whereas others will ignore it. It

is already partly true to say that the cause of the timidity lies in the relation between the

situation or the intimidating person (who may deny any intimidating intention) and the

50 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, op. cit., pp. 68-9. 51 Ibid., p. 55.

26

person intimidated, or rather, between the social conditions of production of each of

them. And little by little, one has to take account of the whole social structure.52

In emphasizing the distinctiveness of this process--namely, the manner in which it

operates causally and materially without being the product of overt force or conscious intention--

Bourdieu draws attention to what I shall call a second dimension of violence. Stated tersely, the

one-dimensional view designates the standard social scientific construal of violence as involving

above all an agent’s coercive use of physical force (either directly or through the use of various

instruments).53 This view, which is evident in Max Weber’s influential definition of the state as

“a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered

to be legitimate) violence,”54 defines violence expressly in terms of three basic elements: (1) a

relation of domination, (2) a use of instruments of ocercion or physical force directly on person’s

bodies and (3) its instrumental, means-end character. Indeed, so common is this idea that even

Arendt, who in “On Violence” criticizes almost all previous writers (including Weber) for their

reluctance to distinguish adequately between violence and other terms such as power, authority,

52 Ibid., p. 51. This account also suggests an important limitation in Jürgen Habermas’ effort to ground normative justification in a proceduralist discourse ethics. Though Habermas unquestionably shares Bourdieu’s ideal of a “non-violent communication,” and in fact aims to spell out what he claims are inescapable presuppositions implicit in any such communication, his enumeration of “the three levels of presuppositions of argument” (p. 87) fails to identify the specifically symbolic violences that Bourdieu describes in this passage. Particularly at the third level of analysis, that is, the analysis “at the rhetorical level of processes” (ibid.), Habermas--borrowing heavily from the work of a sympathetic critic, Robert Alexy--adumbrates rules that focus either positively on all subjects being permitted to speak, assert, question, participate, and so forth, or negatively on speakers not being coercively prevented from exercising these positive rights. Bourdieu’s account of symbolic violence exposes a lacuna in these rules, for the exclusions from discourse, or the failure to be heard or taken seriously even when one is allowed to participate, lies neither in formal exclusion nor in repression or coercion, whether internal or external. Rather, it lies in a relationship between the situations of embodied persons, one that may exist and exclude in the absence of any strategic intent or juridical proscription. See Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christain Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 43-115. 53 In this respect it contains close affinities with what Steven Lukes calls “the one-dimensional view of power.” Like that view of power, the one-dimensional view of violence limits the scientific scope of the term to acts involving directly observable, manifest conflict. See Power: A Radical View (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 1984), pp. 11-15.

27

strength and force, includes in her definition two of these elements, differing only on a rather

technical rendering of force as “the energy released by physical or social movements.”55

Bourdieu, by designating as violent relations that involve neither instrumental calculation

nor the use of physical force or instruments directly on person’s bodies, seeks to illuminate an

inconspicuous mode of domination that operates effectively precisely because it is so “gentle.”56

Such violations are not, as Bourdieu emphasizes, identical to the brute physical violence of

torture or rape. Symbolic violence, as we have seen, lacks the intentional and instrumental

quality of brute violence, and works not directly on bodies but through them. Nevertheless,

symbolic violence shares with ordinary usage not only an accent on relations of domination, but

also on modes of domination or breaches of dignity that do not involve the use of overt physical

force (as when we speak of being the object of “violent denunciations,” of having been “done

violence” or having had one’s trust “violated”). By extending the notion of violence to the

symbolic realm, Bourdieu thus foregrounds an often unnoticed mechanism that generates and

sustains relations of domination. And to the extent that such mechanisms go unnoticed, they are,

as we have seen, also more difficult to combat.

It is therefore in these ordinary violences which are neither simply consented to nor

simply imposed that Bourdieu’s analyses become most pertinent politically. If, as Arendt argues,

the denial of public speech is the denial of a properly human existence, then questions about the

54 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 78. 55 Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 144. 56 Although neither identical to nor as fully developed as Bourdieu’s conception of symbolic violence, Jürgen Habermas’s notion of “structural violence” bears interesting resemblances to it. As Habermas states: “Structural violence does not manifest itself as force; rather, unperceived, it blocks those communications in which convictions effective for legitimation are formed and passed on. Such an hypothesis about inconspicuously working communication blocks can explain, perhaps, the formation of ideologies; with it one can give a plausible account of how convictions are formed in which subjects deceive themselves about themselves and their situation. Ideologies

28

specific mechanisms of exclusion from public discourse (or the basis upon which one is included

in that discourse) are political questions of the first order. As I have been arguing, they are also

the questions that Bourdieu’s accounts of language, power and violence instructively address.

III

The Power of Speech

Bourdieu’s signal contribution to the politics of language is his delineation of the diverse

ways that systems of meanings and embodied speech sustain processes of exclusion and

exploitation by masking socially valorized norms and hierarchies as natural or meritricious. By

showing how mechnaisms of misrecognition prompt agents to unwittingly accept as legitimate

that which is in fact arbitrary, Bourdieu uncovers a form of violence that is non-physical and

therefore not categorically located in Arendt’s private realm. Indeed, as a form of violence that

occurs in the absence of any conscious intimidation or consciousness of intimidation, the

phenomena of symbolic violence escape Arendt’s specific strictures distinguishing political from

pre- or non-political speech. Since these strictures all pivot around conscious intentions (to

manipulate, misrepresent or coerce),57 they fail to address the peculiar features of symbolic

violence.

If Bourdieu’s political sociology of language exposes a dimension of language and

speech that escapes Arendtian categories, it is nonetheless far from clear that his account,

however rich and provocative, is fully adequate either. For while Bourdieu’s studies of language

and symbolic violence do indeed elucidate forms of domination and silencing inhering in and

enacted through language, what he fails to provide is any positive account of language as a

potent source of collective power, i.e., power as a capacity to accomplish things by acting

are, after all, illusions that are outfitted with the power of common convictions.” See “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” in Steven Lukes, ed., Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 88.

29

together in the name of common ends. This absence of any articulation of the links between

language and power in the paradigmatically Arendtian sense is in part due to the absence of any

well-developed notion of political community in Bourdieu. As we have seen, Bourdieu

conceives of social and political space not only as differentiated, dynamic and agonistic, but as a

structurally unequal “battlefield” of sorts. And while it is true that one of his central ambitions is

to explore and identify the principal conditions of a “non violent communication,”58 or what

Arendt would term the conditions of possibility of political speech, Bourdieu’s work contains

few examples of such communication.

Whatever the ultimate sources of Bourdieu’s neglect of this intersubjective conception of

power, the political stakes of his omission are considerable. For unless one assumes that the

mere exposure of arbitrary hierarchies and norms is sufficient for dramatically attenuating their

effects or eliminating them altogether, then the alternatives to the Arendtian notion of power as

something that “springs up in between men when they act together” would seem to be

conspicuously limited. Standard interest group politics would seem to be of limited

effectiveness, in part because success in such politics is usually premised on access to resources

that dominated groups rarely possess in large quantities.59 On the other hand, violence, as

Arendt points out, can perhaps produce order and obedience, but never legitimacy, authority or

power.

Perhaps most importantly, Bourdieu’s failure to acknowledge and incorporate into his

thought something resembling Arendt’s intersubjective conception of power makes it difficult

57 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 200. 58 “Des conditions principales d’une communication ‘non violente.’” Pierre Bourdieu, “Comprendre,” in La Mysère du Monde (Paris: Éditions de Seuil), p. 907. 59 From Arendt’s standpoint, the patently instrumental character of interest group politics would clearly render it prepolitical, rather than specifically political. Bourdieu, on the other hand, never categorically separates politics from instrumental action, and so doesn’t divorce in principle politics from strategic or instrumental considerations.

30

for him to illuminate crucial aspects of our current political condition. For one of the things

which makes Arendt’s concept of power both theoretically and practically fruitful is its ability to

reveal something about the durability and vulnerability of particular regimes, about the ways in

which astonishing and unpredicted reversals become an irrepressible part of the political

landscape. It is now well-documented, for instance, that the State and Defense Departments–

with all of their well-paid “experts”–did not imagine that South Vietnam would collapse as

quickly or dramatically as it did during the first five months of 1975. Nor did the CIA–let alone

Presidents Carter, Reagan or Bush–have any understanding of the weakness of the Shah of Iran’s

regime in 1978, or the fragility of the established governments of the Soviet bloc in 1991. By

contrast, Arendt’s analysis of power and authority not only reveals the weakness of these

regimes, but also provides insight into the sources of power of those ostensibly “powerless”

Eastern and Central European dissident groups. Not incidentally, it also suggests that it is a

mistake to view her political theory as responding only to totalitarianism, classically understood,

and not to wider predicaments of our age.

Thus, only something akin to Arendt’s notion of power is likely to provide both a vehicle

and a legitimate normative basis for combating the various species of symbolic violence that

Bourdieu so effectively exposes. In this respect the Arendtian conception of power serves as a

necessary counter not only to Bourdieu’s work, but to that of a wide variety of post-structuralist

writers who adroitly unmask structures of domination posing as natural, eternal or meritocratic

relations. If, as I have argued, these undertakings are vital to any serious quest for a genuinely

democratic future, it is questionable whether they alone are adequate for the task of constituting

legitimate forms of public and political power. Indeed, as Sheldon Wolin has remarked, “the

problem of the political is not to deny the ubiquity of power but to deny power uses that destroy

31

common ends.”60 If Bourdieu eloquently reminds us of the first truth, Arendt does likewise with

the second.

60 Sheldon Wolin, “On the Theory and Practice of Power,” in Jonathan Arac, ed., After Foucault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 198.