APRIL 10, 2009
PIERRE BOURDIEU – SYMBOLIC
VIOLENCE
Pierre Bourdieu was a well known French sociologist and writer and one of the principal players in French intellectual life during the 1990s. Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural , social, and symbolic capital , and the concepts of habitus , field , and symbolic symbolic violence violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. Bourdieu sees symb sees symbolic olic capital (e.g., capital (e.g., prestige, honour, attention) as a crucial source of power. Symbolic capital is any species of capital that is perceived through socially inculcated classificatory schemes. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, violence. and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic exercise symbolic violence. Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated dominated social agents who then take the social order to be just. It is the incorporat incorporation ion of unconsciou unconsciouss structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant. The dominated then take their position to be "right". Symbolic violence is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the specter of legitimacy of the social order. For Bourdieu, formal education represents the key example of this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behaviour, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like the way of dressing, or the accent. Privileged children have learned this behaviour, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged backgrounds have not. The children of privilege therefore fit the pattern of their teachers' expectations with apparent 'ease'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or 'natural' ability as in fact the product of a great social labour, largely on the part of the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parents' class position in the wider social system. system.
1
Working class children can come to see the educational success of their middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's symbolic inheritance (e.g. accent) into cultural capital (e.g. university qualifications) - a process which the logic of the cultural fields impedes but cannot prevent. Symbolic violence can do what political and police violence can do, it only does it more efficiently. Symbolic violence is implacably exerted through the order of things, through the logic of practice, through complicity and interior defeat, suggesting that the symbolically dominated conspire and commit isolated treasons against themselves. An example of symbolic violence, wide spread in remote rural areas of Romania are the cases of children who try to become literate not in their own language or dialect, but in the language or dialect of the members of the ruling group; in our case urban politicians or succesful professionals. Even though it is unlikely that these children will ever become as confident using the dominant mode of expression as others, they typically believe that it is in their own self-interest to do so. Another example of symbolic violence can be found in the large corporation, where work is highly structured—one works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 or so weeks a year—and where remuneration is highly unequal—executives earn orders of magnitude more money for, perhaps, only a proportion more effort and responsibility. Yet, workforces by and large accept this; they are complicit in this structure and this inequity. In Romania this kind of ethic endorses, even lends a moral stature to, hard work and toil, and convincingly tells of opportunity and mobility by pointing to its career legends like Ion Tiriac (a sucessful Romanian tennis player and an even more sucessful businessman). What this ethic does not endorse is a healthy and safe workplace, or time with family, friends, and community. What this myth does not speak of are the constraints on career mobility imposed by not having the necessary linguistic, social, political, and/or cultural capital. Imposing themselves as self-evident and universal, work and pay structures in the modern corporation, they are sites of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence is exerted whenever any power imposes meanings and imposes them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its ability to impose thoes meanings. Pedagogy and communication are a very good example to analyze and ilustrate the concept of symbolic violence. Pedagogy in all its appearances, in the home, in the work place, in the school and in the media,
2
represents a form o symbolic violence. This concept is applicable to any social formation understood as a system of power, which is the precondition for the establishment of pedagogic communications or the imposition and inculcation of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary means (education). The pedagogy which assumes a place of dominance among all pedagogies is the one corresponding to the objective interests of the dominant groups or classes. Any pedagogic action is accompanied by authority, which gives it its persuasive powers; thus any pedagogic activity which revealed the violent aspect of its symbolic power would be self-destructive. This authority is especially powerful because it is not recognized as such. It is never more total than when totally unconscious. The violent aspect of symbolic violence might best be renderd throug examples. Romanian pimary school teachers often treat their pupils with great affection. To do so, Bourdieu believes, means to gain possession of a very subtle instrument of repression: the withdrawal of affection. Most of us have had occasion to experience this kind of p unishment. Many times, however, it was done with the idea of altering behaviour in a beneficial way, e.g. to curb a tendency to lie or steal or cheat. Messages in any pedagogic activity cannot be reduced to a simple commnunication. Always the power relations between the dominant and dominated classes determine the limits within which the persuasive force of a symbolic power can act. Proof of this occurs when pedagogic communication is maintained even when the information content of the message is almost zero, as in the case of beginning teachers for instance. Symbolic violence cannot be equated with cultural acquiesence. Pedagogic communication does not necessarily inculcate the information constituing a dominant culture. Rather, it inculcates the recognition of the legitimacy of the dominant culture. Testimony to the force of symbolic violence is especially evident when individuals exclude themselves from, for instance, pursuit of a college education, ostensibly accessible to all. The learning process involved in the process of inculcation of recognition of legitimacy is irreversible. The habitus 1 acquired in the family is the basis of the reception and assimilation of messages in the classroom. The habitus acquired in school, likewise, forms the basis for reception and assimilation of messages produced and transmitted in the culture industry (e.g. mass media).
1
Habitus can be defined as a system of dispositions (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action). The individual person develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions it encounters.
3
To conclude, we can say that Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, which has been a central topic of his writings, is an important contribution to the sociological world. The concept of symbolic violence theory describes the process of accepting to submit to domination through social relations, a process based on recognition of the dominants by the dominated and misrecognition of the constitutive basis of this relation. A focus on symbolic violence shows the ways in which daily practices produce and foster domination, including those practices of the dominated themselves.
4
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
•
Jeffery Everett, Organizational Research and the Praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu, Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 5, January 2002, 56-80
•
Kyung-Man Kim, Can Bourdieu’s Critical Theory Liberate Us From the Symbolic Violence?, Cultural Studiesa nd Critical Methodologies, Vol. 4, 2004, 362-376
•
Mary S. Mander, Bourdieu, The Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies, European Jurnal of Sociology, Vol. 2, 1987, 427-453
•
Olivier Virol, Reconnaissance et me´connaissance: sur la the´orie de la violence symbolique, Information sur les Sciences Sociales, 2004, Vol 43, 403–433
•
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu
•
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj87/wolfreys.htm
•
http://books.google.ro/books? id=aPVaHgUx1f0C&pg=PA104&lpg=PA104&dq=pierre+bourdieu+symbolic+violence&sou rce=bl&ots=K5DcUMFWof&sig=exCi_cl20SInXMg2AjDTvKYn5oc&hl=ro&ei=CA3bSajO G4mRsAbY6eCDCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPA103,M1
5
6
