CRONIN. Boudieu and Foucault On Power and Modernity

Philosophy & Social Criticism
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Bourdieu and Foucault on power and modernity

Ciaran Cronin
Philosophy Social Criticism 1996 22: 55
DOI: 10.1177/019145379602200603
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Ciaran Cronin
Bourdieu and Foucault on

power and modernity
Abstract Foucaults theory of disciplinary power and Bourdieus

theory of symbolic power are among the most innovative attempts in
recent social thought to come to terms with the increasingly elusive
character of power in modern society. Both theories are based on cri-
tiques of subject-centered analyses of power and offer original
accounts of modern social institutions. But Foucaults critique of the
subject is so radical that it makes it impossible to identify any deter-
minate social location of the exercise of power or of resistance to its
operations. Bourdieus theory of practice in terms of the symbolically
mediated interaction between the habitus and social structure avoids
these problems by connecting relations of domination both to identi-
fiable social agents and to the institutions of the modern state.
However, Bourdieus strategic model of social action remains too
narrow to allow for the possibility of autonomous agency and an
emancipatory political praxis. The theory of symbolic power must be

supplemented by a normative conception of practical reason if its
emancipatory potential is to be realized.
Key words agency · habitus · modernity · power · resistance
The currentcrises of legitimation besetting advanced capitalist so-

cieties due in part to the fact that operations of power have become
are
detached from recognizable structures of political responsibility and
accountability. It is not just that the institutions of representative
democracy are increasingly circumvented by decentered, desubjecti-
fied and diffuse forms of power; these very institutions and the dis-
courses of legitimation on which they are based seem to function as
instruments of impersonal forms of power that resist straightforward
55-

56
analysis and escape political control. Part of our predicament is that

we lack an appropriate conceptual framework for analyzing how
power functions in modern society. The extraordinary resonance of
Michel Foucaults genealogy of power is undoubtedly due to the fact
that it promises to show us a way out of this predicament by chal-
lenging some of our most deeply held philosophical and empirical
assumptions concerning modern social and political institutions and
their history. Taking his orientation from Nietzsches conception of
genealogy, Foucault argues that modern power can no longer be
understood as something invested in subjects who exercise it over
others with the sanction of right or law; on the contrary, since the 19th
century power has increasingly operated through impersonal mechan-
isms of bodily discipline that escape the consciousness and will of indi-
vidual and collective social agents. Foucaults originality consists in his
attempt to combine a relational analysis of power in terms of cease-
less social struggles with a theory of modernization as the emergence
of a complex of disciplinary institutions which make possible the pro-
duction of new forms of scientific knowledge concerning subjects.
But as I will argue in the first part of this paper the reception of
Foucaults genealogical studies suggests that his critique of subject-
centered notions of power is so radical that it becomes impossible to
identify any social location of the exercise of power or of resistance to
power, and his notion of the disciplinary society is too monolithic to
account for the diverse forms that power assumes in modern societies.
In the main body of the paper I will argue that Pierre Bourdieus theory
of symbolic power shares some of Foucaults most valuable orien-
tations, most notably his scepticism concerning subjectivistic theories
of action and his emphasis on the role of bodily practices in mediat-
ing relations of domination. But Bourdieu avoids the problems that
beset Foucaults theory of disciplinary power by according a central
explanatory role to a substantive conception of the subject as both
essentially embodied and socially constituted. Bourdieus theory of
practice in terms of the interaction between the habitus, the set of sym-
bolically structured and socially inculcated dispositions of individual
agents, and social fields structured by symbolically mediated relations
of domination offers a more empirically sensitive analytical frame-
work for decoding impersonal operations of power than does Fou-
caults theory of disciplinary power. Thus the theory of symbolic
power provides powerful analytical tools for understanding our con-
temporary situation and for orienting resistance to relations of domi-
nation. But, in conclusion, I will argue that Bourdieus tendency to
analyze social interaction exclusively on the model of strategic conflict
undermines the critical potential of his theory of practice and of

57
modernization. It must be supplemented by a normative account of

discursively mediated consensual action if it is to provide effective
orientation for an emancipatory political praxis.
I Foucaults genealogy of power and the disciplinary society

Foucaults genealogy of power and the modern subject combines an
original philosophical conceptualization of power with a revisionist
account of the genesis of modern society. These tasks are essentially
interconnected in Foucaults conception of genealogy, for a rigorously
nominalistic approach to history that emphasizes the lowliness of his-
torical origins, the discontinuity of events, and the contingency of iden-
tities subject to endless dissolution and reconfiguration, is the discipline
of thought by which metaphysical notions of originary meanings,
enduring essences and an objective teleology in history can be over-
come.2 Thus Foucaults philosophy of power and his history of the
genesis of modern social institutions and the modern subject are two
integral parts of a single enterprise which aims at a thoroughgoing trans-
formation of our understanding of ourselves and of the modern world.
While it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of Foucaults
genealogical works in a brief discussion, this duality suggests that their
significance for understanding modern power can be reconstructed
along two main axes: (1) they seek to effect a radical shift in the con-
ceptual framework in terms of which we generally think about power
and (2) they present an original historical account of the genesis of
modern institutions.
(1) Foucaults innovations along the first axis involve a shift from
a substantive conception of power as invested in, and exercised by and
over, subjects to a relational view of power as a function of a network

of relations between subjects. This shift involves a number of dis-
placements. In the first place, Foucault argues that the view that power
involves one individual or group exercising control over another sys-
tematically misrepresents how power functions in modern society. It
reflects a juridical conception which links power to sovereignty and
law; on this conception, power is invested in certain individuals within
a hierarchical structure of power relations, it is exercised with the tacit
consent of those over whom it is exercised, and it operates in accord-
ance with a shared conception of right which sets limits to its legiti-
mate exercise. But modern, disciplinary power does not involve a
special relation of authority or control alongside other social relations;
rather, it functions in and through a multiplicity of social relations -
economic, familial, sexual, etc. - to form a field of force relations that

58
encompasses the whole of society.3 Disciplinary power produces its

effects through ceaseless local struggles, which form strategic patterns
that are not reducible to the intentions and purposes of individual
agents and that crystallize into global mechanisms of domination. It
is concerned not with the legality of conduct and the punishment of
transgressions but with the normalization of behavior designed to
harness the productive and reproductive capacities of the body.
Thus in a second displacement Foucault shifts the focus of ana-
lysis from the conscious, willing subject to the body: disciplinary
power acts on the body to inculcate normalized, habitual responses
through which the modern subject is constituted as an effect and a
vehicle of power.4 Whereas sovereign power is negative - it prohibits
behavior that does not conform to the law - disciplinary power is pro-
ductive : through minute and exhaustive techniques of surveillance,
regulation and examination designed to control bodily behavior in a
continuous manner, the modern subject is literally constituted as a
vehicle of power and an object of knowledge. The discourses and
experimental procedures of the emergent human sciences that explore
this new domain of subjectivity first become possible as a result of the
opportunities for surveillance, spatial and temporal regulation and
examination of bodies afforded by modern disciplinary institutions
such as the hospital, the prison and the school. Hence Foucaults dis-
placement of the practical subject goes hand in hand with a corre-
sponding displacement of the knowing subject, who is denied the
epistemic privilege that Greek philosophy associated with the activity
of theoria and modern epistemology with the apodictic self-conscious-
ness of the Cartesian ego. Since Plato at least, Western philosophy has
viewed power as antithetical to knowledge, as something which dis-
torts our perception of the truth. Foucault takes aim at this tradition
with his provocative claim that there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of power, nor any knowledge that
does not constitute at the same time power relations, Thus the focus
of analysis must shift from the subject of knowledge to constellations
or regimes of power-knowledge relations and their historical trans-
formations.6
But with this another cherished assumption concerning power
must be abandoned, namely, that which would enlist truth in the
service of emancipation from domination. The implicit contract on
which juridical power rests presupposes some shared conception of the
human interests to be realized through the exercise of power, so that
operations of power that frustrate these interests can be criticized as
illegitimate and oppressive. Disciplinary power, by contrast, does not
rest on a contract or on a shared conception of justice; as a result

59
resistance can no longer be understood on the normative model of

emancipation from unjust social and political relations. But Foucaults
thesis that there is an essential interconnection between power and
knowledge makes an even more radical break with the traditional
notion of emancipation in implying that there is no truth about
human beings - no real human interests or authentic, unrepressed
sexual desires - to which an emancipatory politics could appeal
against the excesses of a power that has overstepped the limits of its
legitimate exercise.7 Thus the ultimate consequence of Foucaults
radical decentering of the knowing and willing subject is to sever the
connection between resistance and normative conceptions of truth and
justice, at least as these are traditionally understood.
(2) Foucaults innovation along the second axis consists in chal-
lenging Weberian accounts of modernization in terms of the functional
differentiation of spheres of social action and their consolidation in the
institutions of the modern state, on the one hand, and Marxist
accounts of modernization in terms of the unfolding of the inner logic
of the capitalist economic system, on the other. We live neither in a
Weberian society dominated by the state nor a Marxian society increas-
ingly polarized into two antagonistic classes,8 but in a disciplinary
society in which social relations are subject to an all-pervasive regime
of normalizing discipline. In support of this radical thesis Foucault
meticulously documents the development of techniques of discipline in
a range of modern institutions - the prison, the hospital, the mental
asylum, the school, the factory and the military barracks - and claims
that they have in the meantime spread beyond the walls of these insti-
tutions and now shape every aspect of life in modern society. He treats
the prison as emblematic of institutions in which new technologies of
power were forged around the isolation of individuals and the exhaus-
tive surveillance and regulation of their bodily behavior in both space
and time. These institutions served at the same time as the labora-
tories of the emergent human sciences, making it possible to observe
inmates minutely and to register and codify the effects of regulations
and coercive measures; and the design and operation of these insti-
tutions were in turn modified and rationalized in light of the crimino-
logical, psychological, medical and pedagogical knowledge whose
production they made possible. Thus to the extent that disciplinary
power has disseminated throughout the social body, we are caught in
a progressively more highly integrated feed-back mechanism of
power-knowledge which is beyond the control of knowing and acting

subjects.9 The analysis of modernization as a transition from one
global regime of power-knowledge to another reflects a Nietzschean
conception of history which rejects the teleological assumption that

60
there is some ultimate truth about human beings which is gradually

being uncovered by science or that the history of political institutions
represents a progress toward a more just social order.
But setting aside for the moment the question of how much sense
Foucaults thesis of the disciplinary society makes of our contempor-
ary situation, I want to argue that the conceptual constraints imposed
by his critique of subjectivism already restrict in problematic ways the
explanatory potential of the model of disciplinary power. Instead of
locating power in individual or collective social agents, Foucault ana-
lyzes contemporary power in terms of impersonal relations of force
and strategies:
...
power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity
of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and
which constitute their own organization; as the process which,
through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strength-
ens, or reverses them ... [and] as the strategies in which they take
effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is em-
bodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the
various social hegemonies.lo
To focus the analysis of power on strategies rather than individuals or
groups is potentially illuminating in suggesting that strategies have his-
tories of their own that cannot be reduced to the intentionality of indi-
vidual agents or to class interests at a particular moment. But divorcing
the concept of a strategy from subjects altogether, as Foucault seems
to do when he says that power relations are intentional and nonsub-
jective, has paradoxical consequences because the notion of a strat-
egy is essentially related to those of agency and social practices. 11 As
Charles Taylor has argued, cases where individual or collective actions
have unintended consequences provide us with examples of purpose-
fulness that cannot be reduced to the conscious motives, choices, or
decisions of individuals or groups; but we can plausibly claim that such
consequences exhibit strategic patterns only if we can relate them to
the conscious ends and purposes of identifiable social agents.12 Fou-
caults strategies, by contrast, seem to crystallize spontaneously out of
a chaos of shifting relations of force between interchangeable subjects
and to float free of any specific social relations. Thus while his critique
of subjectivism goes some way toward explaining why mechanisms of
power in modern society seem to escape individual control, it runs the
risk of reducing power to a play of forces unconnected with recogniz-
able human concerns.
In Foucaults genealogical analyses the body seems to take over the
role played by the subject in traditional analyses. But the body,

61
considered in abstraction from an embodied subject, is neither a plaus-

ible target of power nor a possible source of resistance to its opera-
tions. As an empirical matter, the operations of power outside the
confines of coercive institutions such as the prison and the asylum do
not necessarily, or even generally, take the form of direct bodily con-
straint or coercion nor do they always involve surveillance; for
example, class, racial and gender domination are so insidious precisely
because they function in large part through the internalization of
repressive schemes of interpretation of self and world, often in an
unconscious manner and by dominant and dominated agents alike.13
And on a conceptual level, in describing power on the naturalistic
model of relations of force between bodies, Foucault is in danger of
undermining the essential reference of the concept of power to social
relations altogether and assimilating it to notions of energy, force and
discharge that properly apply to physical nature On the other hand,
it might be objected that Foucaults goal is not to jettison the subject
altogether but to challenge the assumption of the philosophy of con-
sciousness that the subject is a self-originating source of meaning and
action by showing that the modern subject is, to a certain degree at
least, an effect of disciplinary power. But without some account of how
individual identity is constituted through the internalization of social
schemes of interpretation and evaluation, this approach is in danger
of reducing the subject to a mere reflex of bodily habits induced by
external stimuli.15 Moreover, the role that Foucault assigns to the body
renders the notion of resistance to power problematic because it is not
clear how the body as such can function as a source of resistance to
power. In certain places Foucault speaks of resistance in terms of the
revolt of the body, citing as an example the intensification of sexual
desire in response to the increased scrutiny of childrens sexuality by
psychology and medicine; but the intensification of desire seems more
like a causally induced effect of power than an instance of resistance
to power. 16
These problems are symptomatic of more deep-seated difficulties
concerning the possibility, or even the intelligibility, of resistance oc-
casioned by Foucaults attempt to dissociate the concept of disciplinary
power from normative conceptions of right and justice, which he
assimilates in a reductive manner to the legalism of the juridical model:
I then wanted to show ... the extent to which, and the forms in which,
right (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, insti-
tutions and regulations responsible for their application) transmits
and puts in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but
of domination,.17 By treating right in general as an instrument of
domination, Foucault tacitly denies any constitutive connection

62
between power and discourses of legitimation, and hence between

resistance to power and the normative idea of liberation from dom-
ination.18 But while the norms of right and justice embodied in the
laws and institutions of a particular state at a particular time may be
repressive, the concept of right is not exhausted by any factually
existing laws and institutions, as Foucault seems to suggest in the
passage just quoted, for the latter can always be criticized as unjust,
and hence as instruments of domination. And without some notion of
right and legitimacy that does not represent it merely as an instrument
of power, the idea of resistance ceases to have any normative import.
It is perhaps the realization that genealogy would thereby forfeit its
potential to orient resistance to domination that led Foucault to specu-
late about the possibility of a new form of right which would be anti-
disciplinarian and liberated from the principle of sovereignty. But what
an anti-disciplinarian notion of right would involve he does not
specify, other than to say that it would break with the juridical con-
ception of individual rights There would be no problem here if Fou-
cault were willing to renounce any connection between genealogy and
an oppositional politic; but that would be at odds with the subversive
rhetoric of his own writings and sympathetic commentators have
generally seen the value of his work to lie in part in its subversive politi-
cal implications.2o
The close interconnection that Foucault asserts between power
and knowledge creates further problems concerning the possibility of
resistance. If disciplinary power is an effect of the systematic, totaliz-
ing discourses of the human sciences, it would seem that resistance
must be local and undirected and whatever effects of truth it might
generate would be at best ephemeral. Perhaps this is what led Foucault
to connect genealogical analysis with the revival of subjugated know-
ledges that preserve the memory of past social struggles but are dis-
qualified as inadequate by the established canons of scientific rigor.
Genealogy as anti-science would elaborate these popular knowledges
into a historical knowledge of struggles that could be deployed tacti-
cally against the tyranny of organized scientific discourse and the cen-
tralizing powers associated with it.21 With the idea of reviving
suppressed knowledge Foucault seems to bring genealogy into contact
with the critique of ideology; but then genealogy would have to lay
claim to objectivity or truth in opposition to the established disci-
plines, which contradicts his thesis that power and knowledge are
essentially interconnected. For this thesis entails that there is no objec-
tive standpoint outside of relations of power from which the truth
could be ascertained: discourses are neither true nor false in themselves
but merely generate effects of truth.22 But then genealogy could only

63
ground a counter-power and would become as totalitarian as the

established sciences were it to prevail.23
This brings us finally to the question of the explanatory force of
Foucaults theory of disciplinary power and its empirical adequacy as
a description of modern society. His theory of modernity in terms of
the disciplinary or carceral society turns on the claim that disci-
plinary techniques spread beyond the closed institutions in which they
originated and gradually came to pervade modern society as a whole.24
But the generalization of the model of disciplinary power from an insti-
tution such as the prison or the asylum to the social body as a whole
is highly problematic because the disciplinary techniques Foucault so
carefully describes seem capable of functioning effectively only within
closed institutions.25 The exercise of hierarchical surveillance, nor-
malizing judgment and systematic examination calls for organiz-
ational resources, coercive means of enforcing behavioral regulations,
and instruments of data collection and analysis for which there are no
obvious analogues in the case of interactions outside of institutional
settings. This suggests that Foucaults choice of the prison as the
exemplary site of modern power may have prejudiced his analysis of
modern society as a whole. More worrying is that he ultimately failed
to establish a convincing connection between what he called the
microphysics of power - the strategic play of domination and resist-
ance in which subjects act on one another - on the one hand, and the
global constellations of power evoked by the image of the disciplinary

society - large-scale institutional techniques of surveillance and nor-
malization grounded in the totalizing discourses of the human sciences
-
on the other. As Foucault depicts it, the exercise of power at the local
level always potentially encounters resistance and relations of dom-
ination are inherently subject to reversal. But then he needs to explain
how these shifting relations of power become stabilized into enduring
strategic patterns and disciplinary mechanisms by showing, for
example, how the strategies and tactics of agents at the micro-level of
local struggles are conditioned by, and serve to reproduce, the large-
scale institutions of the disciplinary society. But he offers no such
account.26 Moreover, his rejection of explanations in terms of the state
or class relations ultimately rings false because he does not explain
how we moderns could have been so mistaken in the explanatory cat-
egories we apply to modern society both as theorists and as lay
persons. While his account of the proliferation of techniques for dis-
ciplining bodies certainly highlights previously underappreciated
aspects of modern history, this cannot be the full story.
Bourdieus theory of symbolic power, by contrast, while preserv-
ing Foucaults emphasis on local struggles and bodily conditioning,

64
relates the analysis of local interactions in a convincing way to global

relations of domination between social classes mediated by the insti-
tutions of the modern state. The superiority of Bourdieus approach is
due in part to his sensitivity to the symbolic aspects of power, which
also enables him to give a more plausible account of the role of the
subject in the exercise of power and resistance, but without reinstat-
ing the discredited conception of the subject of the philosophy of con-
sciousness.
11 Symbolic power, class domination, and the modern state

Bourdieus analysis of modern forms of power is based on the appli-
cation to modern societies of a theory of practice developed in
anthropological studies of a tribal society - that of the Kabyles, a
Berber people of Algeria - and assumes an implicit theory of moderniz-
ation whose outlines have become clearer only in his recent work. I
will begin by examining the conceptions of agency, practice, and social
structure that underlie his theory of symbolic power (section 1) before
turning to his analysis of modernization and modern structures of
power (section 2) and describing how together they represent an
advance over Foucaults theory of power and modernity (section 3).
1
Bourdieu attempts to go beyond both subjectivist theories of action in
terms of the intentions or rational calculations of individual subjects
and objectivist theories, such as structuralism, which explain practices
in terms of rules grounded in collective symbolic structures.27 He ana-
lyzes practices in traditional societies - e.g. the exchange of gifts - in
terms of a dialectical interaction between the habitus, the behavioral
and cognitive dispositions of individual agents, and the objective struc-
ture of the social world in which actions unfold. The habitus consists
of a system of durably inculcated dispositions that structure both the
agents behavior and her or his perceptions and representations of situ-
ations of action and of the social world in general.28 It is inculcated
through the everyday behavioral injunctions and petty disciplines,
often indirectly communicated through gestures, by which parents and
teachers bring the childs behavior into line with certain prevailing
social expectations. These extend to such matters as physical deport-
ment and posture, how food should be handled and consumed, the
place and time in which it is appropriate to speak, in what intonation,
with what forms of expression, etc., and are generally differentiated

65
along gender lines. In the course of this training a whole vision of the
social world and of her or his position in it is communicated to the
child in the form of implicit cultural schemes of classification. Thus
the habitus reflects the relations of power that structure the social
world in which it is inculcated and the cultural understandings that
shape social practices and are objectified in material culture. The
whole social environment, from the actions and utterances of others
to the disposition of domestic space in the traditional house, conspires
to reinforce the individuals view of the world and of her or his place
in it, and to elicit behavior that is objectively attuned to the constraints
of the prevailing relations of power without recourse to overt coercion.
The habitus functions as a generative principle of actions only in
relation to the structured social space in which it was constituted (or
one sufficiently similar to it); it is not a property or set of properties
of an agent considered in isolation but a generative scheme of prac-
tices that functions only in relation to an appropriately structured
social space.
The structure of the social world of a traditional culture is
determined both by relations between agents who occupy different
positions in a hierarchical power structure and by a system of sym-
bolic oppositions which shape agents perceptions of the social and
natural worlds, such as dry/wet, right/left, even/odd, day/night, etc.29
Relations of power are determined in part by material resources,
specifically, the wealth and the means of violence individuals can
command; but to view power in traditional societies in purely material
terms would be to misrepresent their structure and mode of repro-
duction. In a traditional society economic and political power are
inseparable from the operations of symbolic power that disguise the
truth of social relations based on material dependence or on the
implicit threat of force and thereby facilitate the general acceptance of
such relations. Symbolic power is the form material power relations
assume when they are perceived through social categories that repre-
sent them as legitimate.3 The shared schemes of perception and evalu-
ation incorporated in the habitus mask the arbitrariness of social
divisions by inculcating belief in their legitimacy or naturalness:
Systems of classification which reproduce, in their own specific logic,

the objective classes, i.e. the divisions by sex, age, or position in the
relations of production, make their specific contribution to the repro-
duction of the power relations of which they are the product, by secur-
ing the misrecognition, and hence the recognition, of the arbitrariness
on which they are based; in the extreme case ... the natural and social
world appears as self-evident.31

66
The shared cultural belief system on which symbolic power rests

Bourdieu calls the doxa: as a structuring principle of the habitus, it
underlies an immediate, unreflective, bodily adherence to a common-
sense view of the world which ensures that practices and the social
divisions and relations of domination they reproduce are experienced
as self-evident and hence are taken for granted.32 The existence of a
common-sense view of the world shared by all agents regardless of
their social position is a function of the cultural homogeneity of tra-
ditional societies, which is reflected in the relative homogeneity of the
habitus of different social agents and hence in the probability that
their actions and experiences will be harmonized with one another.
But this shared common-sense view of the world masks real differ-
ences in the interests of agents who occupy different positions in a
hierarchy of power relations. Thus while dominant agents have a

vested interest in upholding the principles of vision and division of
the social world that legitimate their position of dominance, symbolic
power also depends on the complicity of the dominated in the form
of an immediate, unreflective, bodily adherence to these same prin-
ciples.
Though relations of symbolic power depend on the doxa and col-
lective misrecognition, they are as much an objective part of the
social world as are material power relations, since social reality is not
independent of agents representations of it. The doxic representation
of the social world is embodied in the schemes incorporated in the
habitus, and the dispositions of different social agents ensure that their
actions are harmonized in such a way as to reproduce relations of
domination automatically. But the mutual reinforcement of subjective
and objective structures is not a matter of mechanical determination.
Both the habitus and social structure are shaped by the history of past
struggles for material and symbolic power. Though the habitus func-
tions primarily as a practical sense - an immediate bodily awareness
of the potentialities and constraints of situations of action and an auto-
matic adaptation to them - agents can exploit existing relations of
symbolic power in a strategic manner by manipulating accepted rep-
resentations of the social world. Thus a scheme of classification which
reinforces male domination by associating things female with what is
sinister, secret, treacherous and magical makes it possible for women
to a secret domain of symbolic power of sorcery and magic
cultivate
in opposition to the official, public power of men. However, the
cultural homogeneity of traditional societies, and the ubiquitous regu-
lation of practices by the consensual schemes of the doxa and the
habitus, mean that the scope for resistance to operations of dom-
ination in such societies is relatively limited.

67
Bourdieus analysis of agency as structured by relations of power

and systems of cultural knowledge follows Foucault in breaking with
conceptions of the subject rooted in the philosophy of consciousness.
Actions generated by the habitus cannot be explained in terms of the
conscious representations and calculations of the subject considered
in isolation from the social world which shapes the subjects behav-
ioral and cognitive dispositions. The habitus ensures that an indi-
viduals actions are attuned to the objective constraints of the social
world in which it is constituted, and hence that they present the
appearance of calculation and finality; but this appearance is the result
of the operations of a practical sense whose operation does not depend
on conscious reflection and rational calculation. The habitus encodes
cultural background knowledge in the form of schematic oppositions
that cannot be reduced to explicit conscious representations or rules
of rational choice without distorting how practical sense shapes
actions.33 Because the habitus encodes implicit cultural knowledge,
the actions it generates have a social meaning that transcends the con-
scious intentions of the agent and is inseparable from the structure of
the social world and its history. On the other hand, the social context
from which actions derive their meaning does not exist independently
of the actions and perceptions of individual agents. The social world
in both its symbolic and material aspects is continually created and re-
created by agents through their perceptions and actions, though under
the constraints of history embodied in the habitus. The habitus is not
a mere mechanical imprint of social structure in the body of the indi-
vidual, in which case actions would be just one moment in the func-
tional circuit of self-reproducing social systems. While Bourdieu
stresses the homogeneity of the habitus of agents in traditional
societies, homogeneity at the level of shared cultural schemes of
interpretation is compatible with endless variations in individual dis-
positions resulting from differences in positions in the social hierarchy
of power relations. Ones habitus is enduringly shaped by such socially
marked factors as ones sex, ones position in the family, ones position
in the social field of class relations, and ones trajectory through social
space over time.
2
Both social structure and the habitus, and hence the forms of symbolic
power that rest on their interrelation, undergo fundamental trans-
formations with the transition from traditional to modern forms of
social life. Bourdieu subscribes to Max Webers general account of
modernization as a process of rationalization through which forms of

68
social action become differentiated into autonomous domains or

fields of discourse and practice.34 With the development of com-
modity and labor markets and the spread of money, economic
exchanges become increasingly dissociated from symbolic relations
between agents and wealth can function as economic capital in accord-
ance with the logic of the market. Money and the market function as
instruments of objectification of economic capital that enable social
agents to recognize and publicly acknowledge the economic truth -
that is, the relations of material power - underlying their exchanges. 35
Economic differentiation goes hand in hand with the emergence of
autonomous fields of cultural production - most importantly, the
scientific field, the fields of art and literature, the field of law, and the
political field - in which interactions also obey a broadly economic
logic of capital accumulation. Culture in non-literate societies is the
shared possession of the whole group: all agents bring the same
schemes of interpretation and classification to their interactions, and
the doxa, the common-sense view of the world, is collectively imposed.
But with the spread of writing and the resulting codification of cul-
tural knowledge and practices, specialist producers of symbolic goods
emerge who claim a monopoly of the competence to produce legiti-
mate culture and competition between rival producers opens up the
dominant view of the world to contestation and struggle.
When domains of practice are codified in systems of explicit rules,
the practical relation of agents to their practices undergoes a profound
transformation. Codification makes possible a reflexive relation to
practices that had previously been regulated by the practical sense of
the habitus. It normalizes practices by minimizing vagueness and
ambiguity in interactions; it objectifies them, so that the different tem-
poral phases of practices can be grasped simultaneously; by making
them public, codification also officializes practices and contributes to
their recognition as legitimate; and by formalizing practices, it renders
them calculable and predictable.36 The resulting rationalization of
practice gives rise to new forms of symbolic power. The cultural com-
petence required to codify practices is not equally distributed among
members of different social classes and its possession confers control
over the legitimate representations of practices and of the social
world in general. Thus cultural capital accumulated within the special-
ized fields translates into symbolic capital, the power to impose the
legitimate vision of the social world, and thereby to reinforce - or to
challenge - social divisions.37
Cultural differentiation goes hand in hand with the division of
modern society into specialist producers of cultural goods, such as
scientific theories, works of art, legal interpretations and political

69
discourses, and an encompassing social field of consumers who differ

in their levels of cultural capital and hence in their ability to under-
stand or consume cultural products. On the consumption side, cul-
tural capital is closely related to inherited economic capital, since
families seek to maintain and improve their social position by con-
verting wealth into cultural capital through education (e.g. by sending
their children to university) and cultural consumption (e.g. through
theater-going and museum visits), thereby instilling dispositions and
attitudes that later translate into economic opportunities. The logic of
capital accumulation and conversion ensures that capital goes to
capital with the result that the social field becomes polarized into a
dominant pole of those who are rich in economic and cultural capital
and a dominated pole of those who are relatively poor in both forms.
Consequently, modern societies can be represented as a space of social
positions in which agents are distributed according to their total
volume of capital, their relative amounts of economic and cultural
capital, and whether they are on an upward or downward social tra-
jectory. Agents can be grouped into social classes according to their
proximity in social space, the dominant class comprising groups rela-
tively rich in economic capital (professionals, executives) and those
relatively rich in cultural capital (intellectuals, academics and other
cultural producers), whereas the dominated class comprises those
poor in both, such as farmers and unskilled laborers, with the differ-
ent fractions of the middle class in between. But social space in this
sense is a theoretical construct and the classes that comprise it are
classes on paper, not real classes in the Marxist sense, that is, col-
lective agents who act on the basis of shared class interests; it is only
through political mobilization that agents who are sufficiently close in
social space can be galvanized into real political classes.38 This means
that, while the divisions of the social field reflect enduring relations of
domination, class domination is not a direct effect of the coercive
actions of the dominant class but an indirect effect of the structure of
the social field.39
In order to understand how domination is mediated by social
structure we must examine the relation between the internal structure
of the specialized fields of cultural production, the structure of the
social field, and the institutions of the modern state. The cultural
fields are structured by relations of power between agents endowed
in different degrees with the competence specific to the field (or cul-
tural capital), where the relations of power at a given time are the
outcome of past struggles for cultural capital and for monopoly over
the principles of classification and evaluation of works and compe-
tences. Cultural producers raise claims to legitimacy for their

70
products whose recognition reflects back on the producers in the form

of honor, prestige and authority. Thus control of the principles of
evaluation in terms of which claims to legitimacy are adjudicated rep-
resents the power to impose the recognized definition of the field (of
who belongs, of the competences required for entry, etc.) and to influ-
ence schemes of interpretation and evaluations of the social world
beyond the specialized field. Symbolic struggles presuppose a shared
interest or investment in the stakes of the struggle, a belief in their
importance that constitutes a shared doxa and is embodied in a field-
specific habitus. The field-specific habitus, an intuitive feel for the
game that ensures an immediate identification with the stakes and an
awareness of the prevailing power relations, is what separates the
specialist from the non-specialist; it is inculcated through training and

participation in struggles within the field but it is deeply influenced
by the agents prior social conditioning, the class habitus that agent
has internalized as a consequence of a position in the social field. Thus
there exist homologies between the structure of the social field and
the relations of power within the cultural fields through which they
mutually influence one another. For example, social scientists, such
as economists and sociologists, wield symbolic power over how lay
people and other professionals view the social world in virtue of the
symbolic capital of reputation and personal authority they have
acquired through symbolic struggles in the scientific field. At the same
time, the convertibility of economic into cultural capital through the
education system and cultural consumption ensures that most scien-
tists and other cultural producers belong to the dominant social class
and are disposed to advocate theories that reinforce the dominant
view of the world in virtue of their affinity with the interests of the
dominant class. Members of dominated classes, on the other hand,
are relatively weak in cultural capital since they are less likely to
achieve educational honors, and hence do not have equal access to
the cultural and symbolic means to challenge the dominant view of
the world. Thus the dominant class exercises domination indirectly
in virtue of the structural homologies between the social and cultural
fields without any need for direct acts of domination. The complicity
of scientists and other cultural producers in reproducing relations of
domination is not a matter of a conscious decision to promote the
interests of the dominant class; it rests on the homology between the
structures of the social and the cultural fields, based on an affinity
between class habitus and scientific habitus, juridical habitus, etc.,
that ensures that the aggregate effect of the disinterested pursuit of
scientific truth or artistic excellence by different agents is to reinforce
class divisions.

71
The dialectical interrelation between class struggles in the social

field and symbolic struggles in the specialized cultural fields which
underlies relations of symbolic domination is closely bound up with
the emergence of the modern state as the privileged locus of symbolic
power. In contrast to accounts of the constitution of the state that
emphasize the centralization of the means of physical violence or the
rationalization of fiscal administration, Bourdieu underlines the
importance of the unification of cultural fields through which the
modern state gained a monopoly of the power to produce and impose
the categories of thought that agents apply spontaneously to the social
world.4 The state - that is, those who act in the name of the state -
becomes both the guarantor of an official, national culture which
identifies itself with the general interest, and the supreme regulatory
instance of the practices through which the behavioral and evaluative
dispositions of the habitus are inculcated.41 Its primary agency is the
education system which contributes to the transformation of the dom-
inant culture into a legitimate, national culture by conferring academic
degrees and official titles on cultural producers and is the means by
which the norms of legitimate culture are inculcated in the habitus of
individual agents.42 Among the most important cultural developments
in the emergence of the modern state is the institution of a single
national language through the codification of grammar and norms of
correct usage, a process which depends on the complicity of special-
ized cultural producers, including linguists, who treat the unified lan-
guage as a pregiven object of analysis, and writers, who provide
grammarians with models of correct usage.43 The emergence of a
national language and culture sanctioned by the state reinforces the
deepest and most enduring relations of domination in modern
societies:
Cultural and linguistic unification is accompanied by the imposition
of the dominant language and culture as legitimate and by the rejec-
tion of all others as unworthy (patois). The accession of a particular
language or culture to universality has the effect of relegating others
to particularity; moreover, because the universalization of the exi-
gencies thereby instituted is not accompanied by universalization of
access to the means of satisfying them, it favors both the monopo-
lization of the universal by some and the dispossession of all others,
who are thereby mutilated, in a certain sense, in their humanity.44
The unification of culture and language leads not only to the devalu-
ation of minority cultures and dialects but also to the cultural and
political disenfranchisement of members of dominated social classes.
For children from different social backgrounds are not equally

72
predisposed by their family training to master the norms of official

culture inculcated by the education system; thus in rewarding aca-
demic achievement, the education system legitimizes the results of
prior social conditioning by representing them as the expression of
innate merit or intelligence, thereby contributing to the naturalization
of arbitrary class divisions.
Bourdieu views the state as a field of power in which agents who
occupy dominant positions in the restricted cultural fields struggle for
control over the power invested in the institutions of the state to
impose the official representations of the social world.45 Writers,
scientists, bureaucrats and jurists, as well as politicians, can exert sym-
bolic power over agents perceptions of the social world, but only by
identifying with the interests of the state, that is, the disinterested
interest in the universal or the general interest. The processes of cul-
tural and linguistic unification in which the state is constituted are also
processes of universalization by which particular competences and
views of the world are endowed with universal significance. Hence all
agents who want to partake in the power of the state must present at
least the appearance of disinterestedness and adopt the language of
neutrality and impartiality. However, the field of power, as Bourdieu
construes it, should not be confused with the political field, which is
one of the specialized fields of cultural production: politicians, the pro-
fessional producers of political discourses, compete with other cultural
producers for control over the power invested in the state. Hence the
power of the state cannot be analyzed exclusively in terms of the politi-
cal process, as this is understood by philosophical theories of political
legitimation. Indeed, the real problem of legitimacy for Bourdieu is
that the established order is for the most part accepted as unproblem-
atic and that, with the exception of crisis situations, the question of
the legitimacy of the state is never posed.46 The dominant class is so
successful in imposing its domination because it can count on the com-
plicity of the dominated which is extorted through the state-sanc-
tioned inculcation of the norms of the dominant culture.
3
Bourdieus theory of symbolic power provides a more fruitful basis for
a critical analysis of modern power than Foucaults conception of
disciplinary power. It shows how impersonal operations of power are
mediated both by the cognitive and behavioral dispositions of indi-
vidual agents and by global features of social structure, in particular
by relations of domination between social classes and the institutions
of the modern state. It thereby allows for both the subjective and the

73
social aspects of power without falling into the forms of subjectivism

and economism rightly criticized by Foucault. It also makes possible
a more empirically nuanced description of the diverse forms power
assumes in modern societies and opens the way to a more plaus-ible
account of resistance.
Bourdieus theory of the habitus recognizes the importance of the
bodily aspects of agency but avoids the problems besetting Foucaults
treatment of the body by integrating it into the circuit of symbolic
power through which relations of domination are mediated. Whereas
Foucault treats the subject as an effect of disciplinary technologies
acting on a mute and malleable body, Bourdieu holds that structures
of subjectivity are the result of the incorporation of practical and cog-
nitive dispositions via the internalization of cultural schemes of
interpretation and evaluation. Both thinkers accord a key role to
bodily disciplines in the constitution of the subject, but the forms that
discipline assumes in their respective accounts are importantly differ-
ent. Foucault applies the model of disciplinary techniques, which
developed in closed institutions such as the penitentiary and the
asylum, to modern society as a whole. The inculcation of the habitus,
by contrast, is the result not of novel techniques of surveillance and
normalization, but of everyday injunctions concerning posture,
manners, correct pronunciation, etc., by which parents instil into
their children behavioral dispositions and schemes of perception and
evaluation, which are subsequently reinforced by the education
system.47 Modern forms of power are not the result of the emergence
of new technologies for disciplining bodies - though these undoubt-
edly play an important role in closed institutions, as Foucault amply
demonstrated - but of the normalization, objectification and formal-
ization of practices through codification, which lead to new forms of
symbolic power connected with the institutions of the modern state.
Bodily hexis, the culturally constructed way of holding ones body
and the gestural and verbal style one uses, is an important dimension
of the habitus; but the habitus is also a cognitive structure, the product
of the internalization of cultural schemes of interpretation and evalu-
ation. Thus the concept of the habitus allows for the inner, symbolic
dimensions of personal identity. At the same time, while Bourdieus
agent is not a passive effect of disciplinary power, neither is she or he
the sovereign subject of the philosophy of consciousness. The schemes
of the habitus reflect the norms of the dominant culture legitimated by
the state, which ensure that the dominant classes enjoy a monopoly
over the symbolic power to shape agents self-understandings.
But it remains open to question whether Bourdieu breaks suf-
ficiently with the Foucauldian view of the subject as an effect of the

74
operations of disciplinary power on the body. Foucaults treatment of

the subject is problematic because it does not allow for the inner,
reflective dimension of personal identity and thus seems to reduce the
subject to a collection of acquired behavioral reflexes. Bourdieus
account of the inculcation of the habitus through the internalization
of symbolic schemes of classification and evaluation goes some way
toward overcoming this limitation; but it stops short of a genuine
theory of individual identity. For the only principle of individuation it
admits is the differentiation in the social positions of agents: differ-
ences in the habitus are a reflection of differences in the social con-
ditionings of agents that result from the positions they occupy in social
space (their family background, social trajectory, etc.). But a theory of
the differentiation of the dispositions of agents according to social con-
ditions does not amount to a theory of individualization and hence of
individual identity.48 Without some account of how the agent can
come to reflect on and criticize the schemes of interpretation and
evaluation she or he has internalized, the agents identity remains a
mere effect of social conditioning. Bourdieu allows that the individual
can achieve some control in shaping her or his habitus in virtue of the
awakenings of consciousness and socioanalysis,49 that is, through the

objectification of relations of domination in the social sciences that
cuts through the mystifications of the doxa; but he does not explain
how the results of such awakening could be integrated into an auton-
omous personal identity. In order to do this he would have to extend
his conceptions of agency and rationality to include an account of how
repressive schemes of interpretation of self and world can be opened
up to discursive criticism in light of impartial norms of social justice.
Only through critical practical discourses can agents liberate them-
selves from the facticity of social conditionings and constitute them-
selves as autonomous agents. But this would presuppose a richer
understanding of the political process than Bourdieus position allows,
as I will show.
Bourdieu agrees with Foucault in viewing power as a dynamic,
relational phenomenon that operates through ceaseless strategic con-
frontations and struggles. But Foucaults skepticism concerning expla-
nations of power in terms of social classes and the institutions of the
state leaves him at a loss to explain how local strategic struggles
become stabilized into enduring relations of domination. Bourdieus
model, by contrast, shows how local interactions are orchestrated by
symbolic mechanisms via the inculcation of the habitus in such a way
that agents are led to reproduce relations of domination even against
their own interests. But he goes beyond traditional Marxist analyses
of class domination by linking the accumulation of economic wealth

75
to cultural mechanisms that enable those who occupy a dominant

social position to impose the vision of the world favorable to their
interests as universal, and hence as legitimate. Thus he avoids the
economism which reduces all social relations to productive forces and
voluntarist accounts of class struggles as involving direct conflicts
between social groups mobilized around class interests. The dominant
classes have no need to exercise power directly through actions moti-
vated by class interests because they can count on the complicity of
dominated agents in their own domination. Hence, resistance to class
domination cannot simply take the form of the political mobilization
of the dominated class through the heightening of class consciousness.
As Foucault recognized, traditional Marxist theory of ideology and
revolution remains trapped in the philosophy of consciousness: it
assumes that domination is mediated by the ideological misrepresen-
tation of the true interests of the proletariat, so that revolutionary
action can be precipitated by transforming the proletariats represen-
tations of its true interests. But Bourdieus theory of the habitus sug-
gests that relations of domination are more deeply entrenched and
resistant to change than the critique of ideology would suggest because
they are based on bodily schemes that agents, and especially those who
are culturally disenfranchised, can reflexively grasp and control only
within limits. Taken together with his analysis of the modern state and
of the cultural mechanisms underlying the mutual convertibility of
economic and symbolic capital, this goes a long way toward explain-
ing why the hierarchical relations of privilege characteristic of capital-
ism have proved to be so resilient and why oppositional political
energies have been consistently dissipated.
But what scope, if any, does Bourdieus analysis leave for resist-
ance to the operations of symbolic power? The problem of resistance
is addressed in Bourdieus work at the level of the political field and
at the level of the scientific representation of the social world. As
regards the political field, he is skeptical about the possibility of over-
coming relations of domination through the institutions of represen-
tative democracy. This is in part because political discourses of
legitimation are open to manipulation by those who monopolize the
symbolic power to represent particular interests as universal; but even
more important is the fact that the internal logic of political struggles
between politicians and parties within the political field tends to repro-
duce rather than to undermine relations of domination in the social
field. Dominated groups can gain political representation only by del-
egating authority to professional politicians who exercise a monopoly
over the forms of political discourse that are socially recognized as
legitimate, and whose political stances are determined more by the

76
logic of struggles internal to the political field than by the interests of

those they claim to represent. Though ostensibly the representative is
delegated by the group, in fact the representative creates the group by
providing it with the symbolic means of understanding itself as a
group, especially when its members are relatively deprived of the cul-
tural means of publicly representing their own interests. This means
that the more culturally dispossessed those it claims to represent are,
the more likely a political party is to be organized as an authoritarian
apparatus of mobilization that demands unquestioning allegiance to
the official party representation of the groups identity and interests.
Thus struggles within the political field, with the exception of crisis
situations in which the authority of established parties and represen-
tatives is challenged, tend to reproduce relations of domination by
intensifying the disenfranchisement of dominated groups.so
As it transpires, the primary locus of resistance to power on
Bourdieus analysis is not the political field but the scientific field, since
scientific representations of social practices can dispel the mystifi-
cations underlying symbolic domination by revealing the arbitrariness
of the social divisions it serves to legitimate. Bourdieu agrees with Fou-
cault that the social sciences are deeply implicated in modern forms of
power; but he goes beyond Foucault in showing how scientists exert
symbolic power in virtue of the homology between the scientific field
and the social field; and while Foucaults claim that knowledge necess-
arily generates effects of power threatens to collapse the distinction
between knowledge and power altogether, Bourdieu accords scientific
discourse a qualified autonomy that enables it to play a role in facili-
tating resistance to power. Like other cultural producers, scientists
exercise symbolic power by shaping the categories through which
agents perceive the social world; indeed, the potential symbolic effects
of scientific theories are all the greater because science claims to speak
in the name of the universal (i.e. of reason) and to be neutral and
impartial with respect to social struggles. But the subversive potential
of science vis-a-vis existing relations of domination depends on the
degree of autonomy enjoyed by the scientific field at a particular time.
To the extent that the scientific field is subordinated to the logic of con-
version of economic into cultural capital, struggles within the scien-
tific field are likely to contribute to the reproduction of relations of
domination by reaffirming the dominant view of the world. The
greater the autonomy enjoyed by the scientific field, the more struggles
within the field conform to the intrinsic scientific logic of a compe-
tition for truth in which participants must fight with reasons and
arguments.51 But in contrast to the critique of ideology, Bourdieu does
not view the critical potential of science as a straightforward matter

77
of advocating the truth in opposition to ideological distortions of

social reality. Rather, he analyzes it in terms of a progress of reason
which results from the fact that the internal logic of symbolic struggles
within the scientific field compels scientists to advocate the interests
of the universal. In this way, he attempts to break with metaphysical
conceptions of reason as a transcendental faculty of the human mind
in favor of a conception of reason as the product of historical struggles
subject to the internal dynamics of the scientific field.52
However, it is not clear that Bourdieus account of symbolic
struggles in the scientific field supports his assumptions concerning the
historical progress of reason and the emancipatory potential of scien-
tific representations of the social world. Science is capable of trans-
forming agents perceptions of social reality because it raises
criticizable claims to truth; scientific representations enable agents to
recognize the arbitrariness of relations of domination by shattering the
misrepresentations of symbolic power. However, the primary stake in
the struggles in the scientific field, on Bourdieus account, is not the
production of true statements or valid theories but the socially recog-
nized authority to speak and act legitimately.53 But if the competition
for symbolic power within the scientific field does not lead to the
victory of positions that are justified in a sense that can be specified
independently the mere fact that they are socially recognized, there
of
is no reason to believe that it necessarily contributes to the progress of
reason as opposed to a mere succession of equally arbitrary represen-
tations of the social world. The progress of reason cannot be under-
stood solely in terms of symbolic struggles among scientists
independent of some account of how the internal logic of scientific
research and argumentation leads to the victory of positions that are
justified or true. The disenchanting sociological gaze that views the
history of science in terms of struggles for dominance between advo-
cates of competing positions cannot dispense with an internal analysis
of the logic of scientific discourse. That being said, it should also be
emphasized that Bourdieus analysis of the structural homologies
between the scientific and the social fields has the merit of showing
how social science can contribute to the reproduction of relations of
domination in spite of, and even in virtue of, its rhetoric of objectiv-
ity and disinterestedness.
III Symbolic power and discursively mediated power

While Bourdieus theory of symbolic power points to the possibility of
resistance to symbolic domination, it does not ultimately provide the

78
conceptual resources in terms of which resistance can be understood

as emancipation and hence can take on a positive political significance.
Bourdieus theory of action limits the scope of practical reason to the
strategic calculations of agents to maximize their share of the material
or symbolic profits at stake in different fields of action. While Bour-
dieu breaks with the narrow individualism of rational choice and utili-
tarian conceptions of practical rationality in showing how the
dispositions and preferences of agents are shaped by social forces, this
represents an advance at the level of social explanation rather than at
the level of the theory of action and political theory. While it leads to
penetrating empirical analyses of mechanisms of symbolic power that
function behind the backs of social agents, it narrows the scope of
possible resistance to relations of domination and thereby weakens the
critical force of the theory of symbolic power. For the only options it
leaves open to dominated agents are to accumulate sufficient economic
and cultural capital to attain a position of dominance (the strategy of
the upwardly mobile classes) or to challenge the principles of per-
ception and evaluation that legitimate existing relations of dom-
ination. By challenging the dominant principles, symbolic struggles
may succeed in overthrowing arbitrary social divisions; but without
an account of what would constitute a non-arbitrary social order -
that is, one which could claim legitimacy and form the basis for con-
sensual political action guided by shared interests - resistance can only
lead to the substitution of one form of domination by another.
Without a more differentiated conception of practical reason that
allows for the possibility of consensual political action, Bourdieu
cannot account for the phenomenon on which symbolic power
depends, the fact that in all societies interests which are regarded as
universal command social recognition. In traditional societies, the uni-
versal is the shared possession of the group: it is embodied in the
schemes of perception, classification and evaluation in terms of which
the members recognize themselves as a group; and individuals acquire
the symbolic capital of honor and personal authority by giving at least
the appearance that their actions conform to the publicly recognized
norms and customs of the group. In modern societies, by contrast, the
universal becomes the monopoly of the state and of those who can
appropriate the power invested in the institutions of the state and its
symbols, specifically, the symbols of national identity in terms of
which citizens understand who they are. Bourdieu assumes that all uni-
versal values are merely particular values that have been universalized
through the mechanisms of symbolic power.54 But values which
present themselves as universal are capable of mobilizing groups only
because their members do not view them as embodying merely

79
particular interests that have been arbitrarily universalized; and

whereas perceptions of legitimacy can be manipulated, the claim to
universality, and hence legitimacy, of values can also be based on
reasons. In order to allow for this possibility, Bourdieu would have to
extend his conception of practical reason to encompass non-strategic
interaction based on a discursively achieved agreement concerning
shared interests and values. In this way alone is it possible to conceive
of the mobilization of resistance to relations of domination which is
based not simply on the universalization of the interests of a particu-
lar social group but on interests that can claim more general validity.55
The constitution of a just social order presupposes in turn that agents
can adopt a reflexive, critical attitude toward their socially constructed
identity by breaking the hold of repressive schemes of interpretation

and evaluation internalized in the habitus. Thus a genuine emancipa-
tory politics calls for the cultivation of non-repressive structures of
self-identity in dialectical interaction with discursively mediated struc-
tures of intersubjectivity.
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Notes
I would like to thank Thomas McCarthy for his comments on an earlier

draft of this paper.
1 The following remarks will focus primarily on Discipline and Punish

(New York: Vintage, 1979) and The History ,of Sexuality Vol. I (New
York: Vintage, 1990) and on related essays and interviews from the
1970s. My reading is motivated by a limited concern - to what extent
do Foucaults genealogical writings provide a framework for analyz-
ing and criticizing relations of domination in modern society? - and
does not claim to do justice to his work as a whole. Nevertheless I
believe this narrowness of focus is justified by the fact that his
genealogical writings mark a clear departure from his earlier work
and are in important respects inconsistent with the ideas he was
developing before his death, a fact overlooked by those who argue for
a greater unity and consistency in his thought as a whole than Fou-
cault himself was wont to claim for it.
2 Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),

80
pp. 139-64. Drawing on Nietzsche, Foucault advocates a form of his-

torical writing which would overturn metaphysical conceptions of
meaning and truth by showing that historical origins are irreducibly
contingent and multiple, that the self is the result of traces inscribed
in the body by contingent events, and that history is an endless series
of struggles for domination devoid of any teleological meaning. On
Foucaults concept of genealogy see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 104ff.
3 cf. Charles Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, in David
Couzens Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell,
1986), p. 84.
4 Discipline and Punish
, p. 29; cf. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New
York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 98: The individual is an effect of power,
and at the same time ... it is the element of its articulation. The indi-
vidual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.
5 Discipline and Punish, p. 27; cf. Power/Knowledge, p. 52.
6 Discipline and Punish, p. 28: it is not the activity of the subject of
knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant
to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that tra-
verse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and
possible domains of knowledge.

7 Thus Foucault not only rejects the Marxist theory of class domination
that locates power in a particular social class; he must also reject a
Marxist revolutionary politics informed by an ideal of emancipated
social relations in which the free exercise of human capacities would
be possible.
8 Discipline and Punish, pp. 26-7. While Foucault is critical of the
economistic assumptions of Marxist class theory, he does acknow-
ledge a historical link between bodily disciplines and the growth of
capitalist modes of production and accumulation; see ibid., pp.
218-21 and History of Sexuality, Vol. I, pp. 140-4.
9 On the affinities between Foucaults model of the disciplinary society
and systems theory see Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 183-4, 193-4.
10 History of Sexuality, Vol. I, pp. 92-3; cf. Discipline and Punish, pp.
168-9.
11 History of Sexuality, Vol. I, p. 94. Foucault goes on to say that power
relations are imbued with calculation and that no power is exercised
without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that
it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject. Yet it
is difficult to conceive of calculations, aims, or objectives that are not
tied to the choices and decisions of agents or groups. Indeed the

81
following passage suggests that Foucaults main concern is to deny

that strategies of power originate from above, in a ruling caste or
those who control the state apparatus. But then he owes us some
account of who are the subjects of the local tactics of power - the
cynics of what he calls the local cynicism of power - and how these
tactics become stabilized into comprehensive systems.
12 Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, pp. 86-7. This is confirmed
by Foucaults own later analysis of the concept of strategy in a text in
which he clearly distances himself from some of the assumptions of
his genealogical works: The Subject and Power, in Dreyfus and
Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 224-5. It is
significant that in explicating the idea of strategies without strate-
gists in their study (cf. pp. 108-9), Dreyfus and Rabinow introduce
a notion of social practices that plays no role in Foucaults own dis-
cussions.
13 This is not to deny the significance of such practices as police har-
rassment of racial minorities and rape and wife-beating as exercises
of domination; but even they can be assimilated only with difficulty
to Foucaults model of disciplinary technologies.
14 Foucaults later assertions that, in order for a power relationship to
exist, the other over whom power is exercised must be recognized
as a person who acts (The Subject and Power, p. 220) and that
[p]ower is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they
are free (ibid., p. 221) read like a belated recognition of these con-
ceptual constraints on the notion of power. No comparable assertions

are to be found in the genealogical writings.
15 cf. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp.
287-8. Habermas argues that Foucaults account of the constitution
of the self through bodily conditioning does not allow for the indi-
vidualizing effects of socialization - the fact that individuation is
inseparable from self-determination and self-realization - because its
objectifying perspective effaces the symbolically and linguistically
structured nature of the medium in which socialization takes place.
On the problematic implications of Foucaults rejection of hermeneu-
tic approaches to social analysis see Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and
Illusions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 50-3.
16 Power/Knowledge, pp. 56-7; cf. Kevin Olson, Habitus and Body
Language: Towards a Critical Theory of Symbolic Power, Philo-
sophy and Social Criticism 21(2) (1995): 23-34, who argues that the
central role Foucault accords the body cannot be reconciled with his
general conception of power.
17 Power/Knowledge, pp. 95-6.

82
18 cf. Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, pp. 90-3.

19 Power/Knowledge, p. 108. William Connolly argues that Foucault
aspires to a conception of rights attached not merely to the self as
subject, but especially to that which is defined by the normalized
subject as otherness, in Taylor, Foucault, and Otherness, Political
Theory 13(3) (1995): 371. But what a right grounded in otherness
would consist in, whose right it would be, or what kinds of claims it
would ground, remain unclear.
20 Thus Connolly, for example, argues that Foucaults rhetorical
devices are designed to incite the experience of discord or discrep-
ancy between the social construction of self, truth, and rationality
and that which does not fit neatly within their folds (Taylor, Fou-
cault, and Otherness, p. 368). The trouble with such readings, it
seems to me, is that the category of otherness by definition resists
theoretical specification - it is, after all, what is excluded or sup-
pressed by discourse - so that it all too easily serves as a generalized
source of suspicion of any analytical framework or political
program, but has no determinate empirical content or political impli-

cations of its own.
21 Power/Knowledge, pp. 81-4.
22 ibid., p. 118.
23 cf. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 281.
24 Discipline and Punish, pp. 211-12; Power/Knowledge, p. 72.
25 The generalization of the disciplinary paradigm from closed insti-
tutions to society as a whole also marks a controversial methodo-
logical shift in Discipline and Punish from a descriptive history of
institutions and a speculative theory of modernity; cf. Michael
Donnelly, On Foucaults Uses of the Notion "Biopower", in
François Ewald (ed.) Michel Foucault Philosopher (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992), pp. 201-2.
26 cf. Honneth, Critique of Power, pp. 191-2.
27 See, among numerous accounts of this opposition in his writings,
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), pp. 1-6, 21-30, 72-8; The Logic of Practice
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 25-51; In Other
Words (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 124-5.
The main targets of his critique of subjectivism are thinkers in the
phenomenological tradition, principally Sartre, Schütz and Gar-
finkel, while his critique of objectivism is aimed primarily at Lévi-
Strauss.
28 Outline, p. 72; Logic of Practice, pp. 53-4.
29 For a diagram of the symbolic scheme of oppositions which structure
the Kabyle vision of the world (whose underlying principle is the

83
division of labor between the sexes), see Outline, p. 157, and Logic
of Practice, p. 215.
30 Logic of Practice, pp. 112 ff.
31 Outline, p. 164.
32 ibid., p. 80.
33 For an illuminating interpretation of the habitus as embodied social
understanding see Charles Taylor, To Follow a Rule ..., in Craig
Calhoun et al. (eds) Bourdieu
: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, IL:
Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 54-9. However, the assimilation
of the habitus to the background knowledge of the lifeworld tends to
obscure the fact that, in addition to cultural knowledge, it also
encodes relations of power.
34 cf. Scott Lash, Modernization and Postmodernization in the Work of
Pierre Bourdieu, in Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (London:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 237-65.
35 In precapitalist societies the material truth of economic exchanges is
systematically disguised by symbolic relations between agents: wealth
can be put to work only by cultivating personal relations of depen-
dence and obligation, and upper limits are set to accumulation by the
fact that maintaining personal prestige demands heavy material
expenditures on ones clients; cf. Outline, pp. 191-4; Logic of Prac-
tice, pp. 123-9.
36 In Other Words, pp. 80-4.
37 The transformation of cultural capital into the symbolic power to
social facts and impose social divisions is particularly evident in
create
the field of law; cf. Bourdieu, The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology
of the Juridical Field, Hastings Law Journal 38 (July 1987): 814-53.
38 In Other Words, pp. 117-18; Bourdieu, What Makes a Social Class?
On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups, Berkeley
Journal of Sociology 32 (1987): 1-17; Language and Symbolic Power
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 229-51.
Bourdieu criticizes Marxist class theory for failing to take account of
its own theory effect, the fact that in declaring the existence of classes
and of class interests it contributes to their realization.
39 Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques: Sur la théorie de laction (Paris: Seuil,
1994), p. 57; La Noblesse dEtat: Grandes écoles et esprit de corps
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989), pp. 554-5.
40 Raisons pratiques, p. 101. Bourdieu argues that the concentration of
symbolic capital in the state is the precondition of the consolidation
of the other forms of capital into autonomous fields (ibid., p. 116).
Elsewhere he describes the state as the central bank of symbolic
credit (
La Noblesse dEtat, p. 538).
41 Raisons pratiques, pp. 125-6.

84
42 See La Noblesse dEtat for a comprehensive analysis of the key role
played by the education system in the reproduction of relations of

domination in modern society, with particular reference to the French
elite grandes écoles.
43 Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 44-9. Bourdieu has in mind
specifically the political process by which the French language became
the official national language of the French state, which entailed the
devaluation of regional dialects and the cultural and political disen-
franchisement of speakers of those dialects. However, the controver-
sies unleashed by proposals to make English the official language of
the USA and the forces ranged on either side of the dispute attest to
the generalizability of Bourdieus model to other societies.
44 Raisons pratiques, p. 116 (my translation).
45 ibid., pp. 56, 109; cf. La Noblesse dEtat, pp. 375 ff.
46 Raisons pratiques, p. 128.
47 Thus I would question the claim that surveillance and normalizing
judgment, as techniques of objectification, play a major role in the
inculcation of the habitus (cf. Olson, Habitus and Body Power,
pp. 38-9). The effectiveness of symbolic power depends on the fact
that it goes without saying, that it does not need to resort to the
objectification of individuals through specific techniques of surveil-
lance and judgment.
48 On the distinction between differentiation and individualization
see Jürgen Habermas, Individuation through Socialization, in Post-
metaphysical Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp.

150-1; cf. above, n. 15.
49 In Other Words, p. 116.
50 See Language and Symbolic Power, pp. 171-202, where Bourdieu
argues that the authoritarian tendencies of working-class parties are
a reflection of the fact that both party officials and their clients are
relatively deprived of the cultural means of representing their inter-

ests and hence are dependent on the party apparatus for the rep-
resentation and confirmation of their social identity.
51 Bourdieu, The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Con-
ditions of the Progress of Reason, Social Science Information 14(6)
(1975): 19-47.
52 Raisons pratiques, pp. 132-3, 165-6, 234-5.
53 cf. Lash, Modernization and Postmodernization, p. 244.
54 Raisons pratiques, p. 166.
55 Whereas Foucault effaces the connection between power and legiti-
mation by analyzing power in naturalistic terms, Bourdieu recognizes
that all genuine power, in contrast to naked force, depends on the
practical recognition of those over whom it is exercised (La Noblesse

85
dEtat, p. 549). But he falls short of a normative conception of power

that could form the basis of a critical social theory by assimilating
legitimation to denegation, the various symbolic strategies designed
to dissimulate the arbitrariness of power.

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Bourdieu and Foucault on power and modernity

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Bourdieu and Foucault on

Abstract Foucaults theory of disciplinary power and Bourdieus

emancipatory political praxis. The theory of symbolic power must be

The currentcrises of legitimation besetting advanced capitalist so-

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analysis and escape political control. Part of our predicament is that

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modernization. It must be supplemented by a normative account of

I Foucaults genealogy of power and the disciplinary society

over, subjects to a relational view of power as a function of a network

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encompasses the whole of society.3 Disciplinary power produces its

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resistance can no longer be understood on the normative model of

power-knowledge which is beyond the control of knowing and acting

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there is some ultimate truth about human beings which is gradually

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considered in abstraction from an embodied subject, is neither a plaus-

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between power and discourses of legitimation, and hence between

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ground a counter-power and would become as totalitarian as the

global constellations of power evoked by the image of the disciplinary

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relates the analysis of local interactions in a convincing way to global

11 Symbolic power, class domination, and the modern state

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Systems of classification which reproduce, in their own specific logic,

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The shared cultural belief system on which symbolic power rests

hierarchy of power relations. Thus while dominant agents have a

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Bourdieus analysis of agency as structured by relations of power

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social action become differentiated into autonomous domains or

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discourses, and an encompassing social field of consumers who differ

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products whose recognition reflects back on the producers in the form

specialist from the non-specialist; it is inculcated through training and

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The dialectical interrelation between class struggles in the social

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predisposed by their family training to master the norms of official

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social aspects of power without falling into the forms of subjectivism

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operations of disciplinary power on the body. Foucaults treatment of

awakenings of consciousness and socioanalysis,49 that is, through the

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to cultural mechanisms that enable those who occupy a dominant

legitimate, and whose political stances are determined more by the

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logic of struggles internal to the political field than by the interests of

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of advocating the truth in opposition to ideological distortions of