The media, the intelligentsia and Pierre Bourdieu, by Jacques Bouveresse (Le Monde diplomatique

Each new day gives us fresh opportunity to measure the enormous void left behind by Pierre Bourdieu’s death. We can also see the extent to which the figure of the critical intellectual – Bourdieu was probably its last great representative in France – has become obsolete. It is being replaced by something that I think Jean-Claude Milner described quite well in his pamphlet Existe-t-il une vie intellectuelle en France? (Does France Have an Intellectual Life?): ‘The [notables’] first call to serve was followed by a second one: “Stop offending us with too much evidence of excessive knowledge and unpleasant insight.” It is not enough to serve; one must also be humble. Some rhetoricians, from the College de France to the Journal, appointed themselves as the theorists of this humility. Hence today’s intellectual: cowardly before the strong, hard on the weak, aimlessly ambitious, ignorant though pedantic, imprecise despite a punctilious style’ (1).

Milner probably tends to idealise the preceding period, but what he says seems essentially correct. It describes the rise to power of a type of intellectual whose morals and behaviour Bourdieu knew particularly well, and whose advent he had predicted. I recently suggested that we call this type a ‘deferential intellectual’: one who carefully guards himself against giving the impression of knowing more or having more awareness than others, and takes every opportunity to show respect for all forms of power (economic, political and media), as well as for moral and religious authorities, popular beliefs and even, where appropriate, received ideas.

I recently suggested that we call this type a ‘deferential intellectual’: one who carefully guards himself against giving the impression of knowing more or having more awareness than others, and takes every opportunity to show respect for all forms of power

In recent years, I often had the opportunity to talk with Bourdieu about this shift. To the end, he was among those who opposed the idea of practicing humility in the mendacious form now recommended — in other words, of making the concessions and accepting the required accommodations in matters of competence and knowledge, in the hope of satisfying as many people as possible. He never believed that the task of intellectuals – even and especially sociologists – could be, as is increasingly demanded today, to confine themselves to simply reflecting the social world in every way (including the most unacceptable), trying not to make any judgments or assessments likely to shock or upset other players.

For Bourdieu, a sociologist’s job never consisted in ‘sniffing out the social realm’ (to borrow an expression used by the astrologer Elizabeth Teissier’s thesis supervisor (2)) including, possibly, what can be most nauseating to someone who has retained certain moral and intellectual standards. The job was, instead, to acquire real knowledge of the mechanisms that govern the social realm using methods that have nothing natural and immediate about them — a knowledge which is not just desirable but crucial in order to have any hope of transforming that social realm.

Both a scholar and an ‘activist’

Grasping this dimension of the problem is essential to understanding some of the most virulent attacks that Bourdieu had to face over the last years of his life. He found himself in the position of seeming to defend a scientistic and elitist position against what was sometimes called democracy and equality of knowledge and belief. This is the model of the deferential intellectual that Philippe Sollers adopted when, in an article entitled ‘For media pluralism’, published on 18 September 1998 in Le Monde, he described our era as ‘a time of pluralities, uncertainties, constantly new faces, surprises, intersections, confrontations, irreducible singularities’. Sollers recommended that intellectuals accept all forms of contradiction and debate and treat them as equal, whatever their origin and the degree of competence and seriousness of those who express a point of view different from theirs.

Philosopher and public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut was even clearer when he suggested that, contrary to appearances, it was not the abusive power of the media that Bourdieu was attacking, but what Finkielkraut calls ‘democratic uncontrollability’. What Bourdieu was objecting to ‘is not the rule of sameness, but rather that other voices are heard on an equal footing with his own; it is not the shrinking of the public space, it is its very existence’ (3).

This is a point that deserves special emphasis. The media have become, in the eyes of a section of the intellectual world itself and certainly the most media-oriented intellectuals, the incarnation of democratic pluralism (by which we mean complete relativism and subjectivity of conviction and belief: ‘it’s my opinion, it’s my choice, etc’). Therefore an intellectual who starts critiquing the media, especially if he does so from a viewpoint that presents itself as objective and, worse still, scientific knowledge, risks being accused of refusing to play the game of real democracy.

The publication of Bourdieu’s La Misère du Monde (The Weight of the World, a study of the lives people of different classes) in 1993 is generally considered to have marked an important turning point in his intellectual trajectory, since that was when he fully committed himself to political and action through the media. This presentation of things is, of course, artificial, since Bourdieu’s writings – from the first, linked to the experience of colonisation in Algeria, to the most recent – always had the same deeply activist character. But even more curious is the notion, now quite widespread, that Bourdieu somehow ceased to be a scientist when he became an activist (in other words, partisan). In an article in Le Monde on 19 January 2001 entitled ‘The intellectuals in the fray?’, the journalist Thomas Ferenczi wrote that, in recent years, Bourdieu ‘has given up, in many of his interventions, the posture of the scientist to adopt that of the activist’.

Whatever may have been said or written on this, Bourdieu never thought that an activist’s standpoint could replace that of a scientist on matters of science

This is a questionable assertion that Bourdieu would surely not have accepted since he did not believe that a more active presence in the public arena and the treatment of issues likely to attract greater public attention – for example, that of the media in general and of television in particular – must come at the cost of a scholarly viewpoint. Whatever may have been said or written on this, Bourdieu never thought that an activist’s standpoint could replace that of a scientist on matters of science.

As sociologist Alain Accardo said, ‘it is … by submitting as scrupulously as possible to the duty of objectivity dictated by scientific morality that the scientist, by fighting to symbolically impose the truth of the social world, affords himself the best chances of fulfilling his moral duty of solidarity with the oppressed, to whom he brings weapons of symbolic subversion of the established order’ (4). Bourdieu never thought that one had to choose between the search for objective knowledge and the imperatives of political and social action. And, even on questions that in principle concern everyone, he remained convinced that there was a gulf between the professional sociologist’s methodical, precise and scholarly approach and the rhetoric and verbiage with which popular intellectuals beloved of the media, who willingly give them the floor, often try to replace that approach. In other words, he was always convinced that, when it came to activism, there were things we needed to know and understand first, and not just positions to take and protests to make heard.

In La Misère du Monde, a bestseller that helped introduce sociology to a good number of people who probably knew nothing about it and had no particular reason to be interested, Bourdieu made a public and solemn vow to act for those excluded from our society. It begins with a chapter dedicated to those who most embody social suffering, humiliation and indignity today. It was, of course, for the most part about the suffering of the modern proletariat, if we admit that a group, class or social reality deserving to be to be called by that name still exists today – Bourdieu himself had no doubts on this point. But social misery is not simply material poverty and can, of course, serve as an example, in many ways, within the intellectual world itself.

Misery, in all its forms, always revolted Bourdieu. For my part, I share the viewpoint historian Gérard Noiriel expressed in a recent book on the radical nature of Bourdieu’s activism and on the resulting violence of his style: ‘Bourdieu’s sociology, like Foucault’s philosophy … provided me with arguments to continue to think with Marx, but against Marx. Two elements allowed me to make this transition. First, the violence of Bourdieu’s style was just as strong as that of the Marxists, which appealed to me a lot at the time, because I was convinced that radical discourse necessarily reflected radical commitment. Second, Bourdieu’s sociology illustrated in its own way the Leninist slogan that I had adopted in the early 1970s: “To tell the truth is revolutionary”. In other words, to be useful to the poorest, it was enough to discover and tell the truth. But the framework that Bourdieu proposed seemed to me much better than what had been previously available because it put empirical research in the foreground instead of engaging in abstract discourse on class struggle and the science of history. Moreover, while Marxism focused on economic power, Bourdieu provided instruments that made it possible to better understand cultural and symbolic domination, the importance of which I became aware at the time of the Longwy industrial dispute. I now had a whole arsenal of arguments at my disposal to support my criticism of the “spokesmen” that the metalworkers publicly expressed’ (5).

I believe Noiriel’s observation could be endorsed by a good number of intellectuals of my generation, who had the same kind of response to Bourdieu’s thought and work. I often heard Bourdieu, especially when he criticised the philosopher Louis Althusser’s students’ thinking and behaviour, declare in a half-joking, half-serious tone that he was the only truly Marxist French intellectual of the time. By this he meant that he was the only one doing the work of analysis and empirical research on social reality that a modern Marxist should consider his duty.

To what extent did he really believe that, to be useful to the less fortunate, it was enough to discover and reveal the truth about the social world? He surely considered this a prerequisite, which is understandable insofar as, if intellectuals can be useful as such to the poorest, it can probably only be because of what they represent and what they are able to offer, namely knowledge. But Bourdieu was, or became, more hesitant over the years as to whether that prerequisite was also sufficient. This is a problem I know relatively well, because I often discussed it with him, and it was one of those on which we never really agreed.

I have always found that the idea that additional knowledge and understanding must necessarily produce (or even can frequently produce) a liberating effect on those to whom it is provided a little too optimistic. This is an assumption that seems to me, especially in recent times, to be regularly contradicted by the facts. The truths of critical sociology can perfectly well be internalised in a more or less cynical way without this changing much about the behaviour of those concerned: they continue to act as before, knowing what is going on and hiding behind the fact that, from the point of view of the sociologist himself, everyone pretty much does what was intended and simply cannot do otherwise.

I have always found that the idea that additional knowledge and understanding must necessarily produce (or even can frequently produce) a liberating effect on those to whom it is provided a little too optimistic

Bourdieu told me on various occasions that he had been deeply shocked that I had written in my book Rationalité et Cynisme that better knowledge such as that which we owe to sociology and the human sciences in general can, in fact, foster not an effort of emancipation but, on the contrary, resignation and cynicism. This is undoubtedly shocking, but unfortunately it is hardly up for debate. Today the use to which we put intellectuals who were among the most subversive in their time – like Foucault, who has become, it seems, a reference point for certain thinkers of the Medef (Movement des Enterprises de France, an employer federation) – confirms this. The sociologist Alain Accardo was surely right to remark that, if the Bourdieusian vision of social relations aroused so much hostility, at least among the members of the establishment, ‘it was because it requires those who take it seriously to be consistent and to pick a side’.

But, regrettably, there is nothing modern man gets used to as easily (and which ends up seeming as natural to him) as inconsistency. Thinking one way and acting another can unfortunately also become a habitus (6) and even constitute the modern habitus par excellence.

Number one enemy

We can obviously also take comfort in the thought that Bourdieu remained the unanimously identified and openly named number one enemy of all defenders of the neoliberal order. His thinking is not about to undergo a hijacking process like the one I have mentioned. As philosopher Michel Onfray observed, there is currently a remarkable, revealing and ultimately reassuring consensus against him. ‘The reason for this is simple and obvious: Pierre Bourdieu doesn’t hide his fight against neoliberal capitalism and therefore he makes enemies of all its defenders, from both left and right, including most of the newspapers — except for a few rare publications, a tiny handful of which contain true tributes, without implied criticism or treachery on the part of a former disciple, or some reservation by a skilful and hairsplitting diplomat between the lines. However, the intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers and other players in the world of ideas who clearly express their opposition to neoliberal domination and to the future of the planet being entirely subject to the laws of the market are few at a time when money is an unsurpassable horizon providing the credo around which all ideological, national and international positions are organised’ (7).

In spite of everything, when one wonders about the leverage intellectuals have to act on the world and to contribute to transforming it, one can’t help noticing that there is nothing easier than to believe what the most critical and radical among them say, while at the same time refraining from drawing any conclusions whatsoever. This arises particularly sharply when it comes to the chances of denouncing the media’s abuses of power.

It would be nice to be able to agree with Bourdieu that theoretical and scholarly criticism of the media should lead to awareness and thereby to a change in individual behaviour, and perhaps an improvement. ‘I am convinced that analyses such as these might contribute, in part, to changing things,’ Bourdieu explains in his book on television, ‘and the fact that I present them on a television channel is a testament to this. All the sciences make this claim. Auguste Comte said, “From science, foresight; from foresight, action.” Social science is entitled to have this ambition, just like the other sciences’ (8). I am sceptical about the results that critical sociology of the media has yielded so far. But if I’m honest, I know no more than anyone else what means can still be effective against such an excessive, well-armed and protected power.

Michel Onfray was surely right to reply to those who grotesquely reproached Bourdieu for being ‘the most media-friendly of all the enemies of the media’ that ‘criticism of the media in the media does not in any way constitute a contradiction’. He wrote, ‘When sophists associate criticism of television with an obligation not to go on television, what are they really saying? That criticism of the workings of the media can only be carried out in the desert? That the alternatives are either to go and flatter the powers that invited you, or not to go there, so as to keep your critical capacity? I myself see this as a logical error, because there is another possibility: to go there and criticise them, then to demonstrate the legitimacy of media criticism in the media’.

Like all media thinkers, Onfray oversimplifies things when he assumes that the motives of the inflexible (Bourdieu, of course, did not belong to this category) are pure. He suggests that, if they refuse to appear on television, it can only be because they are never invited or because they know they would not be comfortable there. Unfortunately, I wonder if he does not risk having to include thinkers like Jules Vuillemin (for whom Bourdieu rightly felt the greatest admiration and whom he considered to be among the few people who had something substantial to say today) in the category of ‘lay monks who set up shop on the summits nearest to the sky of ideas where nothingness, emptiness and absence reign supreme’. Although with regard to television, radio and newspapers, ‘critical presence’ is undoubtedly preferable to ‘a silence as unproductive as nothingness’, most of the intellectuals who use this argument to justify their responsiveness to media requests seem to me to very quickly to become ubiquitous rather than really critical – something that could certainly not be said of Bourdieu. But that is not my point here.

The question is not whether one can successfully (especially with some media success) criticise the media in the media. Media criticism of the media is surely possible and, one might say, it is even planned and desired by the system itself. But the problem is to know how likely it is to succeed and produce real effects, and whether it has worked so far – or can work in the future – in shaking the power it is attacking and in altering, however slightly, a shift that seems to have become almost inevitable and about which, for a long time now, no one seems to have been able to do anything.

For Bourdieu, there are no evil forces at work in the social world. There are only systems whose logic must be described or, to use his own language, ‘fields’ subject to laws that, if they are not immediately knowable, are in no way secret

The American historian Christopher Lasch observed: ‘Like the assembly line, mass communication, by its very nature, reinforces the concentration of power and the hierarchical structure of industrial society. It does this not by spreading an authoritarian ideology of patriotism, militarism and submission, as so many leftwing critics claim, but by destroying collective memory, replacing trustworthy authorities with a star-system of a new kind, and by treating all ideas, political programmes, controversies and conflicts as equally newsworthy (of the point of view of the news), equally worthy of capturing the distracted attention of the viewer, and therefore equally forgettable and devoid of meaning’ (9).

In these circumstances, it is not clear what prevents media criticism from being a media subject as apt as any other to hold the reader or spectator’s distracted attention for a moment, but also as forgettable. So you don’t have to be an elitist, a puritan or a doomsayer to ask serious questions about the effectiveness of media criticism voiced in the media and about the behaviour of intellectuals who pride themselves on being both mediagenic and successful critics. There is no need to resort to conspiracy theory to explain what is happening, or to impute any special evilness to the actors involved, especially the most powerful.

For Bourdieu, there are no evil forces at work in the social world. There are only systems whose logic must be described or, to use his own language, ‘fields’ subject to laws that, if they are not immediately knowable, are in no way secret.

Unequal access to language

Bourdieu did not criticise journalists in order to exculpate intellectuals any more than Kraus did. Gérard Noiriel writes that ‘the criticism of intellectuals is undoubtedly the keystone of all of Bourdieu’s sociology. The notion of “symbolic power” that he developed to explain this form of domination starts with the idea that all social relations are mediated by language’. This point is crucial with Bourdieu. The inequality in the conditions of access to language and to the mastery of the forms of good and beautiful language imposed from above constitute one of the most important factors of discrimination between those who exercise symbolic power and those who are condemned to submit to it – and power in general in its necessarily symbolic nature. It is one of the main sources of distinction between the dominant and the dominated.

Pierre Bourdieu constantly returned to the considerable privilege of those who have the means to act in a way that essentially works through language and their ability to make others accept a representation of reality that need not be objective to be believable — mostly, it is not at all – but is designed to present reality to their advantage and serve their own ends. Symbolic power is, first of all, the power to lead the dominated to perceive and describe things in the way those who occupy dominant positions have an interest in the dominated seeing and describing them.

This is true, of course, of intellectuals. Bourdieu thought that their relationship to language and their ability to create the world of which they speak simply by talking about it were at the root of a special difficulty which often makes it extremely problematic, not to say impossible, for them to access reality itself, especially social reality. But it is also true of all those who produce discourse, especially politicians and journalists. This will probably be increasingly true, since governing has today become more or less synonymous with communicating.