Universal corporatism the role of intellectuals in the modern world (Pierre Bourdieu)

He was histori- cally constituted in and by the overstepping ofthis opposition: French ~vriters,artists, and scientists asserted themselves as intellectuals when, at the moment of the "A

Fourth Lecture Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern

World

Pierre Bourdieu; Gisele Sapiro; Brian McHale

Poetics Today, Vol 12, No 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter, 1991), pp 655-669.

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Fourth Lecture Universal Corporatism:

The Role of Intellectuals

in the Modern World

Pierre Bourdieu

T h e lecture I a m about to deliver, on the initiative of' the Asalli news-paper, falls within the sphere of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution And I would like to contribute in my olvn way, which is, no doubt, a little paradoxical o r perverse, to these cele- brations by recalling, following the lecture I delivered yesterday at Todai University, that the organizers of' these ceremonies are none other than, in the France of 1989, the members of'this State nobility, the power of which finds its legitimacy in cultural capital, that is, from a naive point of view, in intelligence One can immediately see that this new torm of' domination raises a difficult and prob- ably unprecedented problem for intellectuals, who are dominated dominants, that is, the dominated among the dominant Unlike those whom nineteenth-century writers designated as "bourgeois" or, worse,

"shopkeepers," a good many of the modern rulers of great public

o r private bureaucracies are technocrats o r even epistenlocrats who pretend to use science-notably, economic science-in order to gov-

e r n and who have, by virtue of this, more power than ever- before to contest the monopoly of' intelligence that intellectuals used to readily appropriate to themselves

But I a m coming to the subject At the risk of' overstepping the bounds tacitly prescribed for a lecturer, especially when he is also a

r h ~ s Ircturr \ \ a s d r l ~ \ e ~ e d at the e c l ~ t o ~ l a l offices of 4,c1lrt on October 6 1989

Poc2tlrs Today I2:4 (\Vintr~-19!)1) C;op\rlght O 1991 h! T h e Portrr Institute for

Poetics a n d Serriiotics ( : C C 0?1:3:3-5?1'iL'/Y l/SL'.30

656 Poetics Today 12:4

foreigner, I shall be acting here in the capacity of an intellectual, in the precise sense of the definition which I shall be trying to give to that term I shall try to place whatever competence I may have as a sociolo- gist at the service of a symbolic action (of a political type) designed to encourage and promote a reasoned and effective intervention by intel- lectuals in political life Whatever novelty my argument may possess lies in the f'act that, tor reasons which characterize them sociologically, intellectuals are not used to subordinating their action to sociological knowledge, not only of the ~vorld in ~vhich they claim to act, but of themselves as intellectuals and of the reasons fbr (or the social deter- minants o f ) their actions I would like to try to define the possible ends

a n d means of collective action by intellectuals of all countries o n the basis of an analysis, ~vhich seeks to be as realistic as possible, of ~ v h a t

an intellectual is and ~ v h a t he could be

T h e intellectual is a paradoxical being One can only conceive of him as such on the condition that one calls into question the classical alternative of pure culture and political engagement He was histori- cally constituted in and by the overstepping ofthis opposition: French

~vriters,artists, and scientists asserted themselves as intellectuals when,

at the moment of the "Affaire Dreyfus," they interfered in political life as intellectuals, that is, with a specific authority grounded on their belonging to the relatively autonomous world of art, science, and lit- erature and o n all the values that a r e associated with this autonomy- virtue, disinterestedness, competence, and so on

T h e intellectual is a bidimensionnl being To be entitled to the name of intellectual, a cultural producer must fulfill two conditions: on the one hand, he must belong to an autonomous intellectual ~vorld (a field), that is, independent from religious, political, and economic powers (and so on), and must respect its specific laws; on the other hand,

he must invest the competence and authority he has acquired in the intellectual field in a political action, which is in any case carried out outside the intellectual field proper

The Genesis of the Intellectual

In order to ground these propositions, which might seem peremp- tory a n d arbitrary, and before stating the broad outlines of a collective action by intellectuals, it is necessary to try to allude briefly to the for- gotten o r repressed history of which intellectuals are the product This

is a n extraordinarily repetitive history, since the evolution of the field to~vard autonomy is attended ~vith a perpetual vacillation in attitudes toward politics, between engagement in the world and retreat into the ivory tower I n the eighteenth century, the "engagement" of the "phi- losophes," which Voltaire, in 1765-in the article from the Dzctior~r~aire PhilosoPhzqz~eentitled "L'Homme d e lettresn-opposes to the scholastic

Bourdieu Universal Corporatism 657

obscurantism of decadent universities and academies, found its logical continuation in the participation of these same "hommes d e lettres" in the French Kevolution

During the postrevolutionary period of the Restoration, the

"hommes d e lettres" were held responsible not only for the movement

of subversive ideas which had led, notabl!., through newspapers, to the Revolution itself, but also for the excesses o f t h e Terror: they were ob- jects of' distrust, and even scorn, for the younger generation of 1820,

in particular the Kornantic poets In the first stage of the Kornantic movement, these poets impugned the claim of the "philosophes" to interfere in political life and to propose a rational vision of histori- cal development; and they affirmed their own desire for autonomy

by reestablishing religious sensibility and feeling against reason and criticism of dogmas But as soon as the reactionary politics o f t h e Kes- toration threatened the autonomy of the intellectual field, they did not hesitate to claim liberty tor the writer and the scientist (notably, in the case of Michelet and Saint-Sirnon) and to recover (notably, in the case of Victor Hugo) the prophetic function of the eighteenth-century

"philosophes."

But, in a new swing of the pendulum, the populist Romanticism that seems to have possessed almost all writers in the period preced- ing the 1848 revolution did not survive the failure of the progressive movement and the establishment of the Second Empire: the collapse

of the illusions of '48 led to this extraordinary disillusion, which is so

vigorously evoked by Flaubert in L'Education senti7rtentale, a n d which

furnished fertile ground for a renewed refusal of engagement T h e champions of "art for art's sake," such as Flaubert o r Theophile Gau- tier, opposed "pure" art to both "social art" and "bourgeois art," ~vhich was subject, in the realms of art and the art of living alike, to the bourgeois customers' norms Refusing the servitude of "industrial lit- erature" (except in the interests of paying the rent) and admitting

no judgment but their peers', they identified the literary field's self- enclosure with the ~vriter's renunciation of the exercise of symbolic power in any form whatsoever (thereby breaking with the tradition

of' the poet as zlates in the manner of Hugo and that of the scientist-

prophet in the manner of hlichelet)

It lvas only at the end of the nineteenth century, at the moment

~ v h e nthe literary field, the artistic field, and the scientific field acceded

to a very high degree of autonomy, that the most autonomous agents

of these autonomous fields arrived at the idea that autonomy was not

to b e identified with the renunciation of politics and that they could even intervene as artists, writers, o r scientists in the political field Un- like those cultural producers who turned into politicians (like Guirot

o r Lamartine), they entered upon the political landscape with an au-

658 Poetics Today 12:4

thority which derived from the autonomy of their own field a n d which claimed all the values on which its existence was grounded-ethical purity, competence, and so on Emile Zola's accuse" a n d the peti- tions in support of it had an exemplary (paradigmatic) value since properly artistic o r scientific authority was affirmed there in political interventions of a new type, rvhich tended to maximize both of the dimensions constitutive of the intellectual's identity, namely, "purity"

and "engagement"; the); galre birth to a politics of pz~rity ~vhich Tvas the perfect antithesis of the "Raison d7E:tat."

The Intellectual: An Unstable Synthesis

What rvas the basis of this anti-political politics? It was the existence

of social worlds rvhose fundamental law was the refusal of the legality specific to the economic and political fields, the refusal of ends and values that these fields recognized, such as rnoney, power, honors With Zola's "position" in the 't4ffaire Dreyf'us," the table of values had been decisively overturned: not content with renouncing merce- nary and commercial ends within the limits of their own upside-down world, the intellectuals undertook to affirm their anti-values on the very ground of ordinary social life, in the realm of' ethics-notably,

in the realm of' sex-and also, a graver t~ansgresszon,at least from the

point of view of'the champions of social order, in the realm of politics

(these ethical o r political transgressions became the occasions for trials

in the case of Baudelaire and Flaubert as rvell as in the case of Zola)

They affirmed the right to transgress the most sacred values of the col-

lectivity-those of patriotism and of nationalism-by supporting, in the name of values transcending those of' Commerce, Zola's libelous article against the army (or, much later, during the war of Algeria, by calling for support of the enerny in the antitorture petition o f t h e 121) They founded their authority upon the unwritten laws of an ethical

a n d scientific universalism in order to exercise a kind of moral min- istry and to launch, on certain occasions, a collective mobilization for the purposes of a struggle designed to disperse throughout the rvhole social world the values which rvere current in their own universe

T h e paracloxical synthesis of the contraries of' autonomy ancl politi- cal engagement, rvhich chiiracterizes the intellectual, was not invented all at once and was not established once and for all; it has in it some-

thing unstable and unsettled, the consequence of which, as the to-

and-fro movement observable in history attests, is that the holders of cultural capital can always "regress" torvard one or another of the posi- tions designated by the pendulum of' history, that is, torvard the role

o f t h e "pure" writer, artist, scientist, or torvard the role o f t h e simple political actor, journalist, politician, and so on T h e vacillations be- tween two possible attitudes toward politics can also be explained by

Bourdieu Universal Corporatism 659 the fact that the claim of autonomy inscribed in the very existence of

a field of cultural production must take into account temporal powers which vary from period to period in the history o f a single country and from country to country, ~vhether powers exterior to the field, such as those of the Church, the State, o r the big industrial and commercial enterprises, o r polvers internal to it, especially those involving con- trol of specific means of production and diffusion (press, publishing, radio, television, and so on)

T h e variations which are observable from period to period and, in the same period, from country to country in the cultural producers' strategies, notably, in the realm of politics, and ~vhich result from the state of relations between the intellectual field and the temporal powers should not be allo~ved to conceal the inilnr.iants that are the grounds for the possible unity of intellectuals of all countries T h e same intent toalnrd uutonolrty can, illdeed, be expressed in diametrically

opposed "positions" (secular in one case, religious in another, engaged here, "detached" there), depending upon the structure and history of the temporal powers against ~vhich this intent toward autonomy must assert itself Intellectuals of different countries have to be fully aware

of this mechanism if they want to avoid letting themselves be divided

by circumstantial and phenomenal oppositions stemming from the Pact that one and the same will to emancipation encounters different obstacles in different places I could take the example of the best- known French and German philosophers and sociologists no~vadays, who, since they set the same concern fbr autonomy in opposition to opposing historical traditions, seem opposed to one another, stand- ing in apparently inverse relations to truth and reason But I could just as well take the example of a problem such as that of opinion polls, in which certain people in the \Vest see only a means of domi- nation, ~vhereas others, in Eastern European countries, see a conquest

of liberty

I n order to understand and master the oppositions that risk divid- ing them, intellectuals of different countries al~vays have to keep in mind the state of the tenlporal powers in relation to which they have

to define themselves; for example, they must be able to recognize, in the arguments of intellectuals coming from traditions different from their own-and especially in what seems perplexing o r shocking in these arguments-the effects of their past o r present confrontation with experiences of political despotism, such as fascism o r Stalinism,

o r ~vith ambiguous political movements, such as the student revolts of

'68, o r with policies hostile to cultural activities, or, in the realm of internal powers, the effect of present or past confrontations with the porvers of the press, radio, or television, o r with overt or disguised censorship of the university or the academy, and so on (Llore gener-

660 Poetics Today 12:4

ally, they must be aware that ~ v h e n they speak with aspirations toward the universal, they are al~vays liable to be nothing more than the un- conscious spokesmen of an historical unconscious that is linked to the peculiarities of a specific history of the intellectual field.)

The Struggle to Defend Autonomy

Taking this historical perspecti~.e allorzs us to distance ourselves some- what from the situation of the intellectual field as it appears in most contemporary societies We are already familiar with many past ex- amples of the refusal of the political, often associated with a return to religion, such as we see occurring today in certain Communist coun- tries, a n d the disillusioned renunciation of revolutionary utopias, such

as we observe today in France as well as in Japan and a number of other countries-except England, which may now be discovering the intellectual for the first time, thanks to Mrs Thatcher's profoundly anti-intellectual policies And the fact of finding oneself in the "end- game" of a game in which every move that could possibly be made has, sorne~vhere o r other, already been played can lead to a disen- chanted skepticism, especially in countries like France o r Japan where intellect~~alshave passed, in the space of a single generation, through the whole gamut of possible "positions" to~vard politics; but i t can also favor a lucidity that has nothing to d o with cynical disenchantment

a n d that, equipped with the knowledge supplied by scientific research (which it favors), could be the starting point tor a ~vholly new form of political action on the part of intellectuals

T h e double, paradoxical nature of the intellectual, to which I alluded at the beginning, means that all political action designed to re- intbrce the political efhcacy of intellectuals must inevitably appear to send a double message It is a question, on the one hand, of reinforcing autonomy from the temporal powers, especially by striving to guaran- tee the economic and social conditions for the autonomy of cultural producers (first of all, in the realm of publication and evaluation of the products of intellectual activity) and by reinforcing the position of the most autonomous producers in each field; on the other hand, a question of freeing the most autonomous cultural producers from the temptation of the ivory tower by creating institutions o r mechanisms capable of giving them the means to interfere collectively in politics in the name of their specific authority and to strive, at least, for control

of the means of intellectual production and ratification

Thus, the first objective of intellectuals should be to work collec- tively in defense of their specific interests and o f t h e means necessary for protecting their olvn autonomy Through the effect of a kind of guilty conscience, which has often led them to become "fello~v trav- ellers," not, as they supposed, of the proletariat, but of second-rate

Bourdieu Universal Corporatism 661

intellectuals who have claimed to speak on behalf of' the proletariat, intellectuals have often given priority to the defense of' great universal causes and refused, as corporatists, to defend their own interests, for- qetting that one defends the universal by defending the defenders of' the universal I n fact, cultural producers have to commit themselves

to the rational defense of the economic and social conditions for the autonomy of the different fields of' cultural production, these privi- leged social universes where the material and intellectual means of'

~ v h a tLve call science, art, philosophy, law, and so on are produced and reproduced

Examples should be given here of specific actions that intellectuals should carry out with the purpose of defending the republic of artists, writers, and scientists: for example, defense of scientific researchers' control of their means of production and evaluation through resis- tance to the growing influence of scientific administrators, who, often having left research because of failure, seek to impose on research- ers directives based on ignorance of the logic of research; defense of the net~vorks of production and diffusion of avant-garde works in all domains of research, artistic o r scientific, against commercial inter- ests; defense of artists, writers, and scientists against the influence of journalism, a n d the elaboration of an obligatory code (if not an actual law) aiming to protect authors against distorted quotations, misrepre- sentations, and so on I could go on with, for instance, the protection

of young lecturers o r researchers from all forms of discrimination, notably, political discrimination, and so on

With a view to grounding philosophically the realpolitik of Reason that I a m defending, let me counter the transcendental illusion of universal structures of Reason inscribed in consciousness o r language

by reminding you that Reason is a product of history that has to be incessantly re-produced through historical action aimed at guarantee- ing the social co7iditio?~s for the possibilit~ of rational t l ~ i ? ~ k i n g Transposing the Machiavellian vision, according to which virtue is the product of

a public order in which the citizens have an interest in virtue, one has to work incessantly-through practical, concrete actions, o f a kind usually left to politicians, such as the definition of the contents of educational programs o r the defense of an educational and cultural television, o r through the struggle against patterns of cultural pro- tectionism which stand in the \va), of the international cir-culation of ideas-at establishing a republic of artists and scientists, the members

of which ~vould have an interest in reason, in disinterestedness, in truth Against a universal pragmatics in Habermas's sense, a politics of the z~r~iz~ersal should be proposed Transhistorical universals of commu- nication d o not exist, but socially established forms of communication favoring the production of universals d o exist Logic is inscribed in

662 Poetics Today 12: 4

the social logic of public and regulated communication, the exemplary achievement of which is represented by the generalized exchange of the scientific world: in this case, the every-man-for-himself struggle (or competition) is organized in such a way that no one can lvin, a n d thus make the most of himself, except by making the most of arguments, reasons, demonstrations, thus serving to advance truth and reason

But these lvorlds of pure reason have not descended from heaven; they have not been established by the operation of the Holy Ghost Those who are surprised, today, at the difficulties encountered by the human sciences, in particular sociology, have forgotten the battles that the natural sciences had to fight in order to affirm their autonomy against the political and religious powers (which, furthermore, a r e liable to return to the fray whenever important social interests a r e at stake, as is the case with the theory of evolution and the origin of man) A liberating science can develop only when appropriate social conditions converge to make it possible, which presupposes, for ex- ample, abolition of the effects of domination, whether exerted be- tween nations o r within a given country, that can simply exclude from scientific competition-through brutal and overt means, such as sup- pression of scholarships o r research grants, o r through the more subtle censorship of academic decorum-those lvho d o not accept the tacit assun~ptions of the established scientific order

T h e regime of rule-governed dialogue or completely fair compe- tition between perfectly matched opponents is not easy to establish, even in the "purest" of lvorlds, those of mathematics, music, o r poetry

T h e fields of cultural production have their olvn monopolies, their own relations of domination, and it is only at the price of perpetual, moment-to-moment struggle that the real exchanges of the scientific community o r the artistic ~vorld can hope to approach the ideal of au- tonomy a n d universality As one moves along the spectrum from those fields, such as mathematics o r pure poetry, in lvhich no directly social

"interests" are at stake, and the autonomy of which is protected by the esoteric obscurity oftheir products, and approaches such fields as the social sciences, where matters of greater social importance a r e at stake, autonomy becomes increasingly difficult to secure and defend And if rational dialogue is not easy to establish, this is less because

of some peculiar inability of the researchers engaged in these fields

to control their passions, impulses, o r interests than because the most autonomous a r e incessantly exposed to unfair competition from those who a r e more heteronomous and \vho can al\vays, by resorting to ex- terior polvers, find means of compensating for their olvn inferiority from the point of view of the rules of the field Schopenhauer con- sidered the form "par excellence" of rhetorical bad faith to be that of posing an argument which one's opponent cannot refute \vithout his

Bourdieu - Universal Corporatism 663 refutation "going right over the head" of' an incompetent onlooker Economists a n d especially sociologists are under the constant threat

of such strategies: for instance, journalists, publicists, and bad soci- ologists can rely o n the support of the majority whenever they invoke common sense against the sociologist's constructions, which, as in all science, a r e only achieved at the expense of common sense

T h e struggle for autonomy is thus, first of all, a struggle against the institutions and agents ~vhich, inside the field, introduce dependence upon external economic, political, o r religious polvers, ~vhether those who subordinate their production to commercial ends o r those, such

as publicists who, more subtly, make concessions to the law of success,

o r those ~ v h o use their privileged connections with external po\$.ers (such as the State o r the Party, with all their forms of Zhdanovism)

in order to impose their domination inside the field It is through them that the law (nornos) of' another field displaces the specific law of' the field of cultural production This Trojan-horse function, through

~vhich heterononly is introduced into the fields of' cultural production, falls to those producers who a r e least highly appreciated according

to internal criteria and who are thus always tempted to draw o n ex- ternal alliances in order to overturn the polver relations inside the field; expecting less from the field, they are the most susceptible to the solicitations of' temporal power I n fact, if internal ratification is not an absolute guarantee of'autonorny, it at least guards against this pursuit of compensatory paver for purposes of revenge; and it can also enhance that indifference to the "grandeurs d'etablisseinent" (as Pascal put it) which belongs to the ideal definition of the intellectual

Up to this point I have only been describing the most general of the mechanisms posing a constant threat to the autonomy of the fields of' cultural production If a conscious and organized mobilization of intellectuals seems to me nowadays indispensable, this is because the autonomy of' these fields is very powerfully threatened or, more pre- cisely, because increasingly a wholly new kind of threat has come to hang over it I shall mention first the threat posed by the State, either through its often excessive care o r through its hostility o r censorship

In societies where "culture" has become the means and object of policy (as witness, among other things, the existence of' ministries and minis- ters of culture), intellectuals have to learn, under pain of enslavement how to use the State in order to free themselves from the State, to turn to account the means the State guarantees to them (such as, for academics, the status of' civil servants which secures them from eco- nomic sanctions) in order to affirm their independence from the State But there a r e also and especially threats posed by the increasing inter- penetration of the world of art o r science, on the one hand, and the world of money, o n the other I am thinking of all the new forms of