France's Philosophe Impolitique
Richard Shusterman

Recent French philosophy has been most passionately loved and hated for its
militant radicalism. Figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault defined
it through an intoxicating blend of subversive theory and progressive praxis
that deployed academic erudition to wage war and wield influence in arenas
of social struggle far grander than those of campus politics. As Diderot and
Rousseau had done two centuries earlier (inspiring the French Revolution),
so Sartre and Foucault made philosophy seem not just daringly chic but
socially momentous. Through stirring acts of philosophically inspired protest,
widely reported by the media, they gave the lay public a concrete (if
distortedly one-sided) idea of how exciting and politically potent the work of
progressive philosophy can be. But the more Sartre and Foucault became
familiar icons for radical causes and inspirational gurus for the lumpen ranks
of oppositional culture, the more suspicious they became to philosophers
honed on ideals of analytic rigor and academic purism. Even if one shared
the same left-wing causes, one's politics (as we learned at Oxford) should be
kept separate from one's philosophical work, which could only be corrupted
by the vulgarizing effects of media attention.
Many, therefore, hoped the subversive wave of militant French theory had
finally (even shamefully) consumed itself when Foucault, after shifting his
focus to aesthetic self-fashioning and the celebration of consensual S/M,
died of AIDS in 1984. Pierre Bourdieu has proved them wrong. Even from
the most reluctant quarters, there is growing recognition that Paris has a new
"master thinker" worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault. While
Jacques Derrida, François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze always seemed far too
slippery and cryptic to have real political impact, Bourdieu has shown that he
can mobilize trade unions and social movements, not just graduate seminars.
His views on society command particular authority through his distinctive
specialist expertise. Having supplemented his philosophical education by
retooling himself as a social scientist (initially to explore the culture and
political struggles of Algeria), Bourdieu now speaks as the chairman of
sociology at the prestigious Collège de France, where Foucault also taught.

Bourdieu's wide-ranging corpus spans the fields of philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, aesthetics, linguistics and political theory. Densely written and
replete with complex graphs and statistical tables, his major works make
demanding reading for even seasoned academics. Refusing to compromise
scientific substance for slickness of style, Bourdieu is equally reluctant to risk
the claim to objectivity by combining his research with political polemic--at
least in academic texts. Politics, for this Frenchman, requires other kinds of
papers and audiences, those rarely imported by our university or commercial
presses. But thanks to the publication of Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny
of the Market (deftly coupled with the paperback issue of last year's On
Television), American readers can now be properly introduced to the political
Bourdieu; they can even get an inkling of some of his major theoretical ideas
(like "field," "habitus" and "reflexivity") without toiling through weighty
tomes of academic writing.
They can see, for example, how the "field" of journalism, as "a structured
social space" constituted by power relations and the values these relations
establish, implicitly instills these values into all ambitious members of the
field, thus defining the basic perceptual habits that determine what journalists
see as newsworthy. This habitual way of seeing (and not seeing) results in a
form of collective, unconscious censorship that, in turn, poses a higher-level
burden on intellectuals who want their research to be socially productive.
They need to think not only of the knowledge they provide but further, and
more reflexively, of the means to anticipate, avoid and counteract its mediatic
muzzling or distortion.
Acts of Resistance is a collection of short, hard-hitting texts essentially culled
from Bourdieu's past five years of activism against government policies that
damaged social welfare and encouraged racism under the pretext of
protecting the French economy from the pressures of globalization. Ranging
from polemical Op-Ed pieces and interviews to speeches at rallies for
striking workers and the unemployed, these texts mount a ferocious attack
on what Bourdieu's original French subtitle calls "the invasion of
neoliberalism," a political program that stresses free-market economics as the
necessary means for achieving progressive social aims and protecting
individual freedom. How much this ideology pervades the current US politics
of Clintonism and the centrist "third way" can be gauged by noting the
central neoliberal myths Bourdieu targets for critique: that economics defines
the most essential reality; that the free-market system is both objective
necessity and the democratic expression of individual choice; that
competition promotes real diversity of products (instead of uniformity through pressured copying); that globalization and market trends are
irresistible impersonal forces rather than products of willful political agendas;
that any resistance to the prevailing Western model of scientific rationalism
must be irrationalist fundamentalism; that neoliberal thought is a hiply
progressive revolution rather than a slickly repackaged restoration of old
robber-baron thought, replete with the social Darwinist "ideology of
competence" that defines those unable to raise themselves above poverty as
inherently inferior and undeserving.

--> Next Page