On Television (which began as two televised lectures) mounts a scathing
critique of the main vehicle through which these myths are disseminated.
Dominating other journalistic media through its greater power and market
share, television imposes its distorted, profit-hungry vision of the world by
stealthily secreting consensus through a relentless, distracting "dripfeed" of
selective news and views that only serve to reinforce received opinion. In
"manufacturing consent" (as Chomsky aptly puts it), our TV-dominated
media induce what Bourdieu calls "permanent amnesia." Do we remember
that only twelve years ago it was a commonplace that democracy and freemarket
capitalism were essentially in conflict? So obviously in conflict that
even a market fanatic like Gordon Gekko (villain of the movie Wall Street)
could insist: "You're not naïve enough to think we're living in a democracy;
it's the free market!" By now, through ever-increasing media attention, the
market has become such a familiar symbol of everyday American life as to be
equated with democracy. To resist this equation by reminding us of its
devastating social consequences is the not uncommon strategy Bourdieu
deploys.
Protesting French government slashes of social services, he decried the
media's collaboration in making public compliance seem the only sanity. By
earning the counterattacks of political leaders and media stars, Bourdieu
became a surprise celebrity, though a very reluctant one, for the celebrity
"media intellectual" is perhaps the most detested bête noire in Bourdieu's
bestiary of the enemies of progress. To reach the media public by voicing the
clichéd ideas and soundbites it is ready to understand, such "negative"
intellectuals not only betray the cognitive rigor of their disciplines; they add a
counterfeit seal of expert authority to the conventional terms and issues of
public debate, which have been self-servingly defined by neoliberalism's
ruling ideology and its political, financial and media moguls.
But how, except through the media, can expert critics reach the public to
challenge this manufactured consensus that ravages social welfare and even
threatens the integrity of intellectual and artistic culture by reducing all values
ultimately to the economics of profitability and market share? Bourdieu
offers both direction and example. The reign of neoliberalism, he argues,
rests as much on its symbolic control of our minds as on its economic
success, which itself, of course, depends on psychologies of market
confidence. Insufficiently attentive to this "symbolic dimension,"
progressives lag woefully behind conservatives in wielding "the power of
theory" by using media muscle to instill their views among the general public.
To thwart the "authority effect" of neoliberalism's media-endorsed ideology
and to fight its multinational networks, Bourdieu prescribes new "intellectual
and cultural weapons." We "need to invent new forms of communication"
among researchers, activists and their appropriate publics to create "a
structure for collective research, interdisciplinary and international," that can
"communicate the most advanced findings of research" in digestible modes
to aid "the work of contestation."
It is easy to profess this pious "ideal of the collective intellectual" making
"common cause with others" to resist the entrenched dogmas of domination.
But Bourdieu translates this seemingly quixotic preaching into effective
practice. Having issued his critique of mainstream TV through the television
facilities of the Collège de France, he then used the bestseller profits of On
Television to finance an independent book series, Liber Raisons d'Agir.
Initiated with Acts of Resistance, it seeks to implement his program of bringing
collaborative expert research to bear on urgent civic issues through texts
whose style and price are accessible to a wide reading public. Refusing the
traditional choice between ivory-tower purity and pamphlet popularization,
Bourdieu has also launched a parallel series of academic books (titled Liber)
in the hope that this combined program will raise the cognitive standards of
public debate while bolstering the vitality of autonomous research--a
remarkably ambitious publishing enterprise to support a forceful attack on
neoliberal ideology. But what is the philosophy behind it all?
In large part, we find the classic role of philosophical critique, subversively
exposing dogma by a deeper probing of reality. "What I defend above all,"
Bourdieu avows in explicit defense of Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and Foucault,
"is the possibility and necessity of the critical intellectual, who is firstly critical
of the intellectual doxa secreted by the doxosophers." This Platonic pejorative
for those "technicians of opinion who think themselves wise" suggests the
profoundly Socratic dimension of Bourdieu's project. As Socrates struggled
against an Athenian orthodoxy reinforced by the mesmerizing power of
Greek art, so Bourdieu must battle established neoliberal ideology together
with the enthralling media powers that serve it. His ideal of the critical, collective intellectual seeking truth through common dialogue with all kinds
of people strives to recall "the Socratic mission in all of its glory," as he
disputes entrenched dogma by revealing deeper realities.
One pivotal dogma is that economics defines the most decisive human
truth and should therefore be the ultimate perspective in governing society.
Bourdieu's refutation claims the primacy of the social, because it alone
provides the conditions for "the functioning of the economic order."
Enthralled by respect for mathematical science, we forget that economistic
equations are abstractions that ignore vital realities, erecting "the accountant's
view of the world" as the final truth and "supreme form of human
achievement." But human flourishing cannot be measured in dollar terms of
productivity and profitability. We need, says Bourdieu, an "economy of
happiness" where "social cohesion is as important a goal as stable exchange
rates," and the individualist logic of competition and growth is tempered with
social aims of equity and security.
This evokes a second key dogma that Bourdieu's Socratic sociology
endeavors to dislodge: the robust reality of the independent individual (in
contrast to the presumably abstract or "fictional" nature of social groups).
"Under the banner of individual freedom," neoliberalism pursues "a
programme of methodical destruction" against "all the collective structures capable of
obstructing the logic of the pure market"--atomizing union workers, citizens
of the nation-state and even family members through the competition for
profit. Deplorable poverty and anxiety are demonstrable by-products of this
individualistic race for riches. Job insecurity increasingly plagues our most
economically advanced countries, while the conditions of real individual
freedom are being eroded. For individuals are always the products of social
structures (which form one's language and ideas, but also one's habits, tastes
and desires). By destroying the social fabric of solidarity that ultimately
supports the individual's security and self-confidence, neoliberalism is
actually weakening individual freedom. Likewise, by erecting market values as
the universal criterion of worth, it corrodes the autonomy of intellectual,
artistic and other associative fields that can display alternative facts and
values through the "rational pursuit of collectively defined and approved ends," "in
particular of truth."
In such earnest invocations of truth, autonomy and consensual rationality,
Bourdieu sounds very different from his admired progenitors Nietzsche and
Foucault. For they were keen to put these notions (and their own thought)
sharply into question in the exemplary Socratic tradition of reflexive selfcritique (the wisdom of knowing that one does not know).
Is there a troubling tension between the "critical" and the "collective" intellectual? On the critical side, Bourdieu tells us, "thought, by definition, is subversive," a
"taking apart" of accepted ideas. But how, on the other hand, can collective
projects of scientific and artistic culture be advanced without relying on some
accepted ideas to structure inquiry? And how can we effectively criticize the
distortions of television without invoking some solid sense of truth beyond
suspicion? Bourdieu's solemnly unconditional appeals to scientific knowledge
in these popular books need to be seen in the context of his more subversive
scholarly analyses of the autonomous fields of intellectual and artistic culture,
which reveal competitive power struggles, unholy alliances and mendacious
practices that seem not so very different from what he deplores in the media.
But we cannot be effectively subversive toward everything at once.
Perhaps our complex, imperfect world demands the double standard implied
in Bourdieu's dual publishing project. Though the critical ideal demands that
scientific truth itself be put in question, such subversions are more effective
in the ivory tower than in the public sphere of political struggle. Scientific
truth seems a notion too politically potent to be abandoned to the enemy or
to doubt. For Bourdieu it is one of the few terms of resistance we still have
that can match the pervasive symbolic power of profit, or the spellbinding
motto of the market that threatens to enthrall us all.

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