Bourdieu meets Pachukanis/Bourdieu encontro Pachukanis.
| Autor | Castro, Felipe Araujo |
Introduction*
The central part of our argument was thought as a complementary development of the work developed in Bourdieu meets Marxism (BURAWOY, 2010). In this piece Michael Burawoy sought to imagine dialogues among different authors within the Marxist tradition and Bourdieu's work. Each dialogue was developed imagining how these authors would respond to the critique presented by the French sociologist against Marxism in general, besides pointing out eventual insufficiencies and / or flaws in the Bourdieusian theory.
Burawoy's work begins with the relations between theory and practice in Marxian thought, it goes through the discussion of hegemony and the role of intellectuals in Gramsci, through Simone de Beauvoir and the gender issue, through Frantz Fanon and (de)colonial thought and them considers Burawoy's own work about the notion of false consciousness. In addition to Marxist tradition, there is a chapter with a dialogue between the French sociologist and US scholar Wright Mills, presented somehow as a precursor to Bourdieu's work.
In Burawoy opinion, those authors compose a special set of society theorists who "wander like ghosts" through Bourdieu's work. The main difference between this group of thinkers and the French sociologist would be that:
They believed that the dominated people (perhaps some part of them) could under certain conditions perceive and appreciate the nature of their own oppression. Indeed, I refer here to the Marxist tradition that Bourdieu employed without admitting it, refusing the Marxist tradition (BURAWOY, 2010, p. 29). In this fashion, Bourdieu may appear to be identified in the ranks of a postmodernist pessimism, given (i) the abandonment of the emancipatory perspectives inherent to the great narratives and (ii) the apparent denial of the possibility for the exploited to become aware of their own oppression. We do agree that in Bourdieu's work there is no place for a triumphant optimism based on the exploited classes, however it is not correct to presume from that fact that the dominated people would not be able to "perceive and appreciate the nature of their own oppression."
The question, by the way, is an important dispute point about Bourdieu's work: his critical description of society could be considered "neutral", in the sense that it does not (or wish not to) intervene in the portrayed domination or if, in the manner of Marxism, it also seeks to pluck out the imaginary flowers of the shackles that bind the dominated people, not to endure dominance without illusion, but to contribute to set free the dominated from exploitation. In other words, it would exist or not a theory of action in its sociology and, if so, what role intellectuals should play in this process.
Indeed, sometimes Bourdieu seems to assume a conservative position, due to the absence of social and political alternatives to the existence social relations, also its theoretical construction demands of the social scientist a detachment from its object of inquiry, that is, the social scientist should keep a fare distance from the dynamics of social objectivity. The author argues that this distance becomes a prerequisite of quality social intervention. At this point lies an apparent paradox, because this detachment is not absolute, not an end in itself, nor does it mean the abdication of intervention; the distancing, on the contrary, must precede and inform a transformative action.
The fact is that the counselor could hardly follow his own advice. Indeed, at various times in his biography, Bourdieu assumed the position of a "public intellectual", doing interventions in large auditoriums, appearances in demonstrations organized by social movements and even participation in television programs. At such times, his posture was always based on a harsh criticism of neoliberal reason, which also brought him closer to the labor-union cause. The frequency of these interventions has grown in proportion to his prestige in the intellectual field, having peaked with their participation in the strike movements of France during the 1990s. The author published a collection of these intervention texts, with a title that leaves no doubt about their intentions, Counterfires: tactics to confront the neoliberal invasion (BOURDIEU, 1998).
Among the discussions imagined by Burawoy, without doubt, the most important chapter is precisely the initial dialogue, imagined between Bourdieu and Marx himself, more specifically, how could the latter counter the criticisms made to him by the former.
At the end of the considerations about Bourdieu's dialogues with the Marxist tradition, following the exposition method of the dialogues imagined by Burawoy, we propose an additional conversation between Bourdieu and the Soviet jurist, Evgueni Pachukanis (2017), centered on the understanding of the juridical moment. In fact, it seems to us to be a grave shortcoming that the main Marxist theorist of law is absent on Bourdieu's (1989a) criticisms of the Marxist analysis of law.
Although, before developing our core arguments about the relationship between Bourdieu and the Marxism tradition, we intend to highlight a biographical dimension that approach Bourdieu and Marx live experiences and significantly influenced their works. Both the individual trajectories of the authors considered here [Marx and Bourdieu] have a "forced meet with the practice" that led them, each one in its own way and in its time, to break with the scholastic philosophical tradition in which both were inserted.
While Marx, for reasons of financial necessity, was impelled to perform the role of journalist at the Rhine gazette (1842-43), where he had the opportunity to dwell on material issues and to be awaken to economic studies, Bourdieu was forced to serve the French army in Algeria and faced the tensions and contradictions of French imperialism. Both events are narrated by themselves as a turning point with the philosophy of their time: by Marx in the 1859 preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (MARX, 2008) and by Bourdieu in his Sketch for a Self-Analysis (BOURDIEU, 2005).
As far as Marx is concerned, the conclusions he has drawn from this meet with practice are well known in the academic field and are documented in the text mentioned. On the occasion, he wrote that:
The Legal relations as well as State forms cannot be explained by themselves, nor by the so-called natural evolution of the human spirit; on the contrary, these relations have their roots in the material conditions of existence, in their entirety, which Hegel, like the French and the English of the eighteenth century, understood under the name of "civil society." I also came to the conclusion that the anatomy of bourgeois society must be sought in political economy (Marx, 2008, p. 47). In the following discussion, he explains that the men, in the social production of their existence, enter into relations of production by necessity and unrelated to their wills. The totality of these relationships, the sum of the social interactions of the existence, constitutes the economic base of society, upon which legal and political superstructures are built corresponding to the state of development of this economic infrastructure. Thus, "the mode of production conditions the process of social, political and intellectual life", because "it is not the conscience of men that determines their being, it is their social being that determines their conscience" (MARX, 2008, p. 47).
This important passage has served the many deformations of Marxian thought. It is in this same text that the metaphor of the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure is contained, read by many as a relationship of economic determinism of others social spheres. This passage indeed lead to misconceptions, partially due to different translations in different languages, as well as the choices of verbs made by the author in describing the relations between economics, politics, and law: after all, the mode of production determines or only conditions the social reality?
However, considering the Marxian work as a whole, it will be seen that the best interpretation is one which understand the reflexive relationship between base and superstructure in a weak sense, but without denying the economic sphere its preponderant moment.
On the contrary, Bourdieu's main criticism of Marxism stems from the fact that the author selectively chooses reductionist interpretations from this tradition, and then contradicts his own notion of how to overcome mechanistic materialism. From this point of view, he presents his own sociological grammar - with notions such as habitus, field, symbolic power, and so on - as the best option to describe how and why social beings are not determined - or at least not completely determined - by the economic moment, despite being heavily influenced by it, in the formation of evaluative filters and on subject decision made by the individual.
In our view, the author seems to take this position not necessarily because he was convinced that this was the "true" content of Marx's expositions, but acts strategically within the intellectual field. Bourdieu does so to oppose the hegemonic forms of structuralism Marxism of his time - seen as mechanistic readings of materialism - while seeking to separate himself from the Marxist tradition, searching for a distinguished spot within the intellectual field where he acted. In this sense, Bourdieu himself has more than once stated that the intellectual field is also a kind of battlefield (BOURDIEU, 2005, p. 183).
The fact is that both authors hold very harshly to their criticisms of the different manifestations of 'pure thinking' that each one faced, thinking structures understand as apart from reality, as well as to criticize other positions that, although progressive, understands insufficiently or too simply the objective reality.
For Marx, conservative or...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃOCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
