Bourdieu, Foucault and the politics of precarity

ABSTRACT

Precarity is widely regarded as a defining condition of advanced capitalist societies. Given its existentially troubling character and a range of movements condemning its social consequences, several contemporary analysts have sought to diagnose the prospects for liberating society from its rule. Many of those accounts have been inspired by the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault. It is nevertheless argued here that Pierre Bourdieu offers more suitable conceptual tools for diagnosing precarity-induced domination and making sense of resistance in the contemporary age of precarity. With a focus on Foucault’s neoliberal ‘art of government’ and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic power’, this article exposes the differences between each theorist’s account of precarity. While doing so will help grasp the complex and singular character of the operations of power today, it will also serve to highlight the merits of Bourdieu’s work for capturing the limits of, and cracks within, precarity-induced domination. Realizing the full potential of his own approach for conceptualizing resistance, however, rests on supplementing it with insights drawn from intersectionality theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• Bourdieu
• symbolic power
• Foucault
• governmentality
• intersectionality
• resistance

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Charles Masquelier is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter. His research assumes an interdisciplinary outlook, crossing over the fields of social theory, political theory and political philosophy, with particular interests in critical theory, social movements, libertarian socialism and the co-operative movement. His work has been published in international journals such as Current Sociology and the European Journal of Social Theory. His latest monograph is entitled Critique and Resistance in a Neoliberal Age: Towards a Narrative of Emancipation (Palgrave, 2017).

ORCID

Charles Masquelier http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1850-6731

Notes

1. See, for example: Rose (1999), Miller and Rose (2008), Dardot and Laval (2013) and Lazzarato (2009).

2. See, for example, Butler (2004), Lorey (2015) and McCormack and Salmenniemi (2016).

3. Some, such as Zamora and Behrent (2016), have even gone as far as suggesting that Foucault can, at times, appear to endorse neoliberalism.

4. This is my translation of the original French title ‘Le Plaisir de Savoir’.

5. For a more detailed discussion of Bourdieu’s stance towards Foucault’s work, see Callewaert (2006).

6. Bourdieu’s consistent focus on mechanisms structuring social action has earned him the charge of objectivism (Jenkins 1982). This article nevertheless shows that, by discussing his work in its own terms, it is possible to develop a robust diagnosis of the politics of precarity.

7. Bourdieu’s own ideological account of power must not, however, be confused with Marxian accounts of domination. As Cronin (1996, 75) put it, the ‘theory of the habitus suggests that relations of domination are more deeply entrenched and resistant to change than the critique of ideology would suggest because they are based on bodily schemes that agents, and especially those who are culturally disenfranchised, can reflexively grasped and control only within limits’.

8. Long-term employment is here defined as a tenure of ten or more years (Doogan 2009, 2015).

9. For Boltanski, this ‘hermeneutic contradiction’ makes critique possible. It is ‘constantly in the consciousness of actors or, at least, on its edges, and liable to be resuscitated every time an incident - be it a dispute or a simple maladjustment between the elements that make up the environment – reawakens doubt about the content of reality’ (Boltanski 2011, 86). While he was critical of Bourdieu’s own approach to domination for being ‘too powerful and too vague in character’ and for directing critique at a form of ‘symbolic violence’ or domination ‘which invariably is not experienced as such’ (Boltanski 2011, 20), the interpretation proposed here partly aims to show that the latter can provide the conceptual tools with which to grasp the ‘hermeneutic contradiction’ at the heart of Boltanski’s own approach. In this sense, it is aligned with Terry Eagleton’s own interpretation, which recognises Bourdieu’s capacity to offer an insight into the ‘“microstructures of ideology”’ (1991, 158).