Читать книгу Unexceptional Politics - Emily Apter - Страница 10

Micropolitics, historicized as an offshoot of the French anti-psychiatry movement, and repurposed for molecular politics is worlds apart from microsociology, a professionally recognized subset of the academic discipline of sociology. Its early practitioners—Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, George Herbert Mead, R. D. Laing—had diverse interests and specializations that included group psychology, the social anthropology of ethnicity, behavioral codes within everyday life, social theory and social work. Posed against macrosociology, which instrumentalizes structural laws of behavior in the comparative social sciences (and whose magi were Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld), microsociology, conventionally understood, emphasized “up close and personal” humanist approaches to social interaction.

Within this subfield, Bourdieu stands out as an iconoclast, not just because he maintained suspicion towards the humanist heuristics of microsociological analysis, but more importantly because his major topics had a political origin. From his work on colonial violence and ethnosociology, to distinction and the social critique of judgment, to habitus and the structures of class domination, to economies of symbolic and cultural capital, to precarity of employment, and worldly suffering—each area bore the mark of an at-hand political situation, of a personally experienced political engagement.

The son of a postal worker in rural southern France, Bourdieu rose through the system of competitive exams to become a star Parisian academic, all the while experiencing a profound alienation from the corps of professional educators to which he belonged. In his Sketch for a Self-Analysis, he described his lifelong feeling of inner desolation, despair and solitude, relieved only by phrases and conversations in novels that granted access to other worlds and the chance, as Flaubert put it, “to live every life” (“vivre toutes les vies”).¹ His escape from the normative constraints imposed by homo academicus was obtained only by throwing himself into fieldwork that began in Algeria with the ethnography of Kabylian villages, researched while a conscripted soldier during the Algerian War.

To define Bourdieu as a microsociological thinker is not an easy task, since he had no theory of micropolitics and did not employ the term in his writings. His approach to class stratification and group segmentation had little in common with that of Guattari and Foucault. Guattari’s recourse to desire, the unconscious and schizo-language was anathema to Bourdieu, like the language of psychoanalysis more generally.² He shaped his view of sociology around analyzing “what psychoanalysis dismisses as secondary or insignificant.”³ He was closer to Foucault inasmuch as their projects are situated at the conjuncture of philosophy and the social sciences, even if Bourdieu complained that Foucault remained too faithful to the classical discipline of postwar French philosophy. Both dismantled structures of domination and state power in politically marked spaces. In Bourdieu, décor and architecture form part of an animated picture of public and private life, in contrast to Foucault’s factories, hospitals and prisons, which often loom as the impersonal statuary of institutional dispositifs. In Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the place of habitation always leaves its imprint on the animacies of lived life. In his earliest work on the Kabylian house, he breaks open the typology of the plan with descriptions of the everyday duress of survival under conditions of colonial war. The same painstaking method of analysis was applied to the dissection of his own paternal habitus:

Housed with his family in an apartment that came with the job but lacking the most basic comforts (for a long time water had to be fetched from the public fountain), he was tied to a grueling schedule, from Monday morning to Saturday evening and from six in the morning when the post van came and the mail was collected, until the accounts were balanced, often late at night, especially when the end-of-the-month accounts had to be finalized; he kept his own garden, bought and sawed his firewood, and the slightest purchase—a Lévitan-style bedroom suite that my mother and he had made for them in Nay⁴

Bourdieu’s subjects are never as anonymous as Foucault’s, but seated in a nexus of character types, as in a novel. The characters are distinguished in time and place by motivations, intentions and social anxieties that crystallize in ways of speaking and living (translated infelicitously in English as “lifestyles”): “I spent hours listening to conversations, in cafés, on pétanque or football pitches, in post offices, but also at society receptions, cocktail parties or concerts.”⁵ In his work, conversation is the carrier of microsociologies whose surprising contents can often shift the course of research. In his Sketch for a Self-Analysis, he describes how an offhand remark made by his mother precipitates an epistemological revolution in his understanding of sociology:

It was no doubt a banal remark of my mother’s, which I would not even have picked up if I had not been alerted to it (“they’ve become very ‘kith and kin’ with the X’s now that there’s a Polytechnicien in the family”) that, at the time of my study of bachelorhood, triggered the reflections that led me to abandon the model of the kinship rule for that of strategy … It is only at the cost of a veritable epistemological conversion, irreducible to what the phenomenologists call the épochè that intrinsically non-pertinent lived experience can enter into scientific analysis.⁶

The phrase “kith and kin” spurs Bourdieu to rethink how class complicities transform the laws of kinship in the marriage system, prompting him, in his study of the peasant community of Béarn, to train his gaze on the unmarried and the unmarriageable. From there, a vista opens into the “ethnography of ethnography,” which entails understanding “how social experience that seems to have no value can be converted into capital.”⁷

The novelist Annie Ernaux, drawn to casual dinner table conversation as a rich source of microhistory that could be used as the raw material of autofiction, recognized her debt to Bourdieu’s listening techniques and powers of material ethnography, particularly as they informed the composition of her novel Les Années. She noted Bourdieu’s observations on how people in business and the professional classes project self-importance, assigning weightiness to their own words, angling their expressions, and asserting their bodies in social space.⁸ In Distinction this critical regard led to a portrait gallery of workers shown touching their machines or blending in with their workstations.

Distinction expands the vocabulary of class analysis by using large data samples to multiply and complicate the definitions of class identities. No consumer preference or facet of daily life is too trivial to be tallied and interpreted. Bourdieu’s subjects acquire density as subjects when they are shown eating, socializing, and choosing hairstyles, cosmetics, and footwear (“blue dungaries, town shoes, moccasins, sneakers, dressing gowns, lumber jackets,” et cetera).⁹ “To save washing up,” we learn, a woman in a middle-class household distributes dessert,

on improvised plates torn from the cake-box (with a joke about “taking the liberty” to mark the transgression) … The soup plate, wiped with bread, can be used right through the meal. The hostess will certainly offer to “change the plates,” pushing back her chair with one hand and reaching with the other for the plate next to her, but everyone will protest.¹⁰

Much of this information seems superfluous: do we need to know that the soup plate gets wiped with a piece of bread? But this is precisely how Bourdieu proceeds. Miniscule gestures are recorded because they are socially meaningful in ways that resist facile decoding. The improvised cake-box plate signifies nothing in particular, but its function, as a jazz variation in the composition of a social life, is all-important in unpacking the structural workings of class formation.

Challenging the very notion of culture as a term predicated on the suppression of “lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile” attitudes, Bourdieu, in Distinction’s postscript, redeems “vulgar” critiques of so-called “pure” critique. Vulgarity, which smacks of “vulgar Marxism,” has for Bourdieu the felicitous effect of importing ordinary language into sociology; a rebuff to scientific jargon and academic circumlocution. Édouard Louis associates Bourdieu’s resistance to discursive professionalism with the theoretical construct of “insubmission” (“l’insoumission en héritage”). The French education system is the incubator of submission to systems of inherited privilege and class triage. So Bourdieu must attack it at the level of disposition formation, and to this end he homes in on

the ordinary choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing, or cooking, which are particularly revealing of deep-rooted and long-standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by naked taste, without any explicit prescription or proscription, other than from semi-legitimate legitimizing agencies such as women’s weeklies or “ideal home” magazines.¹¹

Bourdieu treats marketing research—as found, for example, in the Luxury Trade Directory, which itemized upper-class animals, children’s clothing labels, fireworks, astrologers, hairdressers, clinics, florists, furs and haute couture—like a score that arranges relations between “the reputation of a person and the social image of a thing.”¹² If Bourdieu painstakingly annotates the minutiae of taste (providing an anachronistic time capsule of French consumer products and cultural pastimes of the 1970s), it is because at this level recognition occurs. Recognition is the mechanism that orders the database; allowing objects or lifestyles unequally distributed among social classes to be attributed to specific classes. Bourdieu’s inclusion as appendix 4 of the “parlor game” called “Associations” uses the results of a 1975 survey that invited the public to tally French politicians to consumer objects or pastimes, such that we find the assignment of “skiing to Giscard, and boxing or rugby to Marchais, the top hat to Giscard, and the cap, emblem of the rowdy urban populace to Marchais, and the beret, symbol of the placid working man, to Mitterrand; the Rolls Royce to Giscard.”¹³ Games like this one prove crucial to understanding the hypnosis at work in “small p” politics, where triggers of subliminal class association not only produce cathexis with a given candidate, but also institute regimes of irrational choice that override policies or party platforms that may be in the voter’s self-interest.

Bourdieu converts the material of political parlor games and market research into a tool of social critique, just as he converts his own class insecurities into a critical microsociology of insecuritization and precarity:

Only slowly did I understand that if some of my most banal reactions were often misinterpreted, it was often because of the manner—tone, voice, gestures, facial expressions, etc.—in which I sometimes manifested them, a mixture of aggressive shyness and a growling, even furious, bluntness, might be taken at face value, in other words, in a sense too seriously, and that it contrasted so much with the distant assurance of well-born Parisians that it always threatened to give the appearance of uncontrolled, querulous violence to reflex and sometimes purely ritual transgressions of the conventions and commonplaces of academic or intellectual routine.¹⁴

The willingness to transgress academic professional protocols brings Bourdieu to a method based on sympathy—“sympraxis”—that will orient his future research and political activism. In “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now,” a chapter of Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (1998), Bourdieu deplores how neoliberal Europe exploits economic crisis to destroy the welfare state, undermine collective responsibility and introduce a psychology of “blame the victim” to justify “the destructuring of existence.” This is a condition that deprives workers of temporal structures and subjects them to “the deterioration of the whole relationship to the world, time and space.”¹⁵ Casualization creates suffering by putting the future into question, thereby sapping the energy and confidence required for collective resistance. With insecuritization comes a vocabulary ranged along a spectrum from fragility to robustness, in which expressions like “on the way down,” “hanging by a thread,” and “bad investment” refer to vulnerable persons rather than to the state of the economy.

Written in the heat of the transportation worker strikes that brought Paris to a standstill in 1995, The Tyranny of the Market builds a language of precarity that Bourdieu had already begun to compile in La Misère du monde (The Weight of the World, 1993), a project undertaken with a twenty-seven-member research team in the 1980s and early 1990s.¹⁶ In La Misère du monde Bourdieu and his group interviewed people of varying social sectors whose economic situations had worsened during the Socialist-sponsored neoliberal turn, including laid-off workers, concierges, inhabitants of the banlieue, ruined farmers, night-workers, people with disabilities, the mentally unstable, contingent teaching faculty, and women and elderly people living in social isolation. The word misère in the French title is especially charged, signifying poverty in the strict economic sense, as well as in spiritual, moral and philosophical senses (Pascal’s “misery” of man without God). Miserableness, ordinary suffering, work settings that have become uncertain places of employment—these associations come through in chapter headings like “The Old Worker and the New Plant,” “The Shop Steward’s World in Disarray, “The Temp’s Dream.” The overtranslated English title, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, highlights the psychic collateral damage of unemployment: depression, lassitude, loneliness, world-weariness, the sheer difficulty of living.¹⁷ “We are offering here the accounts that men and women have confided to us about their lives and the difficulties they have in living those lives,” Bourdieu announced in his opening remarks.¹⁸ Bourdieu makes a point of privileging personal testimony over the specialists’ diagnoses. “As I was listening,” he writes, in an entry,

everything also became natural to me, so present in their words and their actions was the “inert violence” in the order of things, the violence inscribed in the implacable wheels of the job market, the school market, racism (also present within the “police forces” that are, in principle, supposed to repress it), etc., I did not have to force myself to share in the feeling, inscribed in every word, every sentence, and more especially in the tone of their voices, their facial expressions or body language, of the obviousnessness of this form of collective bad luck that attaches itself, like a fate, to all those that have been put together in those sites of social relegation, where the personal suffering of each is augmented by all the suffering that comes from coexisting and living with so many suffering people together.¹⁹

“Inert Violence,” “feeling inscribed in every word,” “coexistent suffering”; these terms of sympraxis are calibrated as non-quantitative metrics of social precarity and must be trained for, listened to, and channeled. It is only through extreme attention to detail that precarity can be phenomenologially calibrated as a boxed-in lifeworld. Stéphane Beaud writes about a temp worker laid off from his job at the Peugeot plant in 1991. Alain’s principal activity is sitting,

in a tiny room that seems as if it has been invaded by objects: a big black and white TV set up on a chair facing the bed, a cassette tape recorder on the table, a small refrigerator next to the sink. The walls are covered with posters from films and hard rock groups.²⁰

Why does it matter that the TV is black and white? That the refrigerator is next to the sink? That the walls are covered in posters? As in a film or literary work these concrete particulars are registered not simply to impart atmosphere to the vignette of cramped quarters. They register a mode of subjectivated existence, a phenomenology of what it is like, to adopt the Heideggerian turn of phrase, to be “poor in world.”

Microsociological case studies in The Weight of the World double as a form of poignant storytelling, doing their best to avoid the traps of miserabilism, objectification, or the genre of hardship narrative so readily appropriated by marketers. Christian Salmon has documented the way in which empathy-inducing storytelling techniques are readily transformed into “sales techniques” (“narrative branding”) and strategies enabling companies “to manage emotional flows and affective investments, and to organize the world of sense-perceptions.”²¹ The lesson here is that microsociology cuts politically both ways, instilling attunement to subtle modalities of subjectivation, precarity and suffering, while lending itself to being co-opted as a toolkit for managing emotional labor. Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her classic study The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), tracked in the airline industry what happens “when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses … when worked-up warmth becomes an instrument of service work,” and when “emotive dissonance” arises from the pressures of “maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning.”²² In measuring the differential in production of a “work smile” and a smile, Hochschild identifies the particular forms of capital produced by engineered displays of motivational enthusiasm or pleasure in work. This forced, capitalist grin lines up with what Frédéric Lordon, writing in a Spinozist vein, associates with the coerced joy factor, embodied by the mask of alienated emotion coached and cooked to proclaim the love of the master. It is tantamount, for Lordon, to a violence committed on the conatus (“the desiring force at the root of all interests”).²³ The production of masks of expression/oppression thus joins other salaried forms of domination that, in Lordon’s estimation, constitute Bourdieu’s greatest theoretical achievement.

The Weight of the World is built to resist commercial appropriation, but this did not prevent the storytelling embedded in its case histories from furnishing the material for a commercially successful film—the Dardenne brothers’ Oscar-nominated Two Days, One Night. Made in 2014, years after the Bourdieu volume appeared, the film is loosely based on the case of Hamid, a CGT (General Confederation of Labor) representative at the Peugeot auto plant in Sochaux. It was filmed near Seraing, a small industrial town in Belgium that was the epicenter of steel production and the site of a bitter general strike from 1960–61. Thus it traces a long history of contingent labor and the proliferation of precarity across multiple sectors, with specific analogies drawn between the 1880s (when workplace deregulation and a general disaffection with unions gave a special advantage to management) and the era of financial crisis post-2008. In the Bourdieu volume, Hamid’s case history (titled “The End of the World”) tracks how employees in a particular section of the plant come to endorse a petition to terminate a putatively underperforming coworker (who happens to be a veteran union member) whom they believe has cost them their bonuses. When Hamid fails to obtain the votes needed to protect the employee’s job, he falls into depression, unable to process how profoundly the foundations of worker solidarity and social justice have been shaken.²⁴ In the Dardennes’ film adaptation, the point of view is shifted to that of the fired worker—a woman called “Sandra” who returns from a medical leave at a Belgian solar panel factory to discover that she has been made redundant. In exchange for their vote in favor of the layoff, her coworkers are promised a bonus of 1,000 euros. When Sandra pleads her case with the boss, she is faced with an infernal proposition: she can retain her job only if, in the span of a single weekend, she can convince the majority of her coworkers to relinquish their premiums. Thus begins, as one reviewer put it, the “low-rent labors of Hercules in which the original tasks are replaced by the locked door, the secret ballot and the bottle of Xanax on the bathroom shelf.”²⁵ Sandra’s ordeal consists of dragging herself door to door, ambushing her colleagues, and abasing herself as she confronts them with their own shame at having sold her out. The outlines of this parable of Capital versus Work are filled in by close-ups of Sandra’s creased, exhausted face, the heaviness of her gait as she gets in and out of the car between visits, the expelled sigh of despair, and the anguished relays of looks between herself and her colleagues. Some pull away; others express anger and outrage at her discomfiting presence. Ariane Nicolas observes,

The fact that personal interest is all-powerful (“sovereign” as Frédéric Lordon would say), doesn’t explain where to put the cursor: “I really need this money,” repeat those who will vote no. To pay for a child’s tuition, to renovate the terrace, to make up for the loss of a second income … in short, “everyone has their reasons,” even if, with the same base salary, some seem to be able to pass up the bonus and others not.²⁶

The humanity shown by the compassionate fellow workers does nothing to mitigate structural exploitation, that is, the predication of finance capitalism on the expendability of employees.

Sandra’s body is carefully monitored by the camera, weakening each time she comes into physical contact with the abusive foreman, with the workers whose jobs will continue on as before, and with the legions of other bodies—the surplus labor—that stand at the ready whenever there is a redundancy or a strike. Sandra’s downward spiral is documented through scenes of progressive abjectification. She is shown in close-up writhing on the bed covers, gasping for air through a car window, crumpling up in tears before the bathroom mirror, running the gauntlet of hostile looks as she walks past her coworkers, and wallowing in the realization that her existence is “nothing at all.”

As the chronicle of a person’s fall into precarity, Two Days, One Night, like The Weight of the World, invites being read alongside Judith Butler’s Precarious Lives, or her coauthored Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. The latter, a dialogue with Athena Athanasiou, elaborates the premise that “the differential ways of allocating precarity, of assigning disposability, are clearly aims and effects of neoliberal forms of social and economic life.”²⁷ “Precaritarization” is identified as a “process of acclimatizing a population to insecurity. It operates to expose a targeted demographic to unemployment or to radically unpredictable swings between employment and unemployment.”²⁸ Invisibilization is the result of economic dispossession, itself based on a system of possessive individualism whereby property ownership is privileged as the measure of personhood, ontic value and political agency. Precarity, they maintain, arises too from the unequal distribution of legal protection, as laws protective of the basic welfare of citizens are dismantled while others are put in place to safeguard privileged sectors and corporate entitlements. This legal distributive injustice is only reinforced, as Simon During suggests, by capitalism’s reinscription of Christian sin, Hobbesian fear, and Lockean uneasiness: “The secular notion that uneasiness and instability are primary to human existence is kept alive under capitalism since it is a mode of production that, in effect, invests in insecurity, which therefore reaches a certain fulfillment in today’s global precarity.”²⁹

The politics of precarity, underwriting the microsociological case studies of The Weight of the World, as well as Tyranny of the Market, anchors Bourdieu’s call, launched during the Mitterrand years to the consternation of the Socialist Party, for a “gauche de gauche” (a Left worthy of the name) that would resist being in thrall to American-style neoliberalism. Microsociology is, in this sense, a motivated political praxis, integral to the struggle against austerity politics, redundancy politics, casualization politics—in short, any politics arising from a sovereign economy that turns precarity into capital, a derivative, or somebody’s bonus. To be a microsociologist is to fight this politics of involuntary servitude. Bourdieu’s approach: sympraxis; his task: to strike, vigilantly, against indifference to the disposability of the contingently employed and the dissolution of structures of social solidarity; his method: to assign concrete particulars to modes of subjectivation. As in Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire (The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude), which in Lordon’s view parses “bodies moved by conatuses of affect,” so Distinction, along with the narratives archived in The Weight of the World, breaks down monolithic abstractions (domination, precarity) into microsociologies of capital traced to the most mundane pursuits, anodyne object-choices, and modes of behaving microsociologically.³⁰