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PREFACE

MICHAEL BURAWOY

My four-year stint with the Ford PhDs, which had brought me to the University of the Witwatersrand for three weeks every year, had come to an end. Karl von Holdt, then acting director of SWOP (the Society, Work and Development Institute) invited me to come to Wits for a semester on a Mellon Visiting Professorship. I would work with students and faculty and also give public lectures. There was interest in my giving lectures on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which I had previously done at the University of Wisconsin. I revised and expanded these lectures from six to eight. As at Wisconsin, the idea was to bring together faculty and students from different departments and develop another side to SWOP’s activities.

But Wits would be a different experience altogether, as Bourdieu was not the popular theorist in South Africa that he was in Wisconsin. After all, Bourdieu was not only a theorist of the North and from the North, but more specifically of France and from France, which made him more unfamiliar than Anglo-American theorists. His convoluted style of writing, his elliptical sentences, his erudition and his philosophical grounding – in sum, his deployment of cultural capital – make his work challenging to access.

As I had done in Wisconsin, I sought to interpret Bourdieu by presenting his ideas in relation to Marxism through a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, Beauvoir, Mills and myself, respectively. Bourdieu makes reference to Marx – indeed, his work is a deep engagement with Marx (as well as Durkheim and Weber) – but Marx never receives a sustained examination. As for Gramsci, Fanon and Beauvoir, his scattered references and footnotes are contemptuous, while Freire and Mills hardly get a mention. Nonetheless, there are some interesting parallels and convergences with these theorists that more often than not evaporate under closer examination. My endeavour was to rescue these figures buried in Bourdieu with a view to problematising both Bourdieu and Marxism. The Marxists I chose – and I realise Mills had an ambiguous relationship with Marxism – were all concerned with developing a theory of superstructures or ideological domination, and therefore most convergent with what lies at the centre of Bourdieu’s opus: the theory of symbolic domination. These theorists also had important things to say about intellectuals and the public face of social science, and here too there was much to debate, as Bourdieu was – and still is – the pre-eminent public sociologist of our era. Like Marxist theory, Bourdieu was always concerned with the relation of theory and practice.

Still, this was South Africa, and even if Marxism had more currency here than in other parts of the world, it was nonetheless flagging; and, moreover, Bourdieu’s concerns with symbolic domination seemed removed from the South African situation, where physical violence seemed far more salient – something about which Bourdieu has little to say beyond some of his early writings on Algeria. My original intention was to try and show the significance of Bourdieu to the New South Africa; this was, after all, a time of the struggles between African National Congress Youth leader Julius Malema and Congress of South African Trade Unions president Zwelinzima Vavi, struggles that might be seen as precisely open warfare of a symbolic kind, with Vavi even calling for a ‘lifestyle audit’ for Malema – effectively questioning the basis of ruling-class ‘distinction’, a questioning that would be difficult to imagine in France, with its settled symbolic order. It was also the time of preparation for the FIFA Soccer World Cup, a spectacle if ever there were one that absorbed the attention of the entire population, masking the real interests at play. Again, the symbolic world of post-apartheid South Africa could not be disregarded. Still, it could be argued that Bourdieu’s significance might be the non-applicability of his ideas to South Africa, i.e. that his ideas are irrevocably Northern or French.

The eight conversations held over a period of six weeks in February and March 2010 brought in crowds from different quarters of the university, and each presentation was followed by heated exchanges. They were made all the more interesting by Karl von Holdt, who consistently defended Bourdieu against Marxist detractors, showing how his ideas do have validity in South Africa. My own attempt to incorporate South Africa into these conversations proved to be paltry and wooden, and so when it came to writing up the lectures, I invited Karl to respond with his own reflections. He has done this in an exceptional manner, in a sense returning Bourdieu to where he began his sociological life – Africa. After all, many of Bourdieu’s abiding ideas are taken from his interpretation of the Kabyle kinship society in Algeria. It was from his studies of the Kabyle that he developed the notions of symbolic capital, misrecognition, habitus, male domination and so forth. Bourdieu applied these ideas to French society, and Karl has now taken them back to Africa, pointing to the symbolic dimensions of township violence, the power of the concept of habitus, the disciplinary mode of education and the place of intellectuals in contemporary South Africa.

If I presented a rather arid conversation between Bourdieu and Marxism, Karl has extended the conversational mode to one between Northern and Southern theory, but based on more than three decades of engaged research and contestation in education, labour and community. Karl brings to the forefront a subordinate register in Bourdieu’s writings, the dimensions of struggle, crisis and social transformation. He does not, however, engage Bourdieu’s writings as a combat sport and he does not dismiss or ignore either myself or Bourdieu, but uses Bourdieu to construct a dialogue about the South Africa of yesterday, today and tomorrow. So we now offer a set of conversations on conversations in the hope of sparking further debate and discussion about the trajectory of South Africa, about the continuing vitality of Marxism and about the relevance of Bourdieu’s thought to different contexts.

These conversations have benefitted from many other conversations with colleagues and students: in Berkeley with Xiuying Cheng, Fareen Parvez, Gretchen Purser, Dylan Riley, Ofer Sharone, Cihan Tuǧal, and Loïc Wacquant, whose boot camp course opened my eyes to the enormity of Bourdieu’s achievements; in Madison with Erik Wright, Gay Seidman, Mara Loveman and Matt Nichter; and in Johannesburg with Bridget Kenny, Oupa Lehoulere, Peter Alexander, Irma du Plessis, Prishani Naidoo, Michelle Williams, Vish Satgar, Eric Worby, Shireen Ally, Tina Uys, Andries Bezuidenhout, Sonja Narunsky-Laden, Ahmed Veriava and Jackie Cock. Especial thanks to Jeff Sallaz, who gave me detailed commentary on both the Madison and the Johannesburg Conversations with Bourdieu, and to an anonymous second reviewer who also gave us excellent comments on the draft manuscript. I have tried to address their criticisms and suggestions in the book. Last, but not least, for the past 45 years I have had the good fortune of listening to, learning from and living with two great interpreters of South Africa – Luli Callinicos and Eddie Webster – and it is to them that I dedicate these conversations.