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Neo-Liberalism as Doxa and India Discourse on Globalization by, Rohit Chopra [Full paper added by ron]
Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Thu 28 May 2009 03:45 PM PDT
I chanced on this abstract and it looked like the right kinda stuff:
NEOLIBERALISM AS DOXA: BOURDIEU’S THEORY OF
THE STATE AND THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN DISCOURSE ON GLOBALIZATION AND LIBERALIZATION
Rohit Chopra A1
Emory
University, Atlanta, USA
Abstract:
This paper
assesses, on the basis of key arguments from Pierre Bourdieu's work, how and
why a consensus about the positive effects of globalization and liberalization
could have established itself as a dominant discourse across Indian social
space. Describing the discourse that validates globalization and economic
liberalization as a particular worldview, which he terms 'neoliberalism', Bourdieu
describes how neoliberalism establishes itself as a doxa - an
unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were the objective truth -
across social space in its entirety, from the practices and perceptions of
individuals to the practices and perceptions of the state and social groups.
The full import of Bourdieu's arguments about neoliberalism, however, can only
be grasped with reference to Bourdieu's theory of the state, and with reference
to key concepts, such as doxa, habitus, field and capital. This paper,
accordingly, seeks to fulfil two related objectives: to explicate Bourdieu's
theory of the state and his concepts of habitus, doxa, field and
capital, and to describe, on the basis of Bourdieu's arguments, how
neoliberalism as doxa could have colonized the discussion and perception
in Indian social space about the effects of globalization and liberalization.
[Note by Ron - Here's the entire article:]
C UL T UR A L S T UDI E S 1 7 ( 3 / 4 ) 2 0 0 3 , 4 1 9 – 4 4 4
Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online
© 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
by Rohit Chopra
NEOLIBERALISM AS DOXA:
BOURDIEU’S THEORY OF
THE STATE AND THE
CONTEMPORARY INDIAN
DISCOURSE ON GLOBALIZATION
AND LIBERALIZATION
Keywords:
Bourdieu; doxa; globalization; India; neoliberalism; state; liberalization
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 420
Introduction: globalized India?
MO R E T H A N A decade after India has implemented a series of market-
oriented economic reforms that pass under the name liberalization, it
is still an open question whether India’s gradually increasing participation in a
global economy has improved the condition of its people. At the very least, there
are two different stories about the impact of liberalization and globalization in
India. An article in India’s largest-circulation English newspaper asserts that
business process outsourcing – the practice of corporations headquartered in
Western countries outsourcing business functions to centres in the Third World
to save labour costs – can strengthen the Indian economy by creating over a
million jobs by 2008 (Dutta, 2002: 1). On the other hand, a recent report of
the Planning Commission’s Special Group on Job Creation points out that the
number of jobs created in the post-liberalization decade of the 1990s was less
than a third of the corresponding number in the decade preceding liberalization
(Kang, 2002). The report predicts that, unless corrective measures are taken,
the number of unemployed people will double in the next five years, reaching a
staggering 45 million.
In the contemporary conversation on Indian economy, politics and society,
it is usually the pro-globalization and pro-liberalization narrative that is affirmed
as more credible than the opposing viewpoint. For instance, a newspaper article
last year reported the peculiar phenomenon of one of India’s oldest left state
governments, West Bengal, hiring consultants McKinsey & Co. to suggest a plan
for labour reforms (The Times of India, 2002: 7). The government eventually
decided to drop the plan, yet apparent in its decision to hire McKinsey & Co. –
a multinational consulting firm well-known for its pro-liberalization and pro-
globalization agenda – was the belief that state labour policies could not resist
the irreversible tide of liberalization for much longer. The view that liberaliza-
tion and globalization must be recognized as simple facts prior to ideology is
echoed by Sebastian Morris, the co-editor of India Infrastructure Report 2002, a
document offering policy analysis and recommendations for the governance of
commercial activity. Chiding the government for what he perceives as the
conservatism of its macro-economic policymakers in not allowing the rupee to
take a free fall against the dollar, Morris proclaims that ‘this is not the time for
ideological histrionics’ (Morris and Shekhar, 2002: 1). In the 2001 budget, then
Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha proposed labour reforms that would cut back
the protection offered to the organized labour workforce.1
These recommenda-tions have already generated much controversy, with trade
unions claiming theyare anti-labour. Yet policy-makers and those in
government argue to the
contrary.
In an interview, Arun Jaitley, then Union Minister for Law, Justice and
Company Affairs, stated, ‘Labour reforms are not anti-poor and will create
more jobs. And the sooner the unions clamouring for ‘rights’ understand it, the
better’ (Barman, 2001). Subir Gokarn, chief economist at the National Council
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 421
of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), similarly backed the proposed
reforms, saying, ‘it’s clear that the government cannot hire anymore, so the
private sector must be freed from its shackles’ (Barman, 2001). As these
examples indicate, the arguments proffered by the pro-reform advocates in
government, journalism and policy call in each case for waking-up-and-
smelling-the-coffee, for recognizing hard facts about India in a changing world.
The actions and rhetoric of numerous Indian state and non-state agencies seem
to endorse globalization and liberalization as desirable transformative forces that
will ultimately provide not only economic rewards, such as increased global
competitiveness of Indian companies and healthier foreign exchange reserves,
but also significant social benefits such as more job opportunities, higher sala-
ries, greater consumer choice and a better quality of life. Indeed, across the
most visible sectors of Indian society and the state, there appears to be
emerging a consensus in limiting the terms of debate about socioeconomic
issues to largely those positions, which already presuppose globalization and
liberalization as enabling frameworks for positive change in the economy and in society
at large.
In this paper I assess, on the basis of key arguments from Pierre Bourdieu’s
work, how and why this consensus about the positive effects of globalization and
liberalization could have established itself as a dominant discourse across Indian
social space. It is this very question that Bourdieu seeks to answer, albeit in the
context of France and Europe, in the essays ‘The myth of “globalization†and the
European welfare state’ (1998a: 29–45) and ‘Neo-liberalism, the utopia
(becoming a reality) of unlimited exploitation’ (1998b: 94–105). Describing
the discourse that validates globalization and economic liberalization as a partic-
ular worldview which he terms ‘neoliberalism’, Bourdieu in these essays
describes how neoliberalism establishes itself as a doxa – an unquestionable
orthodoxy that operates as if it were the objective truth – across social space in
its entirety, from the practices and perceptions of individuals (at the level of
habitus) to the practices and perceptions of the state and social groups (at the
level of fields).
The full import of the arguments in the essays, however, can only
be grasped with reference to Bourdieu’s theory of the state and with reference
to key concepts, such as doxa, habitus, field and capital, which Bourdieu expli-
cates in greater detail across several works.3
This paper, accordingly, seeks to
fulfil two related objectives: to explicate Bourdieu’s theory of the state and his
concepts of habitus, doxa, field and capital, and to demonstrate, on the basis of
Bourdieu’s arguments, how neoliberalism as doxa has colonized the discussion
and perception in Indian social space about the effects of globalization and
liberalization. In the first section of the paper, I define neoliberalism and expli-
cate Bourdieu’s critique of neoliberalism to show what he means by neoliber-
alism as doxa. In the next section, I explain Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, doxa,
field and capital. In the third section, I spell out Bourdieu’s theory of the state.
Finally, on the basis of the concepts and arguments explained in earlier sections,
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 422
I offer a descriptive sketch of the establishment of neoliberalism as doxa in Indian
society.
In Neoliberalism In Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism,
Michael Peters (2001) analyses the success story of neoliberalism in the
latter half of the twentieth century. He traces its rise from a theory
of economic behaviour to its consolidation as a widely adopted framework of
political, social, and economic governance at both
the national and global level. The large-scale adoption of the neoliberal paradigm
as a doctrine of governance has been paralleled by an ever-more strident self-
affirmation of neoliberalism as a ‘global social science able to explain all rational
conduct, or even simply all behavior’ (2001: viii). Indeed, the success of neo-
liberalism as a mode of governance can only be understood with reference to the fact
that neoliberalism has managed to establish itself as a credible vision, at once
universal and foundational, for describing social reality itself.
As an economic theory, neoliberalism can be viewed as a selective reworking
of the tenets of classical political economy (2001: 14). Nonetheless, neo-
liberalism preserves the central idea of classical economics that the free market
is an essential prerequisite for the free society. Invoking a definition of freedom
as individual freedom from state interference and freedom for the market, the
commitment to neoliberalism is predicated, by definition, on a marked opposi-
tion to the idea of the welfare or protectionist state (2001: 14–15). Neo-
liberalism assumes that economic behaviour can be understood in terms of the
human attributes of ‘rationality, individuality, and self-interest’ (2001: vii).
However, neoliberalism also posits that all aspects of human social behaviour
are motivated by these very characteristics. A model in which ‘the social is
redescribed in terms of the economic’ (2001: 15), neoliberalism operates as a
theory of the social founded on a narrowly economistic notion of human
behaviour, which it deems identical to human nature itself.
As Peters points out, the doctrine of neoliberalism has been widely influen-
tial in shaping national governmental policies in the West, especially in the last
two decades.2 He details a range of government policies of the Thatcher and
Regan eras, which collectively articulate the mandate of neoliberal government:
economic liberalization or rationalization characterized by the abolition of
subsidies and tariffs, floating the exchange rate, the freeing up on controls
on foreign investment; the restructuring of the state sector, including
corporatization and privatization of state trading departments and other
assets, ‘downsizing’, ‘contracting out’, the attack on unions, and abolition
of wage bargaining in favor of employment contracts; and, finally, the
dismantling of the welfare state through commercialization, ‘contracting
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 423
out’, ‘targeting of services’, and individual ‘responsibilization’ for health,
welfare, and
education.
(2001: 18–19)
Peters states that neoliberalism is not only enforced at the
national level to ensure
competitiveness in a global economy, but is similarly invested at
the global level
and in transnational organizations like the World Bank, IMF and WTO (2001:
viii). Historically, neoliberalism has developed in the economically advanced
countries of the West but is a force that less developed nation-states, such as in
the Third World, have to negotiate in their dependence on the West and on
institutions like the World Bank or the IMF (2001: viii).
Bourdieu’s analysis of neoliberalism concurs with that of Peters, specifically
with regard to the economistic bias of neoliberal discourse. Bourdieu states that
neoliberalism ascribes to a mathematical model of economic behaviour as syn-
onymous with the nature of human sociality. In this model, it is taken for granted
‘that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the
ultimate and sole goal of human actions; or that economic forces cannot be
resisted’ (1998a: 31). The neoliberal redefinition of the social in terms of the
economic is primarily in terms of the language of quantifiability, calculability,
cost-benefit rationalization and business management techniques. The irreduc-
ibly social that does not translate into mathematical terms is accordingly dis-
carded; ‘a radical separation is made between the economic and the social, which
is left to one side, abandoned to sociologists as a kind of reject’ (1998a: 31). The
chaff of the social cannot pose any legitimate objections to neoliberalism, since
it cannot be represented as a variable in the equation.
Bourdieu argues further that neoliberal discourse views and presents itself
as the ‘scientific description of reality’ (1998b: 94). The assumptions underlying
neoliberalism – about the goal of human actions and about the possibility of
describing the social in terms of the economic – can be forgotten as assumptions
qua assumptions, since neoliberalism claims the status of objective, scientific
truth whose truth-value transcends history.4 Historically- or socially-constituted
logic or rationality are not recognized by the neoliberal worldview as valid. From
the perspective of the neoliberal vision, social reality can only be grasped by
accepting the premises of neoliberal thought. What the program of neoliberalism
does not acknowledge simply does not exist for it, since, by definition, it cannot exist
in the neoliberal scheme.
As Bourdieu states, ‘neo-classical economics recognizes only individuals,
whether it is dealing with companies, trade unions or families’ (1998b: 96). This is what
allows neoliberal discourse to ‘embark on a programme of methodical destruction of
collectives’ (1998b: 95–6, original
emphasis). Bourdieu argues that neoliberalism should be viewed as a political
program, that is at once ‘dehistoricized and desocialized’ (1998b: 95), and, one
may infer, depoliticized as well. Neoliberalism is, hence, a political agenda
predicated on a certain vision of the social world, one that legitimates a certain
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 424
scientistic view of that world and deems as illegitimate opposing views about the
world. Neoliberalism is founded on a particular principle of vision, but, if one
takes its self-definition seriously, one must believe that it does not privilege any
one point of view but merely presents the truth about things as they are.
This is what Bourdieu terms neoliberalism as doxa (a term that I will shortly
clarify), the self-definition and presentation of neoliberalism as a self-evident
truth about the human and social, which is beyond question.5 The status of
neoliberalism as doxa, Bourdieu tells us, is ‘what gives the dominant discourse
its strength’ (1998a: 29). According to Bourdieu, the doxa of neoliberalism as
the self-evident truth about the social has been steadily prepared over decades in
France and the UK by partisan groups of academics, mediapersons, busi-
nessmen, and others. Ordinary citizens and the media ‘passively’ (1998a: 30)
contribute to the entrenchment of neoliberalism as doxa, by accepting and
repeating the claims of neoliberalism. As a result, in public discourse in these
societies, an acceptance of the propositions of neoliberalism is seen as an inevi-
table recognition of the truth about the social world.
The negative effects of the establishment of neoliberalism as a paradigm both
for governance and for understanding the social are experienced in a plethora of
ways in different societies. In France, Bourdieu tells us, the state has begun to
abdicate its role as a guarantor and protector of social benefits in the spheres of
education, health and welfare (1998a: 34). In the name of globalization,
European workers are told to work longer hours to make European countries
competitive with those countries that offer no protection or benefits for labour.
In the UK and the USA, economic insecurity affects not just the working class
but a middle class as well, with options for permanent jobs with benefits being
replaced by temporary and underpaid jobs (1998a: 37). In another sphere, the
neoliberal vision is significantly eroding the autonomy of the arts, bringing the
pressures of the market to bear upon the production and consumption of
literature and film (1998s: 38). The near-monopolistic encroachment of neo-
liberalism on the terms of discussion about the social includes the colonization
of language as well: corporate decisions to sack workers are described as ‘bold
social plans’ (1998a: 31) and the jargon of deregulation, downsizing and
slimming masks the actual social consequences of such actions.
According to Bourdieu, what the neoliberal worldview actually achieves is
nothing other than the oldest dream of capitalism, the establishment of a frame-
work for the accumulation and distribution of profit according to Darwinian
principles. The worldview is similarly nothing other than a reincarnation of the
oldest traditions of conservative thought, rejecting the very notion of the social
in favour of an atomistic fiction of individuals who are governed by the ‘free’
market in the economic arena, and who are free agents in all their choices.
Hence, according to the tenets of conservative thought, individuals have to bear
responsibility for the situations in which they find themselves. Bourdieu
enumerates some of those whose interests the system of neoliberalism serves as
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 425
‘shareholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative politicians or
social democrats converted to the cosy capitulations of laissez faire, senior
officials of the finance ministry’ (1998b: 96).
Along with national and multi-national corporations, and organizations such as
the IMF or WTO, this is the
powerful constituency that neoliberalism serves. This
constituency, in turn,
serves neoliberalism as its guardian, advocate and defender.
I now turn to
explicating some key concepts in Bourdieu’s work, towards theorizing how
neoliberalism might manage to entrench itself in public discourse, whether in
India or France, as the description of reality itself.
Key concepts: habitus, doxa, field and capital
Habitus and doxa
Bourdieu uses the term doxa as early as Outline of a
Theory of Practice (1977), in
relation to his theorization of the habitus. The concept of
the habitus may be
understood as an explanation of the functioning social space at the
‘micro-level’,
a description of the relationship between ‘a particular type of
environment’
(1977: 72) shared by a group of people and the practices of those who
inhabit
that shared space. Bourdieu asserts that there are structures that shape
the
character of particular shared environments. For example, in class societies,
‘material conditions of existence’ (1977: 72) constitute the respective social
spaces inhabited by different classes.
"Practice," an important term in Bourdieu, can be defined as those embodied activities and competencies that are ‘learned’ and carried out by individuals in
a social space. But this learning is not of the order of something that is
consciously incorporated by an individual into their repertoire of responses,
actions or reactions; neither, for that matter does this learning operate as an
unconscious motivational basis for all practices. It would be more appropriate
to say that these practices are acquired as a result of being integrated, acclima-
tized and shaped in a particular type of environment. These learned practices
in turn enable individuals to negotiate interactions with other individuals in that
social space.
Bourdieu argues that the structures that typify social spaces give rise to
‘dispositions’ in the members of a social space. Dispositions can be understood
as inclinations towards certain responses, as the tendencies to make one choice
over another and to privilege one action over another, that is, the tendencies to
regularly engage in certain practices as compared with other practices.
Bourdieu’s habitus is a system of such dispositions that endure across space and
time. An individual may inhabit more than one habitus, and various habituses
may overlap to some extent. However, any particular habitus is circumscribed
by a group’s homogeneity. Operating as a worldview – a framework of cognitive
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 426
apprehension, moral judgment, ethical commitments or aesthetic inclinations
– the habitus becomes the basis for enacting that worldview through practices.
However, what makes a particular habitus distinct from another habitus, and
what makes a habitus an ‘objective’ basis for engendering certain dispositions and
practices in all those who inhabit that habitus, is the fact that there is a range of
practices and dispositions for any particular habitus, which corresponds to what
is thinkable within that habitus. There is thus a limit to the possibilities ‘allowed’
by the perceptual framework corresponding to any habitus. What sets this limit
and lies beyond it, is what Bourdieu terms doxa. To question the doxa is an act
essentially in the order of heresy, for it is to question the very basis on which not
just particular practices or dispositions ultimately rest, but on which the very
system that is the basis of all practices in a habitus ultimately rests. Hence,
Bourdieu argues, for those who inhabit any particular habitus, what counts as
liberal, radical, conservative or orthodox is all within the realm of the thinkable,
that is, within the ambit of what does not challenge the doxa. The doxa may be
viewed as akin to a substratum of presuppositions, and the acquired practices and
dispositions within a habitus as reflections, albeit unselfconscious, unarticulated
or untheorized, of taken-for-granted deductions about reality itself.
What is vital to note here is that the doxa is habitus-specific, thus, implying
that what is doxa for inhabitants of one habitus need not necessarily be doxa for
the inhabitants of another. This difference in doxa is what marks off one habitus
as distinct from another. However, following from Bourdieu’s description of the
relationship between habitus and structures –
‘the structures constitutive of a
particular type of environment (e.g. the material
conditions of class existence) produce habitus’ (1977: 72) – it follows that there must
be some general relationship between the doxa of particular habituses and these
structures at large,
provided the structures producing various habituses are the same.
Hence, while
what counts as doxa for one habitus may be substantially different
from what
counts as doxa in another habitus, the order of logic according to which the
doxic
is designated, or the type of practice that falls under doxa, will be common to
various habituses. By extension, the more variable the structures in their impact
across a society, the less likely is the occurrence of structural consistency across
the doxa of various habituses. But if it were the same agency that shaped these
habitus-producing structures across the breadth of a society, and if the basic
paradigm or method for shaping these structures was the same for all inhabitants
of that society, then each habitus would be imprinted by the same vision of what
counts as doxa. This is Bourdieu’s essential argument regarding neoliberalism: it
is an all-pervasive paradigm and method for shaping habitus-producing struc-
tures. As I will show later, Bourdieu posits that the state is the agency that grants
the paradigm its all-pervasiveness, through the economic, cultural, or social
policies that it advocates. Bourdieu argues that what occurs at the level of the
habitus (‘practices’) also occurs at the level of the state – given certain conditions of
structural homogeneity.
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 427
Field and capital
Bourdieu employs the notion of the field to explain the functioning and compo-
sition of social space across a society, as opposed to his theorization of the habitus,
which explains the functioning of social space in particular and homogeneous
environments shared by groups of people. Social space can be understood as
made up of different, and distinct (although often overlapping) fields, which
correspond to different spheres of activity and practice, such as the cultural,
economic, social, and political.6
A particular field in a society can be viewed as an
embodiment of the valuation
of, exchange of, and struggle over the resources of the field,
between different
groups of inhabitants in the society. But the power relations that structure
a field
do not necessarily operate as an unequal distribution of resources, for each group
of inhabitants can surely bring its ‘own’ resources into the field. Rather, the
relations that structure a field operate through the legislation of what kinds of
resources count as a valid currency of exchange, that is, what kinds of resources
translate as valid capital for the field. Hence, in the cultural field, while each group
may bring its own set of cultural practices into the field and each group may
possess equal resources in this basic sense, how much capital each group possesses
is decided by what counts as culture within that group’s repertoire of resources.
The criteria for what counts as culture is decreed by the dominant class in that
field, which is the class that possesses the most cultural capital, and whose interest
that particular structure of the field serves. Hence, any group seeking to improve
its relative standing in social space, by aspiring to a position of greater power than
it has had before, reinforces the definition of culture and hence the very structure
that serves the dominant class’ interests.
Secondly, what is negotiated and contested in the exchange of capital within
a field is not just those actions that would allow various classes to increase their
capital, but equally importantly, the very stakes by which capital is defined at all,
which Bourdieu terms "nomos."
Nomos is defined by Bourdieu in Pascalian Meditations
as the irreducible, foundational, ‘fundamental law’ (1997: 96) that struc-
tures a field. Nomos may also be understood as the regulative principle that orders
the functioning of a field. Since it is the constitutive structure of a field, it is not
dependent on any forces within the field. Therefore, it does not have to be
explained in terms of these internal forces, nor can it be questioned from within
the ambit of the field. Yet the nomos is neither a transcendental eternal idea nor
a principle of abstract logic. It is a historically shaped view that reflects the
interests of the groups that hold dominant positions in a field. It is, in this sense,
arbitrary because there is no necessary or intrinsic reason for one principle as
opposed to another to orient the functioning of the field. The nomos is what
constitutes the doxa at the level of field, since the nomos demarcates the limit to
what is thinkable within the field even as the nomos must itself remain outside the
ken of the thinkable.7
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 428
Thus, in the cultural field, for example, what different groups challenge
each other for is not just an increase in the amount of capital they possess, but
the criteria by which something is considered genuine cultural capital, and for
the right to define that nomos. What this implies is that all groups who are
participants in a field share the assumption that increasing their capital requires
participating in the game of exchange, negotiation and contestation that takes
place in the field. The participation in this game even by those classes against
whom the dice is loaded, amounts to a reaffirmation of the structure of the field,
that is, the reaffirmation of those practices that serve a dominant class as the most
authentic incarnation of that sphere of social activity. In other words, this
amounts to a ‘recognition’ of both the nomos and the doxa of the field.
Bourdieu, additionally, argues that value or capital in one field does not
necessarily translate into value in another field.
Nor, for that matter, can capital
in any field be understood in terms of its economic value, that is in terms of
economic capital.
This is a function of two related facts about the nature of fields:
first, fields are relatively autonomous from each other and, second, that the nomos
– the ‘law’ that structures each field and dictates the principle for the struggle
over capital in that field of various fields – cannot be understood or represented
in terms of any simple equation. There is no fixed formula that could explain
why one kind of capital translates (or fails to translate) into another kind of
capital; there is no fixed relationship between the various types of capital. The
nomos of each field is arbitrary, and can be understood appropriately only in terms
of the history of a particular field in a particular society.
Nevertheless, certain kinds of capital are ‘convertible’ into other kinds of
capital, for example, economic capital can be converted into educational capital
and educational capital into social capital. While there is no general equivalency
between forms of capital, there are rates of exchange according to which one
particular form of capital may be converted to another particular form of capital.
The mode and mechanisms by which economic capital translates into social
capital and the factors that determine this translation will vary from society to
society. What emerges from this scenario is that, in a particular society, some
kinds of capital may be more advantageous than others, in terms of their ability
to convert into other kinds of capital. This creates a third form of ‘struggle’ over
capital: in addition to (a) volume of a given capital and (b) definition of what will
be valued in a given field (nomos), there is an attempt (c) to control the relative
advantage of forms of capital in relation to one another, that is, the ease of
transfer of capital from one field to another.
Now, any agency or force that can either impact the nomos of a field or the
relative advantage of one form of capital with regard to another can influence
the relative relations between fields in social space as a whole and the play of
capital both within fields and across fields. For example, if a particular kind of
educational capital becomes suddenly valuable in a society, but if that educational
capital can only be acquired on guarantee of possession of a certain kind of
CULTURAL STUDIES
p. 429
cultural capital, then the demand for that kind of cultural capital will also
suddenly increase. For Bourdieu, the state is precisely this kind of an agency,
which, through policy, sets the exchange rate between different fields. The state
even alters the nomos of specific fields because these fields will tend to adjust the
stakes according to the advantages both within fields, and, through exchange,
across fields. Late in his work, Bourdieu begins to think of this meta-valuation
system as a kind of paradigm and views neoliberalism as just the sort of ‘value
system’ between fields, at once altering the fields and, at the same time, natu-
ralizing the meta-value as the essential value for every sphere of sociality. As we
will see now, the meaning of the state in Bourdieu can neither be reduced to an
objective force over and above those that it governs, nor can it be understood
simply as the collective embodiment of all those who fall under its purview.
Bourdieu’s theory of the state
Bourdieu understands the state as the ‘culmination of a process of
concentration of
different types of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of
coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural capital or (better) informational
capital, and symbolic capital)’ (1997: 41, original emphasis).
As fields emerge historically, shaped by the play of capital within these fields, the
state’s accumulation of the
capital pertaining to that field increases as well. With the state becoming the
possessor of significant amounts of different kinds of capital, &Attachment:
