Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx".
This interview comes at a time when Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power and Eagleton’s Ideology were both recently published, and the talk unfolds pertaining to themes of these two books. Eagleton glosses the theme of Bourdieu’s book as being concerned with “the social conditions of the production of utterances” holding to a view of language as “an instrument of power and action [more] than of communication” (265). Having said this he raises Bourdieu’s terms “symbolic power,” “symbolic violence” and “linguistic capital” and other to ask “how these processes relate to the concept of ideology” (265). Bourdieu congratulates him on the accuracy of his gloss and then says that he tries not to use the word ideology as such, suggesting that to say, of another’s position, that it is ideological is a form of what he calls symbolic violence (266). He says that his terminology is meant to be more effective and precise and allow him to avoid the imprecision of the term ‘ideology’ (266). He also remarks that for his, the concept “does not work any more” (266). Eagleton then acknowledges all the vagueness and imprecision that the concept have been subject to and lists what he thinks of as the dominant arguments against it; the theory of representation that in some cases it is founded upon; what I have called earlier the ‘false consciousness problem’; the issue of “enlightened false consciousness” - basically that people know quite well what the are doing and are simply cynically accepting of it, and; the argument that the system runs without the need of consciousness to reproduce it (266-7). Eagleton argues that these are not enough to dispel the concept’s pertinence as he thinks there is something meaningfully brought to light by the notion of false consciousness (267). He then asks Bourdieu where that notion might fit, if it does, into his thought. Bourdieu agrees with all the criticisms that Eagleton enumerated and adds that the term was used by many, though he singles out Althusser, in an “aristocratic” fashion - essentially to mark off the “the true knowledge” from everything else which would be “false consciousness” (267). Bourdieu expands upon the notion of doxa, and how it is, in his view, that it functions outside of our conscious awareness (267-8). He then goes on to claim that consciousness has been too privileged and that the “social word doesn’t work in terms of consciousness; it works in terms of practices, mechanisms, and so forth” (268). He then says that we must move further away from Cartesian thinking (which Marxism is an instance of in his view) and “towards a different philosophy in which agents are not aiming consciously towards things, or mistakenly guided by false representation” (268). [This is an edited transcription, so presumably this is what Bourdieu meant to say here. But I cannot but wonder, in what sort of (social, political) philosophy would we find agents that are not aiming consciously toward ends of some sort?] Eagleton responds, asking further questions about doxa. He is concerned that by the claim that doxa are naturalized, and that doxa are legitimated by virtue of people’s practices, but that these claims make no room for variance in people’s responses and thus for “dissent, criticism and opposition” (268). Bourdieu says that our capacity for resistance has be “overestimated” and that people, even those living in appalling conditions “accept much more than we would have believed” (268). That they do seems to provide Bourdieu with evidence in favor of his concept of doxa. He then gives a fascinating example from his researches in France regarding the beliefs of people about success in life. His finding is that the further one goes down the social hierarchy, the more likely people are to believe that success is entailed by “natural talents or gifts” - and thus, the poorest of the poor would be the most likely to assume that this state was, in this sense, their fault for being “stupid” (269). He describes this structure of belief as a “formidable mechanism” which is “much bigger and more powerful than television or propaganda” (269). He does believe that dissent exists, but that it is “not where we look for it” (269). Eagleton, catching the drift of Bourdieu’s thought he, brings up Bourdieu’s term for such dissent, heterodoxy, described as “an oppositional kind of language” (269). Returning to the notion of doxa, Eagleton asks “can people believe and not believe, or believe at different levels?” (269). Bourdieu’s answer is no. He argues that the questions presupposes a “philosophy of man” and thus privileges consciousness but that “ideological effects” are mostly “transmitted through the body” (269). He argues that because of this, change is very difficult. He also refers to “scholastic bias” which for him means the belief that “problems can be solved only through consciousness” as one of our biggest weaknesses (270). Bourdieu says that in a situation of “symbolic domination, resistance is more difficult, since it is something you absorb like air” (270). Eagleton then responds to the issues about the overvaluation of consciousness and points out that there are a variety of Marxists who agree, he then points to Althusser who “was trying to shift the concept of ideology on to a much less conscious, and much more practical, institutional place” which to him [I concur] sounds not unlike Bourdieu’s position (270). Eagleton then raises the question I brought up at the end of my annotation of Eagleton where he mentions Bourdieu, that of be extending the notions of capital and economy into realms which are not in and of themselves economic, that his theory risks being one in which the zero degree of all social action is war (271). Bourdieu agrees that this is a “problem” but say that he “tend[s] to think that the structure of most of the fields, most of the social games, is such that competition - a struggle for domination - is quasi-inevitable” (271). This leads him to discussion communication a bit, and he claims that many linguistic practices “cannot be understood in terms of communication” (271). After a positive reference to J.L. Austin he says that Austin’s account, as good as it is, does not attend to “the social conditions of possibility he describes”, these being precisely what Bourdieu is interested in. Both speak then about coming from blue-collar backgrounds and being in some ways out of step with the academic positions that they have attained, and Bourdieu says that he tries to comprehend both what he has lost and what he has gained by developing an “academic mind” (272). The floor is opened to questions at this point, some of which are interesting but do not produce answers that advance what has already been said greatly until near the end, when one audience member asks about “economic determinants” and Bourdieu answers but never quite satisfies the questioner. Eagleton steps in to try and rephrase the question, which then appears like this “[y]ou are reacting to economism by lifting economic imagery into the cultural sphere rather than by registering the weight of the material and economic within culture” (276). Bourdieu’s answer to this is “[m]aybe you are right” and says that because this area of thought is so prone to economism that he tends to “insist upon the other aspects (...) the less probably, less visible” (276). [Here I am moved to applaud Bourdieu’s honesty, but wonder is this tendency is truly justified simply from his dislike for economism? Also, does his theory do much more than restage economism in other fields of cultural life?]
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