Bourdieu, Marx, Feminism

Over at The Great Refusal, there’s two posts reflecting Bourdieu’s rejection of certain notions from Marx, obviously a propos reading Masculine Domination.

The first one deals with Marx’s concept of consciousness and, especially, false consciousness. It’s rightly pointed out that Bourdieu prefers not to talk about consciousness as something only going on in the mind, but about habitus, encompassing much more than that, namely the physical aspect of our existence that cannot be separated from the way we think about things.

This concept is interesting as the language Bourdieu uses is entirely physical. Opacity, inertia, and bodies are all words that refer to the physical world, concepts that are used in sciences and observations like Physics. Here Bourdieu evokes the dense and impenetrable state that social constructions impose on physical bodies and thereby become internalized. The habitus creates people’s dispositions which are an internal embodiment of the social structure itself. This is very independent and different from a discussion of ideologies and “ideas” that people possess about the world. Rather, the socialization Bourdieu discusses is much deeper and problematic than that as it becomes integrated within our body itself.

I totally agree and I find the thoughts about the relation between external (social) and internal (habitus) structure very interesting and worth the read.
However, I’m not so happy about the second post. The title, Consciousness Determines Life, pretty much says it all: There’s an interpretation here saying that Bourdieu opposes Marx’s materialism.

Marx believed that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (The German Ideology). Therefore, the material reality of life is not determined by thoughts and ideologies but rather these ideologies are a reflection and reaction to the material existence of people. If this material existence is extended to represent the physical world, Bourdieu here too rejects Marx and his idea that consciousness is a result of the way life is. Bourdieu subscribes to the conception that our physical existence is structured by the prevailing ideologies. These ideologies, such as the division of labor, presuppose the physical reality.

To support this, Bourdieu’s debate of historically changing concepts of the ‘physical nature’ of men and women is cited, concluding:

The division of labor, an ideology, a constructed concept has therefore determined our life, material and physical existence.

Now, I don’t think Bourdieu was this kind of a constructivist. His point, rather, was exactly what was stated in the first post: It’s not a solely ‘discursive’ matter of ideologies but an equally physical matter of habitus. Or, to put it differently: It’s neither simply consciousness that determines physical existence nor just the other way round, but there is a complex interrelation between the social structures outside of us and the social structures incorporated as dispositions of habitus. And, what’s more: the existing relation between men and women at a given time and the corresponding division of labour is of course much more than a mere ideology: it is a physical reality in the structure of everyday life, and only thus does it have the ability to become part of the internal social structures of habitus. Domination thus does have much stronger roots than just being a ‘constructed concept’ that determines our existence.