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Western Journal of Communication
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The Scholastic Fallacy, Habitus, and
Symbolic Violence: Pierre Bourdieu and
the Prospects of Ideology Criticism
James Arnt Aune
a
James Arnt Aune is a Prof essor and Head of
Communicat ion at Texas A&M Universit y.
a
Communicat ion, Texas A&M Universit y
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To cite this article: James Arnt Aune James Arnt Aune is a Prof essor and Head of Communicat ion at
Texas A&M Universit y. (2011): The Schol ast ic Fal l acy, Habit us, and Symbol ic Viol ence: Pierre Bourdieu
and t he Prospect s of Ideol ogy Crit icism, West ern Journal of Communicat ion, 75: 4, 429-433
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The Scholastic Fallacy, Habitus, and
Symbolic Violence: Pierre Bourdieu
and the Prospects of Ideology
Criticism
James Arnt Aune
One disturbing feature of academic discussions of ideology or hegemony is a lack
of reflexivity. In other words, there is an implicit but unjustified assumption that
the academic has somehow escaped the hegemonic processes that influence every-
one else. The classroom, the office, the meeting room, and the academic confer-
ence remain subject to the struggle for status, the perverse dynamics of the
politics of identity, and the imperatives of the all-powerful Market that affect
every other workplace. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, the hardest thing for academics
to theorize is the skhole itselfthe freedom to engage in studious leisure that is
at the basis of our theorizing (Pascalian 13). We get glimpses of the oddity of the
skhole when forced to explain our work to people outside the university; I once
watched a loan officer shake his head in disbelief when he realized that I only
teach six hours a week. Like other professors, I commonly complain about how
committee meetings and mundane aspects of teaching are getting in the way
of work. For us, work is a good thing, unlike probably 99% of the rest of
humanity, and if we listen to our senior professors and deans a major task of
our professional lives is to develop strategies for preserving time and space for
work against the encroachments of service, teaching, and family.
Our separation from the world of production is both liberating and also crippling
(although my own secure position as a tenured full professor at a research extensive
university makes me forget at times the scramble for publications by junior faculty on
the pre-tenure assembly line). Because of our separation from normal work,
James Arnt Aune is a Professor and Head of Communication at Texas A&M University. Correspondence to:
James Arnt Aune, Department of Communication, 102 Bolton Hall, Texas A&M University, College Station,
TX 77843-4234, USA. E-mail: jaaune@gmail.com
Western Journal of Communication
Vol. 75, No. 4, JulySeptember 2011, pp. 429433
ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) # 2011 Western States Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2011.588900
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academics have to be particularly vigilant about their own blind spots when engaging
in political activism. Bourdieu writes,
The social and mental separation is, paradoxically, never clearer than in the
attemptsoften pathetic and ephemeralto rejoin the real world, particularly
through political commitments (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) whose irresponsible uto-
pianism and unrealistic radicality bear witness that they are still a way of denying
the realities of the social world. (Bourdieu, Pascalian 41)
The scholastic fallacy consists above all in injecting meta- into discourses and
practices (Bourdieu, Practical Reason 13132). In addition to confusing research with
politics, a specific way in which the scholastic fallacy can impair our research is a
tendency to divorce the mind from the body, with the latter seen as inferior. One
competitor with ideology criticism, close reading (the subject of an earlier influential
Forum in this journal) simply ignored the fact that rhetoric is by bodies whose voice
and gesture are essential to the production of meaning.
Distance from commodity production, confused political judgment, and an over-
emphasis on the mind are but three aspects of the scholastic fallacy we need to
remember when analyzing the misery imposed on laboring bodies by economic
and political structures. Specifically, we need to keep the cognitive distortions
imposed by our social positionor what John Dewey and Kenneth Burke earlier
called our occupational psychosisin discussing the relationship between struc-
ture and the human (Burke, Permanence and Change 50, 5859). Academics,
Bourdieu points out, are fond of such oppositions as structure and agency because
they are useful in generating theories and schools of thought that reinforce a sense
of the game, the illusio required to keep the academic enterprise going. There is
always the risk in ideology criticism that it may become the basis for accumulating
symbolic capital for academics, at the expense of the original Marxist insight that
ideology criticism was one important weapon provided by intellectuals in the struggle
against class oppression. As Dana Cloud and Joshua Gunn explain in their introduc-
tion to this forum, what is distinctive about the project of ideology criticism in com-
munication studies is its commitment to understanding the social roots of messages,
the centrality of class in political change, and a commitment to rationality. My con-
tribution to this forum is to explicate the work of the late French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu as an important addition to the tradition of ideology criticism. In addition
to encouraging greater self-reflexiveness about the conditions of the academic quest
for symbolic capital, the Bourdieuian project with which I identify provides two
important concepts for bringing ideology criticism forward: habitus and symbolic
violence.
Habitus and Symbolic Violence
Bourdieus concept of the habitus is especially useful in enlarging our understanding
of the role of communication and rhetoric in the construction and maintenance of
ideologies. He defines the habitus as a structuring mechanism that emerges
from within agents, the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with
430 J. A. Aune
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unforeseen and ever-changing situations . . . a system of lasting and transposable dis-
positions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix
of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infi-
nitely diversified tasks (Bourdieu, Outline 72, 95).
We are first of all bodies situated in social space. All the divisions and distinctions
in social space (high=low, left=right, etc.) are really and symbolically expressed in
physical space appropriated as reified social space, says Bourdieu (Pascalian 134).
We are characterized by the place we are more or less permanently domiciled, and
by the relative position of location, which can be expressed in terms of the rarity,
a source of material or symbolic revenues, of our locations, and, finally, by the
extent of the space we take up and occupy. My work-place is more mobile, for
example, than that of the secretaries in my office; my spatial location at Texas
A&M University is marginally a source of higher material or symbolic revenues than
my previous places of employment.
But we are also bodies included in the space of a field, through the illusio
which constitutes the field as the space of a game that thoughts and actions can
be affected and modified, even without direct physical contact. The capacity to par-
ticipate in and construct social reality is not the capacity of a transcendental subject
but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed organizing
principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated social experience
(Pascalian 13537). We develop, over time, a body fit for our work.
So we learn bodily; The most serious social injunctions are addressed not to the
intellect but to the body, treated as a memory pad (Bourdieu, Pascalian 141). Such
bodily learning is like that passage in Franz Kafkas In the Penal Colony in which
all the letters of the laws the prisoner has broken are inscribed on his body, thus literaliz-
ing the ruthless mnemotechnics that groups often resort to in order to naturalize arbi-
trariness and. . . so confer on it the absurd and impenetrable necessity which is
concealed, without a beyond, behind the most sacred institutions (Pascalian 14142).
As I walk through my office building, it is not difficult to discern immediately
whether the person I encounter is a janitor, secretary, administrator, faculty member,
or graduate student. Legitimation is not, as Weber assumed, so much about assent, as
the way in which our bodies fall into place with the established order, for example, in
the temporal rhythms of the school day, or the academic year. In observing
hegemony at work we see that the
practical recognition through which the dominated, often unwillingly, contribute
to their own domination by tacitly accepting, in advance, the limits imposed on
them, often takes the form of bodily emotionshame, timidity, anxiety, guilt),
often associated with the impression of regressing towards archaic relationships,
those of childhood and the family. (Pascalian 169)
An understanding of the role of discursive practices in domination and exploi-
tation cannot leave the body aside.
Nonetheless, messages do matter. Our conventional politics and our workplaces
are shaped and reshaped by the scribblings of economists and management theorists
Western Journal of Communication 431
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all the time. Market language now dominates discussions of higher education: depart-
ment heads and faculty members are expected to be entrepreneurial and develop
strategic plans and market niches. Flexibility, imposed on blue-collar workers
and farmers during the Reagan and Thatcher era, now threatens both tenure and
academic freedom. One productive option for the ideological critic is to reframe
the notion of ideology into symbolic violence, in Bourdieus sense. Symbolic
violence occurs when the dominated can only perceive themselves within the
instruments of knowledge they have in common with the dominator (Pascalian 170).
It may be that an important way forward for ideology criticism in communication
studies is to interrogate the traditional (ideological?) opposition between rhetoric and
violence. After the shooting of Arizona Representative Giffords in February, 2011,
there was a predictable call by rhetoricians for heightened civility in our public dis-
course. As Cloud and Gunn argue at the end of the introduction to this Forum, we
owe a great deal to Slavoj Z

izeks reinvention of ideology criticism. In his recent book

Violence, Z

izek makes some suggestive distinction between subjective violence (acts of

direct violence against an individual or group) and the objective violence perpetrated
by systemic oppression and symbolic acts. If we complicate the traditional liberal
opposition between rhetoric and violence to include ideology as symbolic violence,
we will end up with a richer reflection on the relationship between rhetoric and social
change and we can reopen an important political debate about violent revolution. As
Erin J. Rand usefully remarks, If violence forcefully, compellingly, and irrevocably
narrows the grounds for response, it necessarily enables particular possibilities even
as it eliminates many others, therefore founding and defining the rhetorical agency
of the subject. Thus, violence and rhetoric may not, in fact, be antithetical, and out-
right denunciations of violence may foreclose rather than protect the agency of its
victims (476).
As Gramsci wrote in his analysis of Americanism and Fordism, the rationalization
of production and labor in the U.S. occurred through a skillful combination of force
and persuasion: force, through the destruction of radical movements and labor unions,
and persuasion, through high wages, various social benefits, and extremely subtle
ideological and political propaganda. He concluded, hegemony here is born in the
factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political
and ideological intermediaries (17879). It may be wise for those of us interested
in combating neo-liberalism as an ideology to pay closer attention to the micro-politics
of force and persuasion in the workplaceboth our own and of workers in general.
There remains the risk, as Bourdieu would hasten to remind us, of the scholastic
illusion that raising consciousness will create liberation, failing to recognize the iner-
tia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies.
Radical social changedare I say revolution?appears to come when bodies
learn to move in different ways, when Rosa Parks refuses to move, when drag queens
riot at Stonewall, when Egyptians take to the streets against Mubarak, or when work-
ers of all kinds shut down the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. A next step in think-
ing about ideology may lie in developing new organizational forms that make,
literally, such move-ments possible.
432 J. A. Aune
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Work Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977. Print
. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Print.
. Practical Reason. Trans. Randal Johnson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Print.
Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Print.
Gramsci, Antonio. American and Fordism. The Antonio Gramsci Reader. Ed. David Forgacs. New
York: New York University Press, 2000. Print.
Rand, Erin J. Thinking Violence and Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12.3 (2009): 46177.
Print.
Z

izek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.
Western Journal of Communication 433
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