ABSTRACT

More than anything, Pierre Bourdieu's work was concerned with power. He was particularly interested in the ‘soft forms of domination’ that operate largely unnoticed and without coercion, and through which, in his view, many inequalities are reproduced. Discourse is a medium of such power, and his interest in language was primarily concerned with this aspect, for he considered it rare for language in everyday life to operate purely as a means of communication. His social theory of action emphasised embodied dispositions and semi-conscious practical skills and tendencies rather than discourse and conscious reasoning, know-how rather than knowing-that, and he continually attacked the academic or ‘scholastic’ tendency to reconstruct action in terms of reason, and indeed to reduce action to understanding, or discourse. For Bourdieu, much of what influences us does so below our reflexive radar, and is all the more powerful for that. Not surprisingly, his analyses are marked by a hermeneutics of suspicion rather than a hermeneutics of sympathy that affirms peoples' self-understanding. The result is a series of powerful, stinging critiques of domination, including that exercised unknowingly in the educational field by academics.