The Field of Power and the Division of the Labour of Domination

Abstract

In these handwritten notes for his 1985–1986 lectures at Collège de France, Pierre Bourdieu, outlines his theoretical view of the field of power as a space of positions from which power is exerted over species of capital that dominate in the different social fields that give access to this space. Characterized by struggles over the recognition of species of capital emerging from different fields, especially those between the dominant temporal powers (politics, economy, military) and the dominated spiritual ones (culture, education), the field of power is tied together by an organic solidarity through the shared interest in the fight over the legitimate principle of domination and by the increasingly complex networks, exchanges and alliances through which this struggle is fought.

Translation from French by Jean-Yves Bart

The division into relatively autonomous fields is the outcome of a process of differentiation that should not be confused with the process of stratification (or division into objective classes), although it also leads to social divisions, such as the division of the dominant class into fractions: it can be described as a process of institution of different spaces of play where specific forms of capital are engendered and actualized, and are both assets and characteristic stakes of each form of game.¹

In reaction to what he called Bergson’s “unitarist vitalism”, Durkheim, extending and correcting Spencer’s argument that the universe moves “from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous”, described the evolution that leads from the “primary state of non-division”, in which the “diverse functions” are already present but in a “state of confusion” (religious life, for example, combining rites, morality, law, art and even the beginnings of a science), to the “progressive separation of all these diverse yet primitively blended functions”: “secular and scientific thought became separated from mythical and religious thought; art became separated from worship, morality and the law became separated from rites”.² Durkheim may see in this confusion of different forms of activity an obstacle to the full realization of any one of them (“Primitively, all forms of activity, all functions are assembled together, as each other’s prisoners: they are obstacles to each other; each prevents the other from completely realizing its nature”), but he does not clearly evidence a link, as Weber sometimes does, between the appearance of separate domains and the institution of autonomous social universes, which are the loci of a specific legality, manifested by a constitutive as such (the economy as such, law as such, art as such, etc.).

Being specific powers in a particular form of struggle for a particular type of power, the different species of capital are themselves subject to struggles within the field of power, as a field of power relations between the powers that may operate in the different fields and as a field of struggles to transform these power relations, or even to secure power over the different powers.³

The field of power is defined as the space of the positions from which power is exerted over capital in its different species. One must indeed distinguish between the mere possession of (say, economic or cultural) capital and the possession of a capital conferring power over capital, meaning over the very structure of a field, and therefore, among other fields, over profit rates, and by extension, over all ordinary holders of capital. In the economic field, for instance, “controlling shareholders”,⁴ who are the holders of the actual economic property, are at odds with the small shareholders, who are the holders of the legal property of financial capital; likewise, in the field of cultural production, the holders of mere cultural capital are pitted against the holders of a power over cultural capital, which includes the determination of the chances of profit (and reproduction) granted to that capital (for instance, the most consecrated authors, who as a result have a power of consecration, but also and arguably to a greater extent, publishers, critics and journalists).⁵

As membership in the field of power is defined not by the personal possession of a parcel of capital (in the form of a property deed or an education credential, for instance), but by the possession of a sufficient quantity of capital to dominate in one field or another, the dominant class comprises all agents that in effect hold the positions of power over capital, meaning over the very functioning of a field or over that field’s system of instruments of reproduction. Because it is through the system of instruments of reproduction that the relation between positions of power and all the agents who hold them is established on a lasting basis, the dominant class, despite its divisions and antagonisms, tends to constitute corps  – groups of agents who are socially united by the imposition of an identical name, such as clubs, alumni associations, professional corporations, or, like families, through socially sanctioned ties of filiation and alliance, which means symbolically redoubling and reinforcing objective ties linked to their solidarity of interests and affinity of habitus , i.e., their vicinity in social space.

The objective relationships between the different fractions of the dominant class within the field of power take on two different, if not opposite aspects: when they are considered in themselves and for themselves, as if the field of power were entirely autonomous, they appear as relationships of domination (of the richer fraction in economic capital over the richer fraction in cultural capital); when they are approached […] through the lens of the relationship of domination between dominants and dominated that defines the field of power, one may glimpse that, through these internal relationships, however conflict-laden they may be, a form of division of the labour of domination is achieved. Where the agents are concerned, the duality of points of view lies in the fact that they can be characterized, particularly in terms of their interests, as either belonging to the field of power, i.e., as dominants, or as occupying a position in that field, as dominated-dominants for instance.

Thus, the organic solidarity that unites the fractions of the dominant classes insofar as they contribute to domination, and which finds itself ratified and reinforced by exchanges that allow for the introduction of two-way relationships of obligation and dependence (as each of the exchangers is dominated under one angle and dominant under the next), does not preclude the permanent struggle for the imposition of the dominant principle of domination, and at the same time, for the conservation or transformation of the structure of power within the field of power (especially today, through the conservation or transformation of the structure of the field of educational institutions in charge of the reproduction of the dominant class).⁶

The Question of Legitimacy and the Division of the Labour of Domination

The field of power is defined in its structure by the state of power relations between different powers, such as it is determined by a certain law of conversions between different species of capital (and power) ; it is inseparably a field of struggles over the conservation or transformation of this state of power relations, among other things through the transformation or conservation of the representation of the hierarchy between different species of capital, particularly in terms of legitimacy. Since the dominant class has to reproduce, i.e., reproduce as dominant and as legitimate in dominating, and since it must accordingly produce, as Weber puts it, “a theodicy of its own privilege”, and since consequently the question of the internal divisions of the dominant class cannot be separated from the question of the legitimization of power and of the division of the labour of domination, the holders of cultural capital, oratores, intellectuals, although they are inevitably dominated in the struggle for power, in which the holders of political, military or economic power, bellatores, industry leaders, etc., have all the best cards, nevertheless have a significant advantage in the strictly symbolic struggle over the imposition of the dominant principle of domination.

The fact that each power must, to maintain itself durably, contribute to its own legitimization, and that as a result the division of the labour of domination always tends to be organized around the opposition between political or temporal power (dominated by military, economic forces, etc.) and cultural or spiritual power, explains that in very different societies we find a dualist power structure, which, with the adjunction of the dominated “commons”, composes the Dumézilian triad, perfectly captured by the three concepts of the medieval order analysed by Georges Duby: bellatores, oratores, laboratores .⁷

The legitimacy of a power can be measured on the basis of the recognition it is granted, i.e., the misrecognition of the arbitrariness on which it can be based: therefore, it tends to grow as the pure imposition of violence or the open exercise of force are foregone. Symbolic power (or symbolic capital) cannot be independently generated as a recognized form of power (or of capital under one of its forms), and hence one that is misrecognized in its objective truth. The axiom stating that all symbolic power, that is, all power that manages to impose itself as legitimate by concealing its foundation in force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to that force, is only an apparent exception to the principle of the conservation of social energy: force needs to be expended to produce law; economic capital must be expended to produce symbolic capital.⁸

The intention at the root of acts of public generosity (like the euergetism of the Ancient Romans) or, closer to us, of the philanthropic or cultural actions of large corporations or their foundations, seems contradictory as a generous gift for non-profit causes or organizations made with the aim, conscious or unconscious, but always concealed, at least to others, to serve the interests of the donor, only as long as one is unaware of the specific rationality of the economy of symbolic exchanges. This upside-down economic world experiences a paradoxical form of interest – in such cases, an enlightened self-interest⁹; because disinterest is positively sanctioned, there is an interest in showing oneself to be disinterested: profit can be purely symbolic, as is most often the case, at least in the short term, in the universe of culture; but with the new corporate strategies, it may be an economic profit, in the restricted sense, and pursued as such: conceived as investments meant to improve the ‘image of the company’, meaning the symbolic capital attached to the brand, philanthropic actions must be managed like financial investments, chosen in the moment, in the occasion, in their form in such a way as to maximize their symbolic yield; as the appearance of being free is the condition of symbolic efficacy, self-interested motives must be concealed as perfectly as possible (whereas the most publicity will be given to the generosity of the philanthropist and patron) and the domain of culture, which affirms itself against the economy, is a privileged venue for such investments in the form of gratuitous acts. Corporate patronage is thus the form par excellence of symbolic investment: aside from the profit inherent in gratuitous generosity, it can bring the expression of recognition (in a double sense).

Where legitimacy is concerned, nothing is more wrong than the maxim that holds ‘if you want a thing done well, do it yourself’: the logic of enlightened egoism discussed by Tocqueville requires overcoming the tendency of all powers to take on their own celebration themselves and in doing so sparing themselves the expense and the risk of diversion that are inherent in delegation. The prince can be served by his painters, his poets or his lawyers only if he renounces to fulfil these tasks himself or to legislate directly in matters of art or law. But the partial dispossession entailed by delegation also contains the risk of a greater dispossession: the agents, painters or poets, can divert the powers of consecration that are recognized in them, to their own profit or to the profit of those who think they support them in their struggle against the holders of temporal power; and, paradoxically, the reinforcement of the dominated tends to reinforce the holders of cultural force, which is always potentially subversive, by reinforcing the need for their specific services, and the threat that they might secede.

The Potentiality of Secession

Power involves a demand for recognition. It does not content itself with the mechanical submission of the automaton who obeys every command, like a machine that can be steered thanks to a simple push on a button; it requires an autonomous agent, i.e., someone able to make the prescribed rule of conduct his own by obeying it. An order only becomes effective, efficient, through the person executing it, with the objective collaboration of his conscience, his previously shown dispositions to recognize it in practice, in an act of obedience, meaning belief. As the act of recognition has all the more chances of being recognized, and accordingly legitimate and legitimating, if it appears less determined by external constraints (for instance those exerted through economic or political calculations), the efficacy of a symbolic action of legitimation increases along with the recognized, or statutory independence of the consecrating agent or institution from the consecrated agent or institution.¹⁰ This efficacy is null in the cases of self-consecration (Napoleon crowning himself) or self-celebration (a writer writing his own panegyric), weak in the case of consecration by mercenaries or accomplices or even by relatives and loved ones, as is the case in all relations of direct exchange of symbolic services (tributes, prefaces, reviews, etc.), which are all the more transparent as the distance between the exchangers, as in the mutual admiration clubs where A consecrates B who consecrates A, and the temporal lapse between acts of exchange are short. Conversely, it is maximal when all visible relationships of material or symbolic interest between the institutions or agents concerned have disappeared.¹¹

Thus, although apparent autonomy or unconscious dependence may have the same effects as actual independence, the symbolic efficacy that is conditioned by a degree of actual autonomy of the legitimating body has the virtually inevitable downside of a proportional risk that this body might divert its delegated power of legitimation for its own profit. For instance, as soon as a corps of professional lawyers appeared in twelfth century Poland, the ambiguity of the relationship of dependence in and through the independence between cultural power and temporal power manifested itself very clearly:¹² the autonomization that has the effect of ensuring the prince powers of a new kind, more concealed, and more legitimate, since they are based on the autonomous authority, conquered against him, of the legal tradition and its guardians, is also the root of the demands and power struggles in which lawyers think they are invoking the specific legitimacy of law against the prince’s arbitrariness. We may also mention, as a paradigm of sorts of the relationship between cultural producers and temporal powers, the figure of [Pierre] Arétin who, according to Burckhardt, could use his talents for the benefit of the greats, including Charles V, whose victories he celebrated, but drew most of his profit from indulging in outright blackmail of all Italian celebrities, who were forced to shower him with gifts and pensions to make sure he would stay silent and avoid being the targets of its lethal lampoons and satirical verses.¹³

Ambiguity is inscribed in the very structure of the relationship between the two powers, and it is directly reflected in the ambivalent relationship of each of them with the other. Thus, the holders of temporal power are structurally divided (among them, and likely internally) when it comes to allocating the costs for upholding order to open repression or to the soft violence of an enlightened conservatism that knows to concede to better conserve or even to waste to earn more. The opposition is particularly sharp in terms of ideological work: spurred by defiance towards ‘intellectuals’ and an eagerness to spare themselves the energy spent for dissimulation, the class rear-guard fundamentalists (for instance the ‘shock fractions’) produce a discourse with a high conservative information content but whose symbolic efficacy is very weak, at least outside of their universe; conversely, the modernist fraction adopts a discourse with a low informative content but with a high degree of dissimulation, and thus a high symbolic efficacy, and knows, crucially, how to step aside for spokespersons who are all the more effective as they do not appear to others, or themselves, as such, and even think they are applying a cost of symbolic protest to the profits of the symbolic dissimulation they provide to the conservative message.

The specific contradiction of the most highly differentiated modes of domination resides in the fact that the potentialities of subversive diversion of specific capital increase when the symbolic efficacy of dissimulation linked to the complexity of circuits of legitimation, which are objectively solidary but in practice compete with each other, is inseparable from a differentiation of positions and, correlatively, of interests. The generic interests associated with membership in the field of power do not necessarily coincide with the specific interests, or those linked to a category, associated with the occupation of a given position in the field, which often tend to conceal the former. This is why it occasionally happens that members of the dominant class act against their class interests (linked to their position in the field of power) when those contradict their fractional interests (linked to their position in a specific field); and why the effects of the struggles for domination within the dominant class can come to threaten the foundations of their domination over other classes. This is the case when, in their struggle for domination within a specific field, some agents call for the support of an external force. Among holders of cultural capital, for instance, those who hold a dominated position within the field of cultural production can thus forge permanent or occasional alliances with members of the dominated classes, thereby placing their cultural capital at the service of struggles that they identify more or less completely and durably with their own struggles within the field of power. But, as the effects that concern the field of power (and the dominant class) are only achieved through actions oriented by the interests linked with the occupation of a position in a particular field, the effect of homologies between fields favours a double whammy effect [logique du coup double], meaning that strategies resulting from the logic of a specific field, even when they are expressly steered against class domination, may ultimately help enforce its continued domination: these effects, which are often described in a naively finalistic language as the result of ‘recuperation’ strategies are the ordinary product of a domination whose ‘subject’ is neither an agent nor a group of agents but the complex structure of the field of power as a system of objective relations, remaining opaque to itself, between positions and interests that are both competing and converging.

The Organic Solidarity of Powers

As the field of power diversifies, with autonomous fields multiplying, it keeps moving ever further from a division of the labour of domination based on the mechanic solidarity between interchangeable leaders, like the elders of clan units or the ‘notables’ in village societies, and from the elementary forms of the division of the labour of domination into a small number of specialized functions, like warriors and priests, a simple system, dominated by one principle or the other, such as hierocracy, Caesaropapism or even hereditary monarchy based on divine right, bound to experience open conflict between temporal and spiritual authority. Ceasing to be embodied in specific persons or even institutions, power becomes coextensive to the structure of the field of power, meaning a set of fields that operate according to rigorous mechanisms, which, as they objectify principles of domination (in forms of social automation), allow to refrain from openly using force.¹⁴ More precisely, it is only actualized and manifested through powers stemming from a genuine organic solidarity, and therefore both different and interdependent, i.e., through mechanisms (such as those that ensure the reproduction of economic and cultural capital) that steer the actions and reactions of a network of both competing and complementary agents and institutions, involved in increasingly long and complex legitimizing circuits of exchanges.¹⁵ Class unity results, in this case, in the plurality of incomparable principles of domination (power or species of capital), which tends to limit competition between holders of power and facilitate partial and multiple alliances among them.

Each power (or species of capital) dominates a specific field where it tends to hold a monopoly over profits; it can also be present in other fields but with less weight (for instance, legal capital, a sub-species of cultural capital, is present in the economic field).

Within each field, agents may thus possess different species of capital, but the structure of the capital they possess varies between fields (employers have cultural capital, but less than intellectuals). Due to the plurality of competing principles of hierarchization within the field of power (as well as within each of the specialized fields), each agent answers to several competing principles of hierarchization and it is impossible for a single agent to possess all the properties that make domination possible; or, which boils down to the same thing, there is no such thing as a single hierarchy ranking agents in all respects.¹⁶ This has the effect of restricting competition between individuals (since, when push comes to shove, all individuals, as long as they have a high amount of one of the recognized properties, can be at the top of at least one hierarchy), but without the competition and tension between the different classes of individuals matching the different fields being alleviated. In other words, the irreducibility of value systems and worldviews, as a result of which the different fractions evoke societies with different cultural traditions, is a core principle of the collective struggles over the imposition of a dominant principle of domination (be it struggles between artists and bourgeois, or closer to us, struggles between the great state institutions over the imposition of their value(s) and the appropriation of positions of power); but this is also why the field of power and the different specialized fields offer partly non-substitutable satisfactions (at least subjectively): not only those associated with dominant positions in each of the fields and sub-fields, but also those expected to yield, at the cost of some bad faith, dominant positions according to a dominated principle in these fields and sub-fields, such as positions of temporal power, dean in the academic field or bishop in the religious field.¹⁷

This new form of division of the labour of domination is what gives their particular strength and importance to all the solidarities that transcend divisions related to the existence of a plurality of fields and principles of hierarchization, such as family solidarities, the basis for networks of exchanges and alliances that play a crucial role both in struggles for power within the field of power and in the perpetuation of the dominant class: the great families, which have men in a variety of dominant positions in a variety of fields, are better positioned, as has often been observed, to survive regime changes or political crises, which as Syme showed for Ancient Rome,¹⁸ tend to replace one network of alliances (family or school) by another.¹⁹

Additionally, however, they are also one of the mechanisms through which the collective interests of the dominant tend to prevail over the fractional interests associated with each field. The same applies for all the mechanisms, institutional or otherwise, that contribute to facilitating exchanges between the different fractions, and by extension their integration, such as the fairs, clubs, commissions, committees and workshops where representatives of these fractions meet and where, under the effect of the neutral location, a shared ideology develops, contributing to the neutralization of conflicts between the fractions as well as to the mystification of the dominated.²⁰

More broadly, if agents involved in the field of power are so reluctant to establish among themselves the instrumental and calculated relationships that they have established with the dominated, working, as in pre-capitalist societies, to transform exchanges of goods into exchanges of signs, and economic transactions into symbolic interactions,²¹ it is because, here and elsewhere, their exchanges, which are ends in themselves, strengthen the group’s unity by the mere fact of reaffirming it; it is also because the extra-ordinary forms of the act of exchange, where the denial of the calculating and instrumental nature of ordinary transactions is manifested, proclaim the irreplaceability of the goods and services exchanged, and therefore the incommensurability of the different species of capital. The mutual recognition manifested in the euphemization of exchanges, which might be exemplified by the choice of replacing the paying of a salary or fee by a gift, the perfect antithesis of everything implied by tips or bribes, is combined, without contradiction, with the affirmation of the radical diversity of its fractions and the complete incommensurability of their assets: by allowing to introduce a complex system of two-way obligation and debts, the exchange of irreplaceable goods and services entails that the very person who finds himself indebted to a member of another fraction for a favour he has received can always, simultaneously or at another time, obligate him and ensure his recognition by doing him a favour.

The organic solidarity that unites the different fractions, regardless of all conflicts is thus affirmed in the fact that the business bourgeoisie cannot altogether refuse to play the game of symbolic interaction with the artist without excluding what the artist represents: as they are the only ones to professionally produce goods that, in their social definition, can never be entirely reduced to their equivalent in currency, and as they find in a lifestyle based on the transfiguration of poverty into an ethical or aesthetic choice a means to assert that their products are incommensurable to any material equivalent, the artists are, in their very existence, a refutation to the belief in universal venality; and they also represent a refutation of the absolute and universal power of money, and therefore of the economic domination (in the limited sense) that the business bourgeoisie (and more broadly, the dominant fraction of the dominant) cannot altogether reject without reducing this domination to its truth, i.e., its economic (or in another cases, military and police) dimension.²²

The temporally dominant fraction cannot admit this truth to itself or others: this is a matter of morals and morale, i.e., its conviction of its own legitimacy, which is part of the conditions of its power, because it governs its capacity to impose the recognition of its domination on the dominated, i.e., the misrecognition of the arbitrariness of its power. And, if as soon as the field of cultural production has conquered a minimal degree of autonomy, the ties of dependence established between some intellectuals and the holders of temporal power only exceptionally take the form of a personal favour, it is because both parties have the same interest in projecting a transfigured image of their relation: unveiling their external function would be enough to devalue the goods and services exchanged by robbing them of everything that makes them valuable to both parties, namely the strictly intellectual or artistic legitimacy ascribed by the autonomous judgement of peers. Thus, the intellectuals who stand guard at the borders of the field of cultural production can only fulfil their function, which is to symbolically rearm the dominant fractions of the dominant class against the actual or false aesthetic, ethical or political aggressions or audacities of the intellectual avant-garde, by dressing up the uncertain platitudes and the haughty certainties of bourgeois common sense in an abundance of visible signs, liable to give those who do not belong the illusion that they are part of the world they criticize. Quite often, they only put so much conviction in this ambiguous role because their relationship with their adversaries within the intellectual field hides from their own eyes the very positive relation to the bourgeois that they enjoy as a result of their intellectual negation of the ‘bourgeois’.