Thinking with Bourdieu: Doxa

Claire Birkenshaw

“In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”

(William Blake, 1794).  

Sociology’s purpose, Bourdieu (2013, p.10) argued, is to “uncover the social unconscious” in order to examine and explain “the social relations of domination”, which “deny others the full expression of their intellectual potentialities.” To aid our sociological endeavours, Bourdieu offers a “set of relational concepts whose application [can be utilised] to understand, explain and disclose inequalities at different layers of society” through a “theory-method” process (Costa and Murphy, 2015, p.3). In other words, Bourdieu gifted us with a range of concepts or tools, such as field, habitus, doxa, capital, illusio and symbolic violence, to think with so that we undergo a metanoia – “a mental revolution, a transformation of one’s whole vision of the social world” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.251) – in order to apply a “new gaze” (ibid.), [a] “sociological eye” (ibid.), to expose the realities of existence to power.

In conversation with Terry Eagleton, renowned French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, disclosed that he tended to avoid use of the word ‘ideology’ because “it has very often been misused, or used in a very vague manner” (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p.111); adding further that its employment “seems to convey a sort of discredit” (ibid.). In effect, the deployment of ‘ideology’ or ‘ideological’ by those with power acts as another “instrument of symbolic domination” (ibid., pp.111-112). Instead, for sociological thinking and analysis, Bourdieu considers “the notion of doxa [to be] more useful” (ibid., p.113, my emphasis).

To aid our understanding of doxa, Australian sociologist, Steven Threadgold, offers this richer definition rather than its simpler, rules of the game, form: “a core set of common sense norms, values and knowledge, which tend to be viewed as natural and necessary, that are intrinsic to a specific field” (Threadgold, 2018, p.47). Furthermore, Threadgold (ibid.) guides our sociological thinking to recognise that contemporary doxa “carries the weight of history” and has, at points in the past, endured “political contestation” (ibid.), much of which is “usually forgotten” (ibid.); thus, hidden and silent. Hence, doxa sets, and internalises, our “sense of limits” (Deer, 2012, p.115). As a result, existing forms of doxic knowledge and attitudes are “taken for granted” (Bourdieu, [1997] 2005, p.166) because they appear to be “self-evident” (ibid., p. 164), natural and legitimate. Therefore, doxa’s arbitrary power asymmetry is unquestioned, accepted, and adhered to. For example, this may reveal itself in strict gender division for exam subjects – boys select physics, girls select biology – even though students have been given the freedom to choose, something which school leaders may not be able to account for and address, without sociological understanding of doxa.  

Heterodoxy, on the other hand, materialises when there is recognition “of the possibility of competing beliefs” (Deer, 2012, p.118), which exposes “the arbitrariness of the taken for granted” (Bourdieu [1977] 2005, p.169) to the dominated classes. It is in the interests of the dominated classes to push “back the limits of doxa”, argues Bourdieu (ibid.), otherwise domination will take “the form of a more effective […], more brutal, means of oppression” (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p.115), not perceived as violence as such, because it is “soft [and] invisible” (ibid.): in other words symbolic violence, described by Threadgold (2020, p.103) as “an affective violence [delivering] emotional cuts and bruises.” If symbolic violence is sustained for long periods of time it may lead to “self-exclusion or social exclusion, or forms of social death” to people affected by it. This suggests there is an affective dimension to doxa, feeling the “weight of the water” as Bourdieu and Wacquant term it (1992, p.127).  

Deer (2012, p.119), however, alerts us to the fact that heterodoxy’s power to challenge is ultimately restrained because it is “essentially mediated by the ruling doxa.” In cases where heterodoxy does trouble doxa significantly, for example when ‘equality’ appears to be close to achievement, power may seek to straighten opinion with orthodoxy to restore “the primal state of innocence of doxa” (Bourdieu, [1977] 2005, p.169). This is exampled by the current anxiety-fused political rhetoric concerning issues relating to ‘race’ and LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools, which has resulted in hastily tempered legislation whose purpose appears to be the purging of ‘inappropriateness’ from contemporary education doxa with an intent to time-machine schools back to the epoch of prejudice and discrimination, unquestioning and “complicitous silence” (Bourdieu, [1977] 2005, p.188), and where children and adults alike have a “sense of one’s place” (Bourdieu, 2022, p.49). While reconfiguring education doxa to a state of ‘pre-inclusion’ may appeal to a range of ‘semi-expert’, such a politicians and journalists, or “doxosophers” as Bourdieu ( 2000, p.59) terms them, Bourdieu (2022, p.49) cautions that this may result in student “avoidance”, or “radical” self-exclusion, from education: “This educational establishment is not for the likes of me.” Perhaps, this explains why, like William Blake, I can hear the thoughtless thought-smithies hard at work with their production of “mind-forg’d manacles” too.  

References

Blake, W. ([1794] 2019) Songs of Innocence and Experience. London: Tate. 

Bourdieu, P. ([1977] 2005) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated from the French by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Translated from the French by R.Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2013) In Praise of Sociology: Acceptance Speech for the Gold Medal of the CNRS. Sociology, 47(1) pp.7-14.

Bourdieu, P. (2022) Principles of Vision: General Sociology, Volume 4. Translated from the French by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. and Eagleton, T. (1992) In Conversation: Doxa and Common Life.  New Left Review, 191, January / February, pp. 111-121.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant L. J. D. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deer, C. (2012) Doxa. In: Grenfell, M. ed. Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. 2^nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. pp.114-125.

Murphy, M. and Costa, C. (2015) Bourdieu and the Application of Habitus across the Social Sciences. In: Murphy, M. and Costa, C. eds. Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research: The Art of Application. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.3-20.

Threadgold, S. (2018) Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles. Abingdon: Routledge.

Threadgold, S. (2020) Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Suggested citation

Birkenshaw, C. (2023) Thinking with Bourdieu: Doxa. Altered States of Academia, 21 December [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2023/12/21/thinking-with-bourdieu-doxa/&gt; [Accessed ?].