Symbolic Power And Violence

The terms symbolic power, symbolic violence, and symbolic capital are found in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Through this conceptual language, Bourdieu tries to answer the following question: how do stratified social systems of hierarchy and domination persist and reproduce inter-generationally without powerful resistance and without the conscious recognition of those involved? The answer, he contends, is that the dominated internalize their conditions of domination as normal, inevitable, or natural, and thereby misrecognize the true nature of their social inequalities by accepting rather than resisting them.

Following the thought of Max Weber on the central role legitimation plays in domination, Bourdieu argues that neither brute force nor material possessions are sufficient for the effective exercise of power. Power requires justification and belief. Bourdieu elaborates and modifies Weber's concept of legitimation. The language of symbolic power and violence emphasizes the ways that legitimate understandings of the social world are imposed by dominant groups and deeply internalized by subordinate groups in the form of practical, taken-for-granted understandings. Symbolic power is the capacity to impose classifications and meanings as legitimate. Symbolic power takes the form of embodied dispositions—what Bourdieu calls the habitus—that generate a “practical sense” for organizing perceptions of and actions in the social world. The dispositions of habitus incorporate a sense of place in the stratified social order and an understanding of inclusion and exclusion in the various social hierarchies. Symbolic power creates a form of violence that finds expression in everyday classifications, labels, meanings, and categorizations that subtly implement a social as well as symbolic logic of inclusion and exclusion. Symbolic violence also finds expression through body language, comportment, self-presentation, bodily care, and adornment. It has a corporeal as well as a cognitive dimension. Symbolic capital is the social authority that enables some actors to impose symbolic meanings and classifications as legitimate. Individuals and groups can accumulate symbolic capital through public recognition of their material capital holdings and the social positions they occupy.

Two key aspects of symbolic power are its naturalization and its misrecognition. Bourdieu's symbolic power does not suggest consent, but practical adaptation to existing hierarchies. The practical adaptation occurs prereflectively, as if it were the “thing to do,” the “natural” response in existing circumstances. The dominated misperceive the real origins and interests of symbolic power when they adopt the dominant view of the dominators and of themselves. They therefore accept definitions of social reality that do not correspond to their best interests. Those “misrecognized” definitions go unchallenged, because they appear to be natural and justified. Hence, they represent a form of violence. These properties of symbolic power help explain how inegalitarian social systems are able to be perpetuated without powerful resistance and transformation.

Though similar to the Marxian notions of ideology and the Gramscian variant of hegemony—two forms of cultural power most frequently associated with state-created nationalism—symbolic power and violence stress the practical justification of the established order through taken-for-granted assumptions, classifications, and perceptions, rather than specific beliefs, cultural messages, or explicit discourse. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power and violence points to a layer of preexisting practical schemes that make ideological and hegemonic messages palatable. The symbolic power of modern educational systems, for example, lies not so much in explicit justification of privilege by dominant groups but in the idea that differential access to the advantages of education is misrecognized in terms of individual natural abilities and effort rather than in terms of the unequal distribution of inherited cultural capital among social classes.

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