Working with the Concepts of Gramsci and Bourdieu

Centre Émile Durkheim, Science Po Bordeaux, January 16-17, 2025

Matteo Puoti and Antoine Roger

The underlying epistemological project of the conference was to deploy concepts from Gramsci and Bourdieu in their own logic, that is by employing and mobilizing them. Hegemony and field are analytical and heuristic concepts, therefore if they are considered statically as falling points or sites of anchorage, they lose their raison d’être. They can only be appreciated as devices for ongoing work and must be constantly put to the test, just as their operational quality and openness as thinking tools must be upheld; this is a fundamental feature common to both, as well as the respective conceptual constellations in which they are embedded. Without these aspects they risk being compromised, as they are themselves the result of resemanticizations, clarifications, and reuses of categories already used by others and contributed to by Gramsci and Bourdieu. The conference at hand was thus an opportunity for participants from a range of backgrounds and interests to develop and challenge these premises, thereby giving substance to these infrastructures.
Érik Neveu examined asymmetrical circulations, selective receptions, and mutual denials in British cultural studies (CS) in relation to Gramsci and Bourdieu. Neveu noted that the effective use of Gramsci within CS was often theoretical, and that, in empirical work, he was primarily an ideal reference for studying popular practices. He also pointed out that Bourdieu was largely neglected by CS, much like Bourdieu himself maintained a distinct position from what he considered a “bastard discipline,” as well as from the Marxist orthodoxy he ascribed to Gramsci.
Fabio Dei and Luigigiovanni Quarta provided a novel lens through which the Gramscian historicist approach and its conception of praxis – where the subject is a product-producer of relations and history – can enhance and expand the potential of the typical Bourdieusian analytical objectivation with respect to the relationship between social agents and their “making time,” which involves their localization in a social structure with its own temporality.
Maririta Guerbo examined the feasibility of discussing subaltern classes in Bourdieu’s work, particularly in relation to the concept of “object class,” and subsequently drawn parallels between Bourdieu’s “revolutionary pessimism” and Gramsci’s concept of the reunification of the proletariat and the sub-proletariat.
Marie Lucas illustrated connections among religious and institutional beliefs and mediations that both Gramsci and Bourdieu address, though with one crucial discontinuity: Gramsci’s exploration of the mediating role of intellectuals and the “translatability” between political and religious language is not con-templated by Bourdieu. He only refers to them in terms of field, leading to their continued consideration as two distinct structural logics.
Célia Enache and Titouan Carrere explored the tension between scientific autonomy and political intervention in intellectual fields. From a unified Bourdieusian-Gramscian perspective, they discussed how the effectiveness of the inherent challenges to hegemonies depends on the ideological unification of disparate, and not necessarily connected domains.
Carmelo Lombardo and Gerardo Ienna outlined key points for constructing a framework for social research in scientific fields through the perspective of hegemony. This helps to evaluate scientific production as it is traversed by logics and struggles that are both autonomous and heteronomous; indeed, its social function and its capacity to structure broader socio-political and productive domains are invariably associated with the influences it undergoes, along with its internal structural limits and those of a more general nature.
In considering studies on the evolution of far-right ideology, from a marginal to a relevant position in French society, Eric Darras revealed a dynamic of consent related to the construction of hegemonic interconnections between the political and journalistic fields that produces an integration of symbolic violence and the construction of political reality.
Paola Arrigoni presented a case study focusing on the most senior figures within one of the most prominent Italian banking foundations. The central heuristic key was the interstitiality between fields, applied in an analysis of elite levels, showing that the concept of hegemony can encompass them.
Gilles Pinson and Angelo Salento examined how Gramsci and Bourdieu, in their respective analyses, approached the phenomena of territorial and cultural marginality, spatial inequalities, and center-periphery relations.
Through their research on the privatization of the Italian steel industry, Edoardo Mollona and Luca Pareschi demonstrated that the conjunction of the concepts of hegemony and historical bloc elucidates processes of stabilization of a social system in the aftermath of a transformative period. Building upon this, they established a correlation with the dynamics of acquisition of different forms of capital as contributions to the stabilization in different fields. This allows for an analysis of all the actors, including those who find themselves in an unfavorable position after the change.
Following an evaluation of the preceding discussions, Gisèle Sapiro concluded the conference by proposing a systematic effort to synthesize and compare the primary conceptual and epistemological principles underlying divergences between the organic intellectual and the collective intellectual. She then constructed a triangulation between sym-bolic violence, symbolic domination, and cultural hegemony.