G4122 Theory and Practice in the Study of Culture Instructor: Prof. Priscilla Ferguson

Two Maps for the Culture Maze:

Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall

Prepared by: Emrah GOKER

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TWO MAPS FOR THE CULTURE MAZE: PIERRE BOURDIEU AND STUART HALL

Introduction Theoretical eclecticism in the sociology of culture is not uncommon. On the contrary, given the

analysis of cultural practices, the treatment of gender, ethnicity or class questions, or the inquiries

into the dimensions of identity formation all lead to quite complicated pictures of the social,

culture scholars have been borrowing concepts and methods from a range of different paradigms.

Stuart Hall (1992) himself delineates a number of traditions ranging from Euromarxism to

deconstructionism which had left their explicit marks on the development of cultural studies.

In this paper, I try to set the grounds for what may become a fruitful eclecticism in the

critical analysis of social movements: I compare Pierre Bourdieu’s structural-relational analysis

of the symbolic economy of culture with Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian analysis of identity and

hegemony formation in culture. My basic motive for attempting to build a bridge between the

works of these two scholars was the desire to come up with a critical account of the politics of

social movements in contemporary Turkey. Especially with the rise (and nowadays, decline and

articulation to the center) of political Islam, but also with the new trends in Kurdish identity

politics and in the emergence of civil societal organizations advocating a statist, pro-Army

ideology, the Left in Turkey widely employed Gramscian arguments in analyzing the clash (or

alliance) between social movements and the state. While the stress on hegemony and counter-

hegemony formation through the politics of recognition led to illuminating insights, these

analyses lacked an account of linking these forms of politics to structural accumulation strategies

– speaking in Bourdieusian terms, accumulation of both economic and symbolic capital. It was

fine to emphasize the clash between Islamic (“Eastern”) and secular (“Western”) modernities, or

to address the influence of the Army upon civil societal organizations, but the extra-discursive

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dimension, including the account of the social positions of the agents participating in those

movements, was under-theorized. This paper does not aim to answer those empirical questions,

but by comparing and contrasting the “maps” offered by Hall and Bourdieu, maps with which we

are supposed to find our way around the maze of culture, I want to explore the theoretical ways to

transcend the dilemmas of the critical sociology of Turkey’s social movements.

In the first part of the paper, I deal with the way both scholars tackle with the so-called

“linguistic turn” in the study of culture. I explore their sociology of language and its influence on

their understanding of identity. The second part of the paper takes the argument, building on what

was discussed in the first part, into the domain of political analysis. Basically, I contrast

Bourdieu’s “field analysis” with Hall’s “hegemony” approach and investigate the strengths and

weaknesses of the specific conceptualizations of culture at which they arrive. I will conclude by

offering an eclectic approach which might reconstruct and thus surpass both models for the

purposes of social movements research.

1. Language and Identity Both scholars recognize the importance of the post-structuralist revisiting of language and

semiology in the study of culture. Bourdieu, in general, responded to the “linguistic turn” by

accommodating the production processes of meaning and linguistic practice into his already-

formulized “political economy of symbolic production”. The essays in his Language and

Symbolic Power (Bourdieu, 1991) demonstrates this accommodation. As I will try to briefly show

below, Bourdieu, while not dismissing the relevance of “textualist” methodologies like discourse

analysis, stresses structural (i.e., “extra-discursive”) constraints and symbolic domination

mechanisms. Hall’s relationship to post-structuralist accounts of language is also a critical

relationship. Although, because of the historical differences between the social positions

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occupied by Bourdieu and Hall within the academic field, Hall (as a prominent figure in the

discipline of cultural studies) had closer ties to literary criticism, film studies or post-marxist

analyses of ideology, he has a not so dissimilar (than Bourdieu) political investment in

accounting for the “outside” of the world of language. He insists that

unless and until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, cultural studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. (Hall, 1992: 284) So although the two scholars differ in the way they account for the “outside”, they share a

common concern to address questions of power, domination, inequality or injustice which cannot

be addressed within the confines of what can generally be called “textualism”. Below, I will also

be interested in the differing explanatory powers of the ways they construct their objects with

respect to the circulation of ideas and meanings.

Bourdieu is not much interested in analyzing linguistic exchanges in a level of abstraction

which rips them off their social context. The uses of language in his account become the media

for various symbolic capital accumulation strategies where certain agents are more capable of

distinguishing themselves from those occupying “less respectable” social positions. The

“linguistic market” (Bourdieu, 1991: 50) and the “market values” of particular uses of words,

intonations, pronunciations, and so on cannot operate outside the network of effects exerted by

other fields, principally the field of education and the bureaucratic field.

Language also is embodied: The distinctions played out by agents via the unequal

distribution of linguistic capital are not only inscribed upon them by purely (and when one looks

at certain accounts, abstractly) cognitive or neuroanatomical processes, but also by explicitly

bodily, physical ones. The forms of gestures and mimics that accompany certain conversations

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(like those one feels necessary when communicating something complicated like a theoretical

explanation), the way the tone of voice is raised or lowered according to specific contexts, the

bodily exertion one goes under while speaking, and the choice of words when one feels belittled

by the “official” environment the speech acts takes place, all such examples lead Bourdieu to

conceptualize the habitus agents acquire as they socialize into different fields along with their

natural linguistic capabilities.

Unlike some post-structuralist approaches where questions of identity and power are

addressed using a logic of explanation derived from the flux of signs and meanings, Bourdieu

does not subordinate the analysis of the relationship between power, social positions and

practices to semiology.

[U]tterances are not only ... signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. Quite apart from the literary (and especially poetic) uses of language, it is rare in everyday life for language to function as a pure instrument of communication. (Bourdieu, 1991: 66)

Therefore, Bourdieu aims to go beyond the problematic of communication, draw a relational map

of how practices are shaped by structural relations, and return to the question of “the message”

only after placing the participants and historicizing the context they are in. For Bourdieu’s

sociological practice, the form and content of the message become meaningful objects only after

the dispositions the speaker and listener have about the performative utterance, and the rules of

the game of power are accounted for.1

Bourdieu has demonstrated in a number of works that once a relational account of the

structured and structuring principles of operation of a particular “field” is complete (I should

rather say “sufficient” since it is rarely the case that a field becomes a closed system – i.e.,

“apparatus” in the Althusserian sense), the horizon of identity formation, the available sets of

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beliefs, dispositions, behaviors, personal strategies and so on, is finite and constrained.2

Furthermore, inside the political field, too, strategies of naming and categorizing condition

identity formation. A party or a movement accumulates political capital through certain “rites of

initiation” that aim to form solidaristic ties among members and does this using specialized

Without

going into the details of those rigorous exercises of “field analysis”, we can track Bourdieu’s

position on the “identity question” from his analysis of the “linguistic market”. Bourdieu does not

use the concept “identity” per se, but identity becomes the various configurations of an agent’s

habitus with respect to the fields he or she is connected with, it is conceived as the product of the

not-always-equal negotiation between the field of power, agent’s social position and her

practices.

In that sense, language is a powerful intermediary for identity formation, but its operations

cannot be correctly explained without understanding the institutional environment and the history

of the related social positions. For example, to demonstrate how the uses of language conform to

class distinction, Bourdieu draws attention to proletarian uses of slang, filthy words and

sexualized verbal phrases, emphasizing how these uses are enmeshed with the “vulgar tastes” –

those that reject or cannot recognize transcendental aesthetics – of the disadvantaged classes. The

petit-bourgeoisie, on the other hand, trying to achieve the practical mastery over “ennobled” uses

of language (gentleness, proper uses of titles, usage of flowery adjectives, etc.), develops an

attitude of hyper-correction: Because they lack the stronger aura of consecration in their habitus,

the petit-bourgeoisie exerts extra effort to avoid “inappropriate” dispositions (Bourdieu, 1991:

86-8, 124-5).

1 His peculiar understanding of “ideology” naturally follows this line of reasoning but I will postpone the discussion to the second part of the paper.

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languages. These set of discourses, names, classifications supply the members with a cognitive

and political-practical map of the portions of the social world with which the movement is

concerned. Independent of the degree of loyalty or of self-reflexivity about the operations of the

movement, political capital, as a “credit of credibility” is a resource for identity formation.

I will return to this question of politics in the second part. Most certainly, where Bourdieu

is interested in theorizing politics and political identities, he is not that keen about giving us

explicitly normative accounts of how strategic, performative, resistant uses of language can be

possible. Even when he overtly announces his political enemies and gives sociological reasons

for opposing them (Bourdieu, 1998a), his audience seems to be intellectuals, “suppliers of

reason” like himself. As we shall we, Hall’s project, while theoretically less rigorous, is

politically more ambitious.

Hall’s account of language does not have complex objectification levels like Bourdieu’s.

One obvious reason for that is while Bourdieu’s sociological labor was heavily informed by his

philosophical training, Hall was politically socialized within socialist circles and despite

influences from other intellectual sources (like post-structuralism) his works revolved around

marxist and marxian problematics. For that reason, Hall has always been careful about using a

relatively lighter theoretical jargon, and in general, his sociology of language and identity

undertheorizes the micro-level aspects. Nevertheless, Hall, by stressing the Gramscian

understanding of articulation and hegemony formation, distances himself from textual

reductionism and deconstructionist versions of discourse analysis.

2 For example, Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988) shows how individual strategies of distinction and capital accumulation place chunks of academics into structurally similar positions. According to Bourdieu, while professors are certainly not passively wearing any sorts of “identity t-shirts”, as long as the institutional structures and external influences remain, “playing by the rules” will exert limitations on the available repertoire of academic identities.

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Although both scholars, as I mentioned above, are interested in the “outside” that surrounds

the flow of signs and meanings, Hall’s stress is more on the communication dimension (and on

how power crosscuts this) than on the processes of embodiment and internalization of structural

constraints. According to him, although there has been an ongoing decentralization and

fragmentation of meanings and identities, one cannot deny the presence of many institutional

“closures” upon various “encoding” processes. The uses of language in formulating and

distributing political ideologies is a key concern in Hall’s sociology.

Hall’s discussions of identity do not identify similar mechanisms of operation compared to

Bourdieu’s. Bourdieu operationalizes the complexity of the circulation of meanings, titles, signs,

categories, narrative styles, etc. by using the concept of “capital” and like Marx, he treats this

reformed concept as a relation with which he can also account for the workings of more

“material” things like schools, universities, bureaucratic institutions, tribes, and so on. Hall, on

the other hand, when he attempts to translate his sociology of language to explaining Thatcherism

or racism, continues to rely on the semiological mechanisms of operation first outlined by

Saussure and later critically revised by post-structuralists. Though Hall keeps his critical distance

from deconstructivism, he goes on to employ notions like “difference”, “discourse”, “signifier-

signified” and the like.

Representation is possible only because enunciation is always produced within codes which have a history, a position within the discursive formations of a particular space and time. The displacement of the “centred” discourses of the West entails putting in question its universalist character and its transcendental aims to speak for everyone, while being itself everywhere and nowhere. The fact that this grounding of ethnicity in difference was deployed, in the discourse of racism, as a means of disavowing the realities of racism and repression does not mean that we can permit the term to be permanently colonized. (Hall, 1996b: 446)

In fact, the notion of “representation as an act of enunciation emerging from a particular

discursive formation” here is also familiar waters for Bourdieu’s sociology, considering the

relationship between the field and an agent’s practices, but Hall rarely supplies us with the tools

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to link the workings of the linguistic/discursive complex with the social positions of profiteers

from that complex, with the spatial dimension of representation, with the conditionings of

economy, and so on. While, for example in the South African case, the “discursive formation” of

racism that is instantiated in the lives of white and black citizens might be apparent (from job

market or school segregation to pure physical violence), the analysis would remain incomplete if

the ideological processes of subject formation and inferiorization are treated as the sole fuel of

the apartheid regime. The black and white, male and female, rich and poor subjects “called” and

placed into unequal social positions do also participate in various spheres of life where they

embody, but by embodying potentially (in some cases) resist the conditions dictated upon their

habitus. These conditions may not always be related to the symbolic (and physical) violence of

racism, but racism emerges out of the whole institutional network and the operation of different

repertoires of practices; a logic which operates at the semiological level of abstraction cannot be

its central locomotive.

While Bourdieu comes up with a model with more explanatory power for the problematic

of identity, Hall does a better job in carrying his ideas about identity to the sphere of

antiestablishment politics. Hall’s analysis of hegemony and articulation gives us stronger tools

than Bourdieu’s critique of commonsense and his highly descriptive (rather than normative)

account of the political field. Yet as I will show in the second part below, it is not impossible to

situate some of Bourdieu’s ideas into a neo-Gramscian framework.

2. Fields, Hegemony and Politics Bourdieu does not have a radically different model for the political field. As in every field, what

is of primary analytical importance in the political field is to reveal the integrating logic of

competition between opposing viewpoints. Bourdieu tries to seek out conflict sources in politics

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and attempts to relate these sources to other fields and to class and power. Yet when he talks

about politics as a field, he only has in mind party politics (and that in terms of French

parliamentarism). This is a weakness in his discussion, rendering his model almost incapable of

understanding counter-hegemony formation through the alliance between different social

movements.

According to Bourdieu, the field of politics has a dual structure:

On one side is the field of ideological production, a relatively autonomous universe in which amidst competition and conflict, the instruments for thinking the social are created and where, through this process, the field of the politically thinkable, or, to put it another way, the legitimate problematic, is defined. On the other side are social agents, occupying different positions in the field of class relations and defined by a greater or lesser specific political competence –a greater or lesser capacity to recognize a political question as political and treat it as such by responding to it politically, i.e., on the basis of specifically political principles (rather than ethical ones, for example). (Bourdieu, 1984: 399)

Setting this overall view, he argues that we can read the logic of this field in terms of supply and

demand, where a host of political programmes, issues, discourses, campaigns, views are supplied,

to be consumed by a mass of citizens, where a doxa of “democratic choice” is created (Bourdieu,

1991: 171-172). However, we are not told how the field of ideological production operates for

antiestablishment politics. Although social movements can also be said to operate under a doxa,

they usually emerge out of a certain awareness of the limits of the political channels that are

normally available to them. Since these “conventional” channels are usually monopolized by

party structures, social movements seek to seize some of them to make their points or open

alternative ones.

Let me go back to Bourdieu. In the political field, the rules of the game are established so

that certain agents have the authority to speak about politics, to determine what is discussable and

what is not, according to the social positions they occupy. In that sense, Bourdieu argues that in

party politics, bourgeois or upwardly mobile middle class professionals dominate. In order to

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account for the institutional and individual agents within the political field (from the ordinary

party militant to the party as propaganda machine), he constructs a “social space as a structure of

differentiated positions, defined in each case by the place they occupy in the distribution of a

particular kind of capital” (Bourdieu, 1998b: 15). When we think this social space in the

framework of politics, inside it agents are distributed (1) according to the overall volume of the

political capital (and also other capitals) they possess, (2) according to the relative weight of

economic capital and political capital in their patrimony, (3) according to the evolution over time

of the volume and structure of their capital.

Therefore, agents desiring to be initiated in should master the practical logic of the political

field (that is, be subjected to the values, hierarchies, censorship inherent in the field). The

political capital then corresponds to political relationships, access to informal networks related to

political issues, the practical knowledge or the “feel for the game” with respect to parliamentary

manoeuvres, tactics, agitation/propaganda strategies and so on. Bourdieu further holds that

political parties are the most important agents, “combative organizations specially adapted so as

to engage in this sublimated form of civil war by mobilizing in an enduring way, through

prescriptive predictions, the greatest possible number of agents endowed with the same vision of

the social world and its future” (Bourdieu, 1991: 181). Within the political field, parties are seen

as the agents which are more likely to influence the field dynamics. Here Bourdieu excludes

articulatory negotiations between cultural movements which make public appearances and which

are organized in non-party forms.

Within the political party, there exists an ethos which legitimizes the claim to “represent” a

certain class or classes or groups. Around this ethos, or in Bourdieusian terms, symbolic power

shaped according to the dominant agents’ interests, the professionals produce the “choices” and

“opinions” which would bring them the votes and thus political power.

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All political judgments, including the would-be most enlightened ones, inevitably contain an element of implicit faith, due to the very logic of political choice, which is a choice of spokesmen and representatives and also a choice of ideas, projects, programmes, plans, embodied in “personalities” and depending for their reality and credibility on the reality and credibility of these “personalities”. (Bourdieu, 1984: 424)

So, building upon this, the political capital becomes a “form of symbolic capital, credit founded

on credence or belief and recognition or, more precisely, on the innumerable operations of credit

by which agents confer on a person (or an object) the very powers that they recognize in him (or

it)” (Bourdieu, 1991: 192). That capital may be staked in two different ways, which imply the

dominated and dominant poles inside the political field. It can be based on fame, being known

and having a “good reputation”, available only to a few dominant agents inside the field. This is

more or less what Max Weber termed “charisma” and most of the time is a key to the success of

the political party or a legitimate political organization. The political capital can also be based on

loyalty, recognition, which is not a personal capital but can only be accumulated by the political

organization itself. In this form, the party gains militants, followers, new bureaucrats, and most

crucially, votes. This capital through loyalty is accumulated both by the structural mechanisms,

party employment, task division, education, and so on, and by the agents’ dispositions, which

“party officials or militants implement in their daily practice and in their properly political

action” (Bourdieu, 1991: 195).

All in all, it is possible to talk about a tension between Bourdieu’s normative position

against the “tyranny” of neoliberal economism (along with his parallel Durkheimian call for a

corporation of intellectuals) and his account of the political sphere out of which, after all, similar

“normative positions” emerge. While he insightfully draws attention to the overt and covert

mechanisms of domination and control, the price he pays by distancing himself from those forms

of antiestablishment politics which do not conform to his own practical-rationalist view is his

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incapability of addressing questions of counter-hegemony formation. For example, let us hear his

position on resistance:

It is nonsense to suggest that I do not recognize the resistance of the dominated. To put it briefly: if I stress the complicity of the dominated in their own domination, it is to “twist the stick in the other direction”, to break once and for all with this populist mythology in currency among intellectuals who feel a need to believe that the dominated are always on the alert, always ready to mobilize, to rise up, to overturn the oppression they suffer. Projecting their intellectual vision, which is that of a spectator, an external observer, they forget that the dominated are socialized by the very conditions in which they live and that they are therefore often determined –to varying degrees– to accommodate to their situation, lest the world be totally unlivable for them. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1993: 35)

Although that other direction towards which the stick is twisted is surely an important one, he

appears to undermine the political potentials of the very processes of “socialization into

conditions of domination”. I tend to think that for Bourdieu, unless a fundamental consciousness-

raising which questions the very structure of the game takes place, using the means of substantive

rationality it is difficult to talk about resistance. Let me now turn to Hall to take a look at how

else one can talk about resistance.

Hall has been closer to active politics than Bourdieu, and was active in both socialist and

antiracist circles. Maybe because of that, he was not reluctant to change his theoretical positions

according to the political demands of his time. His encounter with Althusserian structuralism in

the 70s, his articulation of post-structuralist themes in the 80s, and then his relationship to post-

colonial studies in the 90s demonstrates the non-rigidity of his positions. Still, he remains loyal to

a tradition of socialist principles throughout his work, and his insistent employment of Gramscian

concepts is a proof to that.

Hall’s stress is on the terrain of political-ideological struggle and on how various groups

(classes, movements, organizations, etc.) wage a “war of position” to gain the consent

(sometimes an overtly forced consent) of people with different, even opposing interests. He best

gives an account of this struggle in the case of the long-lasting Thatcher administration in

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England. The ideological resources mobilized by Thatcherism in various spheres (law, education,

media, policy-making and so on) ensure power for the ruling elite by successfully being inscribed

on materiality and by “enunciating” different groups of people into the discourse.

[Thatcherism] works on the ground of already constituted social practices and lived ideologies. It wins space there by constantly drawing on these elements which have secured over time a traditional resonance and left their traces in popular inventories. At the same time, it changes the field of struggle by changing the place, the position, the relative weight of the condensations within any one discourse and constructing them according to an alternative logic. ... What makes these representations popular is that they have a purchase on practice, they shape it, they are written into its materiality. What constitutes them as a danger is that they change the nature of the terrain itself on which struggles of different kinds take place; they have pertinent effect on these struggles. (Hall, 1983: 39) The lessons to be drawn from the successes of Thatcherism for antiestablishment politics is

this “mastery” over the mobilization of different modes the political ideology, the capability to

“articulate” particularities of forms of recognition and redistribution politics into a universality.3

The unity in question cannot be derived from essentialist arguments but is a matter of historical,

tendential correspondence between the discourses and the social forces out of which they are

produced. According to this, for example, there is no automatic identity between an economic

Articulation becomes a key strategy in the politics of hegemony. Under capitalism, it is not

enough, in a liberal-democratic rhetoric of tolerance and plurality, to guarantee the proliferation

and co-existence of difference, because this attitude tends to hide the general conditions of

subordination and being silenced of many particularities. A progressively pluralist Left should

find an anti-authoritarian way of making these voices heard. In this project, articulation becomes

the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? The so-called “unity” of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness”. (cited in Slack, 1996: 53)

3 I am not going to discuss here the problems with this alternative model for a “populist” politics of socialism in detail. Jessop et. al. (1988) took up the issue and drew attention to some of the fissures in Hall’s analysis. I will rather investigate how Bourdieu might be helpful to “patch” some of the cracks in Hall’s vision of hegemony.

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formation and a cultural formation, however, the articulatory discourse should be able gain

consent by correctly addressing how a community’s everyday practices are constrained this or

that way because of certain unjust characteristics of the regional economy.

Compared to Bourdieu’s strict approach which cannot account for certain transformative

political capital accumulation strategies, 4

Bourdieu presents tools for a detailed understanding of the mechanisms that operate within

a particular movement, and also of the institutional and historical environment that the movement

is placed in, yet there are too many contingencies and uncontrollable variables when it comes to

explaining interactions between political agents. Hall implies that mobilizing in an enduring way

for a particular cultural formation need not always occur through the clarification of principles

and the smooth distribution of positions among the participants. Stable mobilization need not,

also, occur as a result of emerging tensions between the movement and its “others”, but it is also

possible that through each moment of abridgement and articulation with other cultural

formations, the movement clarifies its position by learning, increasing awareness and

reformulating its doxa. Most assuredly, if the political agent, like the government, is capable of

mobilizing its resources in order to exert its physical and symbolic domination upon others,

minimizing the possibility for a process of equivalent articulation, then we are talking about a

different form of hegemony formation.

Hall’s attempt to wed ideological struggles to practices

of contention and cooperation is more promising. Considering that such struggles do not always

have to be waged in the public sphere, but may also continue in diverse geographies such as

neighborhoods, suburbs, street corners, offices, factories, mosques and so on, the articulation

model allows us to make sense of the processes of conflict and alliance between different cultural

formations.

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Another point that Bourdieu dismisses but Hall recognizes as a lesson to be learned by the

Left is the significance of commonsense in hegemony formation. Other than the “fame” achieved

by prominent figures of the movement5 and the “loyalty” gained from followers, commonsense

might be an important source of political capital, as Hall demonstrates. Bourdieu distances

himself, in his rigorously scientific model, from many versions of commonsensical reflexivity,

but Hall argues that in order to make sense for different praxiological contexts for different

groups of people, an articulatory political discourse should appeal to the practical demands (from

cultural rights to welfare benefits) of them. Commonsense, in Gramscian terms, also represents

the historically stratified deposits of popular philosophy, a “fragmentary, disjointed and episodic”

form of popular thinking (Hall, 1996a: 43; Gramsci, 1971: 324). Because of its historicity,

commonsense might also be the only available platform over which political discourse can be

communicated to masses and thus a politics of hegemony has to invent proper strategies. Hall

further argues that “[i]deas become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular

constellation of social forces. In that sense, ideological struggle is a part of the general social

struggle for mastery and leadership – in short for hegemony. But “hegemony” in Gramsci’s sense

requires, not the simple escalation of a whole class to power, with its fully formed “philosophy”,

but the process by which a historical bloc of social forces is constructed and the ascendancy of

that bloc secured” (Hall, 1996a: 43).

Consequently, I argue that Hall’s and Bourdieu’s maps for culture and the politics of

cultural formations can productively “speak to each other”: The link between positions and

4 Although its future is yet uncertain, the recent achievements of the Mexican Zapatista movement is exemplary here.

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dispositions, ideas and practices or cognitive processes and structural constraints are insightfully

detailed by Bourdieu’s relational dialectics between the concept/objects “habitus” and “field”, a

theoretical analysis which lacks in Hall’s notion of “ideological struggle”. On the other hand,

Hall’s articulatory analysis which takes into consideration the contingent historicities and the

reelpolitik of various social movements that appear in the public sphere is much more capable of

offering a normative strategy for antiestablishment politics. Besides that, the hegemony approach

can better illuminate the complex negotiations, contentions and cooperations, politically

speaking, between different doxas around which different cultural formations produce their

identities.

To conclude the paper, I finally turn to the relevance of this eclecticism for the study of

contemporary political Islam in Turkey.

Openings Between 1993 and 1997, political Islam was on the rise in Turkey, rapidly gaining considerable

electoral power in most provinces of the country and also winning the control of important

municipal authorities including the three largest cities Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. Although the

central locomotive for this continuing process of popularization was a political party (Welfare

Party, hereafter WP), the breadth of political capital mobilization went beyond the party’s

boundaries. Nevertheless, the conversion of religious capital to political capital within the entire

articulatory project can be deciphered if one follows (1) the discourses of public party figures, as

well as local religious leaders and other “small men” about how the state until then wanted to

monopolize Islam and silence popular voices “tyrannically”, leading to the popularization of a

5 It can also be the case that a cultural formation in toto, like a brand name, becomes famous. When the gold mining transnational Eurogold threatened the ecological integrity of the town of Bergama in Turkey, the local peasants

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politics of recognition for religious rights, (2) the ideological after-effects of the economic

struggle in Anatolia between the historically more conservative (but equally ambitious) small-

and medium-sized business and the already Westernized/secularized big bourgeoisie of the

Western provinces, and (3) the Islamization process of the rhetoric of social justice and anti-

poverty, and the humanitarian appeal to the Kurdish question.6

WP made a historical example for Turkish political campaigning by reinforcing party

loyalty using Islamic dispositions of religious solidarity, which supplied the movement with the

most hard-working grassroots community ever existed in the political scene. Households of the

working poor, the elderly, the unemployed and the lower middle class families, i.e., the bulk of

the electorate, were most of the time personally visited and gifts and donations (in terms of food,

money, employment, coal, etc.) were common. WP also grew in power by successfully

articulating a number of cliques within and outside of the party structure: The Islamist

bourgeoisie was lured by promises of East-wise market expansion and of the economic “center”

dominated by the wealthier, secular bourgeoisie. Many marginal fundamentalist groups devoted

their organizational resources to the movement, hopeful of the possibility of a religious

revolution. Tarikats (Islamic denominations) and sects which were not necessarily sharing all of

the Sunni sentiments of the party administration were bought off mainly because of the common

“enemy” and partly because they themselves lacked the economic and symbolic resources to

benefit from popular support.

Still, WP was not (contrary to the military propaganda to defame the movement) playing

the game in order to transform the parliamentary republican regime into a theological state. Most

united and mobilized a nationally recognized resistance against the corporation. As they allied with other green groups, they became famous as “the peasants of Bergama”. 6 One should also consider the fact that this Islamization of the traditionally leftist rhetorics in Turkey owes part of its success to the absence of a powerful socialist or social democratic center.

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scholars (on the left) today agree that before the iron fist of the secular state crushed on the party

(while it was a coalition partner and its charismatic leader the prime minister in 1997), WP was

trying to occupy the center-right, with a less nationalist, but more traditionalist-conservative

ideology that also wink towards the Middle East.

Yet at the beginning of 1997, when WP was inside the government along with the right-

wing True Path Party, the Army went public declaring Islamic fundamentalism as the “second

serious threat against national security” after the Kurdish rebels. Backed by many secular and

anti-Islamist civil societal organizations and the corporate media, this campaign to break up the

articulatory popular base of WP continued heatedly until the Constitutional Court banned WP in

1998 for mainly “threatening to divide the nation in religious lines and change its regime”. With a

new program, under a different name (Virtue Party, hereafter VP), the movement immediately

reorganized but shied away fighting back in the political arena radically. It was a strategic victory

on the side of the state and its neoliberal/secular supporters, because this “war of position” was

successful in disarticulating some of the crucial alliances achieved by the movement. Moreover,

the party rank-and-file, including its charismatic leader Necmettin Erbakan (who has been a

leading figure in Islamist circles since 1960s), were banned from active politics, which further

hindered remobilization of the movement’s political capital.

VP lost some of its electoral power in the 1999 General Elections to mainly the extreme

right-wing Nationalist Action Party (which surprisingly emerged as the second party), yet secured

enough seats in the parliament to be the main opposition (no left-wing party could enter the

parliament). Still, there are serious rifts inside the movement and, to use Bourdieu’s analytical

tools, a new struggle over the monopoly of political capital resources is going on inside the party

center. The movement appears to have lost, this time to use a Gramsican term, its national-

popular platform and most of the more radical Islamist elements are no longer supporting its

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much more moderate (“pro-establishment”) positions. VP’s so-called “traditionalist” wing, while

being careful not to resurrect the Islamist rhetoric which led to the old party’s banning, supports

the previous strategies for a “war of position” and is close to the old leaders which try to

manipulate the center from shadows. The so-called “reformist” wing, on the other hand, insists

that the new party and the new program should learn from past mistakes and should develop

progressive strategies to articulate changing demands of the Muslim populace. Using a discourse

very similar to social democracy, they directly oppose the attempts of domination by the old

leadership. While these internal struggles go on, doubtlessly influencing the negotiations and

contention in the grassroots, the state is once more trying to ban VP, claiming that it is the same

old same old, and thus reproducing the crimes. The court is very close to come to a decision these

days.

Apparently, in order to understand this contemporary phenomenon of political Islam in

Turkey, neither a singly hegemonic analysis focusing on ideological struggle is sufficient, nor

much can be explained if the focus is how the religious field translates itself into the political

field, without paying attention to the processes of articulation. With the help of a properly

designed field research, I believe that such an eclecticism can be successfully operationalized.

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1998c) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bourdieu, Pierre ve Loїc J. D. Wacquant (1993) “From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La noblesse d’État”, Theory, Culture and Society, 10 (3), 19-44.

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