Reworking Moral Regulation: Metaphorical Capital and the Field of Disinterest

Abstract

Resume: Pouvons-nous utiliser la demarche de Pierre Bourdieu pour une analyse de la reglementation morale centree sur la societe? Probablement pas. Par contre, son analyse dans le domaine du desinteret pourrait nous etre utile. Abstract: Can we follow Pierre Bourdieu's work to develop a society-centred analysis of regulation? Probably not, but his analysis of a field of disinterest may be helpful. Foucauldian studies of government and ethics are frequently critical of neo-Marxist concerns with the political of state policy and state regulation. While some scholars pair a concern with governmentality and class analysis (e.g. Castel, 1988; Steinmetz, 1994), others denounce what they see as the tendency of neo-Marxists to inflate the importance of the state in regulatory projects and to operate with imagined material categories like class. Corrigan and Sayer's (1985) influential study of state formation, for instance, has been sharply criticised by neo-Foucauldians for its over-emphasis upon the state and for its culturalist approach to the formation of human subjectivities (Dean, 1994a and b). Many neo-Foucauldian writers prefer to exclude any postulate of systematic capitalist exploitation from the analysis of power, concentrating instead on the exercise of freedom and self-formation within liberal modes of government (see Rose and Miller, 1992; for a critique, Curtis, 1995; Neocleous, 1996). Is it not possible to integrate Foucauldian insights about government and self-formation with a critical political of capitalism? Is it not possible to connect practices of the care of the self with class-political practices? Can we not investigate regulation while neither denying the existence of organized domination and exploitation nor postulating the state simply as their executor or guarantor? An innovative attempt to move in this direction can be found in Mariana Valverde's analysis of moral (1994a; 1994b), a concept inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of cultural (1984). Valverde calls for more attention to the work of Bourdieu by contributors to the debate over the state and regulation. Partly in response to that call, this article first outlines what Valverde seeks from Bourdieu's work and then analyses critically the extent to which she is likely to find it there. Valverde aims to formulate a framework for the analysis of regulation and the formation of ethical subjectivities that would connect these things to a critical analysis of capitalist social formations without equating all forms of regulation with state regulation. An adequate framework would enable one to analyze a economy of forms of regulation while allowing for critical purchase on capitalist class relations (Valverde, 1995a and b). It would enable one to investigate society-centred as well as state-centred forms of regulation. While I do not wish to take issue with Valverde's intellectual project, I argue that concepts inspired by Bourdieu's analyses of social capital are unlikely to contribute to a framework for the analysis of a mixed of regulation. Nor will they bridge the oppositions between neo-Marxists and neo-Foucauldians. This is because Bourdieu mobilizes a conception of the state as an internally unitary, global ordering instance, a meta-capitalist, in the symbolic and the ethical fields. Such a conception of the state is problematic in principle and certainly does not provide the theoretical space necessary to think about a mixed of regulation, nor to investigate the diverse ways in which regulatory projects are taken up or rejected by individuals and groups. The bases of the legitimacy of projects of regulation, by which I mean the grounds for the practical recognition of them as authoritative by those subjected to them, is an important issue in the field. While regulatory projects may have social consequences without being recognized as legitimate -- they may be resisted, for instance -- their positive realization depends upon such recognition. …