The violence of order, orders of violence: Between Fanon and Bourdieu

Abstract

This article uses the high levels of collective violence associated with contentious politics in South Africa as a prism through which to explore the confrontation between a sociology of the West, represented by Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, and a sociology of the colonial and postcolonial South, represented by Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence. The article analyses cases of strike violence, community protests, vigilante violence and xenophobic attacks. It shows that collective violence has both emancipatory and corrosive dimensions, that the state cannot monopolise either symbolic or physical violence, that subalterns shape symbolic order from below in a process which may draw on the symbolic charge of collective violence, that subaltern collective violence is embedded in its own moral orders which challenge the symbolic authority of the law, and that subaltern democratic organisation may provide an alternative avenue for empowering the subordinated that neither Bourdieu nor Fanon considered. The article concludes that the interplay between symbolic and physical violence suggests not the separation of a sociology of the South from a sociology of the West, but an interplay between them, a sociology that brings Bourdieu and Fanon into play with each other.