What Comes After the End of Symbolic Power?

Abstract

The question of symbolic power is taking on a special importance today, when the purely symbolic means of legitimisation of power are being transformed, weakened and replaced by new forms of governance that refer to economic and technical norms. Pierre Bourdieu’s account of symbolic power, so influential in contemporary sociology, equates its operation with symbolic violence. Contemporary societies are manifesting multiple symptoms of crisis in the structures of symbolic power — and this crisis is leading not to the easing of violence but to the emergence of new forms of suffering. A different theoretical portrayal of symbolic power is therefore needed, one that would explain what we are losing with the crisis and weakening of this power. This article presents such a take, which refers predominantly to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its first section lays out the main problem and provides a short reconstruction of Pierre Bourdieu’s account. The second part presents the sources of the notion of symbolic power, in the works of the Durkheimian school and structuralism, while the third introduces the psychoanalytic account. The fourth tackles the crisis in symbolic power, the fifth — new forms of suffering in the new, “post-symbolic” social situation, and the last part offers a summary of the arguments by referring to the issue of the relationship between symbolic and post-symbolic power.