In the footsteps of dissimulation: ideology and school. a study from Claude Lefort and Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

This work is structured, in a broad sense, as an attempt to understand the modes of domination characteristic of modern societies. It is in this perspective that we take into account the classical notion of ideology, as it was critically developed by Karl Marx. This term points out the social process of production of ideas, values and representations within capitalist societies, whose function consists in hiding and legitimizing the divisions of a social order. Our aim is to follow the developments of this debate in the French philosophical scene of the twentieth century, choosing two important contributions in particular: one provided by the philosopher Claude Lefort, another by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Although located in different fields, Bourdieu and Lefort's works converge towards a reformulation of the bases from which the ideological phenomena are conceived, by enlarging the analytical perspectives and casting a new light on them. In a constant critical relationship with the Marxism, the lefortian trajectory allows us to follow the historical movement of a thought, which seeks to apprehend the rise as well as the specificities, forms and transformations of ideology in modern societies. The work of Bourdieu, in turn, unveils and characterizes the modern way of domination conceived as a symbolic violence; it is a phenomenon based on the agreement objectively orchestrated between social structures and the cognitive structures of agents. Involving and overcoming the notion of ideology, the concept of symbolic violence becomes effective when the agents participate in the domination. They give it a recognition based on ignorance of the mechanisms by which social order is produced, reproduced and legitimized. Considering the heritages and distances of the two thinkers with reference to a tradition inaugurated by Marx, we try to reflect on the scope of the main concepts that they leaved us: ideology as a refusal of historicity, of conflict and of political indeterminacy in Lefort, and as a set of practices and styles of life grounded in symbolic domination in Bourdieu. Placed in a broader debate about history and culture, our work is part of the Thematic Project on Nature and History, coordinated by the Professor Marilena de Souza Chauí, in the Department of Philosophy of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. (AU)