Arendt and Bourdieu Between Word and Deed
Keith Topper
University of California, Irvine
This essay investigates questions about the relationship between language, speech, and political
institutions by examining two distinctive views of it: Hannah Arendt’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s. The
essay’s first two sections sketch these perspectives, first explicating Arendt’s analysis of the
connection between speech and identity disclosure, as well as its role in her conception of the public
realm and what I call institutional form. Next I complicate this outlook by examining Bourdieu’s
political sociology of language. Here I focus on the ways that linguistic competences valorized in
particular institutional settings operate as mechanisms of silencing, subordination, domination, and
exclusion. By subverting the principle of equal participation, these “symbolic violences” raise
serious questions about the democratic pretensions of many political institutions. Finally, Arendt’s
and Bourdieu’s insights are joined in a detailed investigation of a specific caseBAIDS activism.
Examined in tandem, Arendt and Bourdieu complement and emend one another in surprising and
illuminating ways.
Introduction
AWherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is
what makes man a political being.@
--Hannah Arendt1
AWords are also deeds.@
BLudwig Wittgenstein2
For many years now, students of social and political thought have been fascinated and
perplexed by the idea that in some fundamental sense politics itself is a language system and
language itself is a political system, that speech is often a form of action and action a mode of
speech.3 Departing from the classical positivist and representationalist view that language is, or
ideally should be, a neutral medium of communication, representation, or expression, contemporary
social theorists have increasingly conceived of language and discourse as constitutive of both politics
and identity. Speaking very broadly, two quite different lines of thought have emerged, each of
which accents one or another aspect of the complex, inconstant, and promiscuous operations of
language and speech. On the one hand, poststructuralists, postmodernists, and some feminist
theorists have focused on the rhetorical, constitutive and power-laden dimensions of linguistic
utterances. Thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault and Catharine MacKinnon, for instance, have
notoriously accented these aspects of language, albeit in very different ways and for very different
purposes. Each has sought to highlight the manner in which language and discourse actively
constitute and alter the very practices, institutions, and relationships they ostensibly describe and
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represent. Politicizing Heidegger=s oft quoted assertion that Alanguage is the house of being,@
Foucault, in his account of discursive formations, and MacKinnon, in her reconceptualization of
speech act theory, both conceive of language as a form of power that in varying degrees produces
subjectivity while enacting domination, subordination, and exclusion.4 In short, Heidegger=s
epigrammatic remark now reads rather differently, as something like Apower/language is the
architect of the house of Being.@
On the other hand, Jürgen Habermas and other proponents of discourse ethics and
deliberative democracy have sought to expose what they perceive as the performative contradictions
and political dangers implicit in the former view. Frankly acknowledging the ways in which
everyday linguistic exchanges are corrupted by manipulation, distortion, insincerity, and strategic
intentBespecially in situations where power relations are unequal--Habermas sets out to reconstruct
the normative basis of communication by identifying the pragmatic presuppositions of it. Thus, in
his theory of communicative action Habermas looks to the Aideal speech situation@ as a universal
normative standard for assessing the integrity of deliberative processes oriented toward
understanding.
In short, by locating imperatives built into the very nature of linguistic
communication itself, Habermas aims to combat what he views as the irrationalist impulses of
linguistic models such as those associated with Foucault and MacKinnon and to provide an
ahistorical justification of the core values of democratic societies.
While both of these approaches have attracted much scholarly interest, each is burdened by
important limitations. Foucault=s account of discursive (or disciplinary) power, for instance,
properly foregrounds the ways in which formal bodies of knowledge constitute and are constituted by
relations of power, thereby installing modes of disciplinary control that escape the notice of juridical
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theories of politics. At the same time, his Acapillary@ conception of power, which pictures power as
a force that circulates throughout the social order, may impede or gloss over efforts to study
systematically the politics of institutional structures.
Ironically, Foucault=s conception of
power/knowledge either makes the study of particular institutions misconceived (since modern
power is dispersed through Ainfinitesimal mechanisms,@5 rather than concentrated in specific
institutions and regions of social space), or too narrowly limits the scope of institutional analysis to
an investigation of total institutions and the institutions of the modern human sciences.
In contrast, by holding that pornographic speech and representations are performative, i.e.,
they are neither true or false statements nor reports of events but are types of conduct, MacKinnon=s
radicalization of speech-act theory effectively foregrounds the very real psychic and physical injuries
that these seemingly Aimmaterial@ utterances and images can cause. Nonetheless, MacKinnon=s
account of the manner in which pornographic representations and speech figure women as sexual
subordinates grants to speech acts a highly questionable ontological fixity and power. Pornography,
MacKinnon argues, enacts subordination, depriving the addressee not just of what Judith Butler calls
the power of resignification, but of the very power to speak at all. The pornographic speech-act, in
other words, is both a sovereign and unilateral action, simultaneously imposing its own unequivocal
meanings on women while silencing, reinterpreting and discounting the speech of those who seek to
resist them.6
While MacKinnon is certainly right to highlight these instances of silencing, when they are
woven into a general theory of language that deprives entire classes of utterances of equivocal or
contestable meanings, something has clearly gone wrong. Indeed, reading MacKinnon=s account of
injurious speech-acts, one senses that she has locked all the exits except her own and yelled Afire!@
3
That is, having positioned the addressee in a structural relation that precludes the possibility of
defusing, subverting, or deflecting the intended effects of pornographic words and images,
MacKinnon advances legal prohibitions as the only viable response to them. As Judith Butler has
summarized it, only the word of the law and the state, i.e., legal prohibitions, can effectively combat
the power of injurious representations. Furthermore, due to her narrow analytic focus--in Only
Words the analysis is limited to cases of hate speech, sexual harassment and pornography, that is, to
what are often considered paradigm cases of intentional and overtly hostile and degrading forms of
speech--MacKinnon=s insights into the operations of power in speech are less helpful for diagnosing
forms of exclusion and domination that occur in more mundane everyday encounters, and often in
the absence of any intention to exclude, subordinate, intimidate and the like.
Finally, Habermas= effort to reconstruct the Auniversal-pragmatic infrastructure@ of all
speech and action, however heroic, remains beset with important problems of its own. Apart from
the deeply contentious question of whether Habermas= proceduralist and transcendental tack yields a
normative standard that at best is too Athin@ to be of any real use, one might wonder whether he
cedes too much to cognitivism and thus embraces, whether intentionally or not, something like a
Platonic distinction between reason and rhetoric.7 Indeed, by excluding passion and rhetoric from
the domain of communicative action and by discounting the productive role that agonism and discord
play in politics, Habermas arguably deprives himself of critical resources for constituting shared
experience and sustaining moral and political vitality. Moreover, by underestimating the role that the
body plays in everyday communicative practice, Habermas fails to attend adequately to forms of
exclusion and silencing that operate not through coercion, the denial of rights, covert manipulation
and the like, but rather through a relationship between situated and embodied persons and particular
4
norms and social structures.
To circumvent and overcome some of the difficulties accompanying these theoretical
perspectives and to better explore the specific set of questions I want to raise in this paper, namely,
questions about the relationship between language, speech and political institutions, in the following
I shall bring into conversation two rarely linked thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu. I do
so because in spite of their superficial and at times not so superficial differences, each provides
conceptual and analytical resources missing in the work of Foucault, MacKinnon, Habermas and
others.8 Instead of restaging yet another confrontation between these thinkers, it may be instructive
to examine the shared concerns and distinctive views that give form to Arendt=s and Bourdieu=s
understandings of the relationship between language and speech, on the one hand, and political
institutions, on the other. Not incidentally, such an investigation may also reveal important
dimensions of Arendt=s and Bourdieu=s thought that are often neglected or obscured in the
voluminous commentaries on their work. On the one hand, it may provide an alternative perspective
on, and a challenge to, interpretations of Arendt as a type of anarchist who is at best uninterested in,
and at worst hostile to, questions of what I call institutional form, that is, questions about the general
structure and overall architecture of political institutions and their role in sustaining both political
action and practices of political freedom.9 On the other hand, it may yield a deeper understanding of
the significance of Bourdieu=s sociology of power for democratic theory today.10
More generally, Arendt is not only an important source of inspiration for Habermas= own
thinking about language, speech and the public sphere, but in some ways provides a more compelling
account of these relationships.11 Not only does Arendt display a fuller appreciation of the
constructive role that rhetoric, agonism, and dissonance play in political discourse, but she also
5
provides a richer account of the links among public speech, action and identity-formation, one that
anchors her spirited defense of the intrinsic value of a vibrant public sphere. In The Human
Condition, for instance, Arendt holds that the very essence of politics is speech--public speech made
possible by a shared language. Indeed, for Arendt, public speech and action are definitive of a
human life in the sense that deprivation of them is literally the denial of human existence itself.
Bourdieu, on the other hand, shares with Foucault the idea that language is a form of power,
one that operates through social relations and inscribes itself in the very constitution of individuals.
Like Foucault, he also recognizes that these operations are not just repressive but also productive.
Unlike Foucault=s capillary conception of power, however, Bourdieu maintains that power often
concentrates in particular institutional sectors and zones of social space.12 Thus, Bourdieu=s
investigations of the politics of language are anchored in detailed sociological analyses of specific
institutional domains--e.g., schools and universities--that are particularly crucial elements in the
reproduction of economic and cultural capital and the subversion of democratic forms of life.
At the same time, I want to suggest that reading Arendt and Bourdieu both with and against
one another allows us to better grasp each writer=s peculiar strengths, tensions, and omissions. For
instance, while Arendt provides what is arguably the most compelling modern account of the relation
between speech, politics and human identity, one of the qualities which makes that account both so
intriguing and elusive is its highly abstract mode of articulation. Indeed, Arendt is uninterested, at
least in The Human Condition, in issues of how manipulation and domination operate concretely in
language, how persons are rendered speechless even when they are not formally excluded from
discourse and discussion, or how private and Asocial@ conditions affect one=s capacity for public
participation. These, however, are precisely the issues that concern Bourdieu. In this essay I argue
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that Bourdieu complicates Arendt=s views by examining concretely how power relations operate in
actual linguistic exchanges.
Bourdieu=s work on Asymbolic violence@ (an embodied but non-coercive, linguistic
Aviolence@ that is exercised through misrecognition on the part of the participants of the meanings
implicit in their speech) and the politics of language explores in detail the ways in which persons
lacking the linguistic competences valorized in particular social and institutional domains are de
facto excluded from participation in them. In such instances symbolic forms cease to operate as
communicative links or modes of self-disclosure. Nor do they empower otherwise isolated and
alienated persons, thereby preserving and augmenting the public realm and the peculiar freedoms it
provides. Instead, these forms become sources of structured inequality which effectively dissolve the
political realm as Arendt defines it. Moreover, these mechanisms of exclusion represent a unique
and uniquely vexing challenge to students of political thought and political institutions. This is not
only because what I term (slightly rewriting Judith Shklar) Aordinary violences@ are so
inconspicuous and Agentle,@ but also because they defy the standard liberal dichotomies of freedom
and constraint, will and coercion. Insofar as these violences fail to issue from overt force, conscious
intention or the formal denial of consent, they appear categorically to be freely willed (or consented)
and legitimate, although this is clearly a misleading formulation as well.
If, however, Bourdieu=s notion of symbolic violence spotlights surreptitious mechanisms of
domination and institutional exclusion which remain either under- or unexamined in Arendt, it is
also the case that Arendt provides students of politics and institutions with important resources
missing from Bourdieu=s conceptual vocabulary. Specifically, her normative construal of power as
a collective property inhering in an Aability not just to act but to act in concert@13 supplements
7
Bourdieu=s detailed account of symbolic violence. Accenting the diverse ways in which agents are
empowered through public speech oriented toward collective action, Arendt reveals the positive and
productive potential of language and speech Ato establish relations and create new realities.@14
Thus, while individually incomplete, when viewed in tandem Bourdieu=s and Arendt=s accounts of
language and speech emend and supplement one another, providing one both with important
analytical tools, and insight into what constitutes a legitimately political form of public speech.
I
Arendt on Language, Institutions and the Ontology of Politics
Notoriously, in recent years students of social and political life have rediscovered the timehonored truth that Ainstitutions matter.@
From the plethora of rational choice theories of
institutional determinants to the sundry Ahistorical approaches@ to the seemingly countless proposals
for new forms of deliberative democracy, the same idea constantly reappears: far from being mere
arenas for the aggregation of individual and group interests, epiphenomenal effects of exogenous
forces, or insidious mechanisms for stealing our most basic liberties, institutions are the precious and
fragile mediums through which we secure those liberties. That this recent attentiveness comes at a
time when large sectors of the public, as well as the elites of both major parties in the US, appear
zealously eager to destroy, privatize or at a minimum dramatically Adownsize@ social and political
institutions is of course an irony not easily missed. With politicians inveighing cynically against the
very institutions that they are charged to protect and preserve, one cannot help but wonder if it is in
part the imperiled status of institutions that has summoned the recent interest in them.
If, however, one acknowledges the importance and distinctive value of institutions, a number
of questions follow. If institutions matter, precisely how and why do they matter? How do and
8
should they function in democratic orders? If, as the Founding Fathers urged, institutions are
necessary to Aestablish justice,@ to Asecure the blessings of liberty,@ and to Aform a more perfect
union,@ then what kinds of institutions promote and procure these lofty goals? Is it not also true that
institutions often subvert the very quest for justice and liberty they are designed to facilitate? Do
they not, as Foucault has powerfully argued, normalize as well as enable, pacify as well as empower?
While the possible rejoinders to these questions are myriad, one particularly provocative view
is articulated in the writings of Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition and elsewhere, Arendt
proffers an account of politics that identifies speech and action as the primary modes of political
activity, and political institutions as supplying the crucial framework for speech and action. Without
this framework politics and the fragile space of political activity would literally disappear, expunged
by both violence and the relentlessly expansive momentum of what she terms Athe social.@ And
since, as she repeatedly insists, politics and political action are neither convenient outlets for the
unalloyed pursuit of self-interest, nor burdensome if necessary civic duties, but are instead
constitutive features of any uniquely human and humane existence, then the eclipse of politics
simultaneously entails the disappearance of human existence as such.
Arendt=s theory of politics and political action begins with the proposition that politics is a
distinctive sort of activity, one that depends upon certain preconditions, and yields singularly human
experiences and artifacts. According to Arendt, political life is possible only in a particular type of
public space and community, one composed of distinct and equal citizens engaged in common
deliberation with others and for the sake of all concerned. If citizens are unequal, then mutual
understanding and common action are impossible. If they are identical, then politics would lose both
its object and impetus. Deprived of plurality and the multiple perspectives it yields, political action
9
would lose its peculiar disclosive quality--i.e., its revelation of Awho@ as opposed to Awhat@ a
person is--and could no longer function as a unique field in which one=s identity is disclosed to
others and to oneself thorough others. Divested of shared objects viewed from a variety of different
perspectives and in its different aspects, what Arendt terms Awordly reality@ would utterly vanish.
This indeed is exactly what happens in totalitarian regimes, where the eradication of plurality and the
consequent extirpation of the political realm yields not a common world but an atomized and lonely
Aworldlessness,@ one in which all common referents, stable perspectives and sources of human
solidarity are unmoored and eviscerated.15
In addition to the preconditions of equality, distinctness and commonality, political life for
Arendt is distinguished by its peculiar content. Political existence, unlike the mundane and tedious
preoccupations of the life process, is by definition free from the twin dictates of instrumental reason
and biological necessity. Political action, Arendt controversially argues, aims not at objects or ends
beyond politics itself, but rather is its own subject and object. When instrumental concerns, interest
group bargaining and economic demands generally become the stuff of everyday Apolitics,@ then
politics, which for Arendt is the sole activity in which humans distinguish themselves from nature,
loses both its existential and ontological significance. Thus, quite unlike typical definitions of
politics as a play of competing interests in pursuit of personal or group gain, or as Awho gets what,
when, and how,@ both of which are in Arendt=s view paradigmatically nonpolitical activities,
politics is precisely about the human creation and preservation of a space in which the natural
impulses toward self-preservation and self-interest are throttled. What distinguishes politics and
political action is its freedom from the relentless biological imperatives that humans share with all
other animals, and its construction of an artificial arena within which all that is distinctive of the
10
human condition can flower unimpeded. As Arendt urges, it is only through speech and action in the
public realm that one is able to disclose one=s unique identity, for only within an arena where one is
Awith others and neither for nor against them@16 can one do rather than behave, persuade rather than
coerce, know and be known rather than command and obey, initiate the new rather than confirm the
probable. Given that humans are fragile creatures endowed with the burdensome knowledge of their
own mortality, only the intense, meaning-giving activities of political speech and action can possibly
vindicate the otherwise unendurable pain and anguish of this existential weight.
Within this distinctive sphere with its singular content and redemptive possibilities, language
and especially speech play an absolutely vital role. For Arendt, speech is the sine qua non of politics
because it is the principal mode of political action. As the primary vehicle through which individuals
express their intentions and announce their appearance and actions in the world, public speech and
especially storytelling reaches beyond its typical function as a medium of communication or
representation and becomes instead a necessary conduit to individual and collective self-disclosure.
Finding the right words at the right time, for instance, involves something more than communicating
discreet bits of information. It entails a sensitivity to audience, texture, and tone, an ability to
express, illuminate, and even constitute that which is common (in the sense both of reestablishing
contact with others and articulating common meanings that make such contact possible) in a world of
distinct but related beings. For Arendt, therefore, public speech does not merely represent objects
but is partly constitutive of the shared meanings which are simultaneously a precondition and
product of it. Politics is literally sustained only through the revelatory powers of speech (which,
Arendt reminds readers, is in such instances also action17), and where speech disappears so does the
body politic and distinctive human identities.
11
Moreover, precisely because political life is defined by a shared commitment to adjudicate all
issues Athrough words and persuasion and not through force and violence,@18 the capacity to speak
and hence to listen, to persuade and be persuaded, becomes the preeminent political capacity. In its
absence genuine mutuality disintegrates, with politics devolving into inegalitarian and prepolitical
relations of ruling, commanding, administering and coercing, thus precluding any possibility of selfdisclosure. As George Kateb has aptly remarked:
Those who use violence or force do not talk and hence do not reveal themselves; their
victims are not revealed. Those who rule (and the rest) do what they do instrumentally,
exploitatively, and manipulatively. They do not engage a world by which they come to be
known or come to know others; and thus the speech embedded in those relations is not
revelatory.19
The upshot of this brief discussion is fourfold. First, from Arendt=s point of view, speech
and agency are ineluctably linked (though not identical), such that one who is rendered speechless is
also dispossessed of all agency. As Arendt writes, ASpeechless action would no longer be action
because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at
the same time the speaker of words.@20 Second, Arendt holds that public speech and action are
uniquely definitory of a human life. To be deprived of speech and action, of Aword and deed,@ is to
be deprived not of a political right but of a human identity. As she eloquently puts it, AA life without
speech and without action ... is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it
is no longer lived among men.@21 Third, Arendt places strict limits on the functions of political
speech and hence the preconditions of politics. Most importantly, she maintains that public space
and public speech exists and flourishes only to the extent that those within it seek not to manipulate,
12
deceive or dominate, but to persuade.22 For this reason, she argues that power, as opposed to force,
strength or violence, Ais actualized only where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where
words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds not used to violate and
destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.@23 Finally, speech as the primary mode of
political action is also linked closely with freedom, which Arendt terms Athe raison d=être of
politics.@24 For Arendt, freedom, understood as the capacity to initiate new and unexpected projects
and processes, is precisely what distinguishes the political from the social, where humans act in
predictable, Aautomatic@ and causally stable ways. Indeed, like the physical and organic processes
of nature, man-made, historical processes tend over time to become stagnant, routinized, natural and
Aautomatic,@ thus hiding their origin in acts of human innovation.25 When this occurs, speech and
action, both as modes of recalling and rejuvenating the Aunnatural@ sources of a now petrified
political life and as unmined repositories of novelty and transformation, function as perhaps the most
formidable bulwarks against the extinction of the often dormant faculty of freedom.
Having delineated these affinities between speech, politics, identity disclosure, and freedom,
we might now ask: how are they related to broad questions of institutional form and structure? In
short, what role, if any, do institutions play in this account? At first glance they may appear to play
virtually no role at all. After all, Arendt is often accused of constructing a conception of public space
that is almost entirely bereft of institutional detail. Seyla Benhabib, for example, makes just this
charge, arguing that Arendt=s conception of public space is Ainstitutionally unanchored, floating as
if it were a nostalgic chimera in the horizon of politics.@26 While I would agree that there is some
truth in Benhabib=s claim, especially if one focuses exclusively on The Human Condition, I believe
that she overstates the case. At a minimum Arendt=s extensive writings on totalitarianism present a
13
richly detailed portrait of institutional forms that destroy systematically the public realm. Indeed, on
Arendt=s view totalitarianism is distinguished in no small part by the creation of institutions that aim
to eviscerate the very preconditions of a body politic, namely, the worldliness and plurality on which
it depends. In addition, Arendt=s well-known criticism of the American founders for failing to
establish an institution that preserved the Arevolutionary spirit@ of the founding implies that
institutions are a vitally important aspect of political life.27 Thus, if only in this limited sense it
cannot be said that Arendt disregards the role of institutions.
Fortunately, Arendt=s view of political institutions is not articulated solely through the
negative example of totalitarianism or inferential reasoning. Rather, Arendt=s discussions in On
Revolution of various council systems and Jefferson=s ward system of government point clearly
toward an institutional model in which public spaces of participation are multiplied dramatically,
thus sustaining institutionally the experience of common deliberation and the fragile practices of
public freedom. In contrast to centralized bureaucratic institutions--which Arendt denounces as
Areally the rule by nobody@28--and the party systems that seek to organize them, the disparate
experiments with councils aimed simultaneously to diffuse power and build it up from below.29
Such Aelementary republics@ would not, as some have supposed, entail the elimination of the more
familiar institutions of representative democracy and the forms of citizenship they presuppose and
sustain. Rather, they would function, among other ways, as instruments of resistance against the
concentrating, bureaucratizing and homogenizing tendencies of modern political institutions and
mass society.30 As seedbeds of grassroots politics and political participation, these diverse public
spaces yield forms of political life that dramatically transfigure the political landscape and moral
topography of mass society, interspersing among the mute dreariness and arid instrumentalism of the
14
private and social, living gardens of Apublic happiness@ and political freedom. Indeed, in a putative
distillation of Jefferson=s views, Arendt sums up the political logic animating her own preferred
institutional scheme: AThe basic assumption of the ward system ... was that no one could be happy
without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his experience in
public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and
having a share, in public power.@31
It goes without saying that this sketch of an institutional form that sustains political freedom
by multiplying the opportunities for active participation in public affairs leaves unresolved a
breathtaking number of issues about the particular kinds of arrangements, rules, and procedures that
should properly operate within specific institutions such as legislative bodies, the judiciary, and the
like. I would argue, however, that this lack of specificity is not the result of an indifference on
Arendt=s part to the challenges of constructing institutions of freedom or to an agonistic or
anarchistic view of politics that inherently privileges extra-political forms of action that occur
outside of all political institutions. Rather, it reflects an acute understanding of, and respect for, the
implications of her own view. For Arendt, political institutions, no less than the political realm
itself, possess no natural form or structure, but are instead artificial constructions of persons living
together in particular cultural, political, and historical settings. Moreover, it is against the backdrop
of these settings and the issues they raise that deliberations about the proper structure of political
institutions must proceed. Political communities punctuated by a history of racial or ethnic
subordination, for example, may construct legislative institutions that strive to insure representation
of these subordinated groups, whereas other communities may not. In both cases, however,
judgments about the type of institutional structures that a society needs must be informed by an
15
understanding of specific cultural, political and historical factors. Even more importantly, however,
Arendt=s position entails that decisions about the proper structure of particular institutions must
themselves be the product of public deliberation. Perhaps anticipating the charge that her description
of the council system, as well Jefferson=s of ward government, fails to specify in sufficient detail the
precise functions and modes of operation of this institutional arrangement, Arendt cites, and then
supplements, Jefferson himself: A>Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for
what others they are the best instruments=--the best instruments, for example, for breaking up
modern mass society, with its dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political mass
movements, or rather, the best, the most natural way for interspersing it at the grass roots with an
>élite= that is chosen by no one but constitutes itself.@32 This of course does not fully absolve
Arendt of the accusation that her conception of the public realm remains institutionally vague, but it
does draw attention to the paradox of specifying in advance institutional details that in her view must
emerge from public deliberation taking place in specific cultural and historical settings. In Arendt=s
mind, such efforts would undoubtedly represent yet another anti-political effort to import political
Afoundations@ from outside of politics itself.
While it is difficult not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of this political vision, it is
equally difficult to avoid posing a number of perplexing questions about it. Many of these are no
doubt familiar to Arendt=s readers. Questions, for instance, about the strict division between the
private realm of necessity and the public realm of freedom, the ostensible exclusion of instrumental
and strategic concerns from the political realm, and the durability and viability of an institutional
form which Arendt herself concedes Anever was tried out,@33 are appropriate and clearly worthy of
exploration in their own right. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I would like to return to
16
our original queries about the relationship between politics, language and institutions. If, as Arendt
submits, it is only through speech and language that humans become both political and distinctively
human beings; if, in some basic sense, our identities are constituted only through political speech and
action; and if, as she also proposes, elementary republics counterpoise to the Amachinery of
government@ diverse spaces for public speech and action, then how does one prevent social
distinctions embodied in and expressed through speech from corrupting both speech and
participation in these political institutions? If indeed this leakage occurs, does it not contaminate the
public sphere that Arendt seeks heroically to reclaim? And if so, is it not also the case that Arendt=s
account of the linguistic nature of political life requires concomitantly something like a political
sociology of language? These are the questions that are addressed in Pierre Bourdieu=s analyses of
linguistic competence and exchange.
II
Bourdieu and the Politics of Language
As with Arendt, Bourdieu=s writings pivot around questions of language and politics. From
his early analyses of gender relations in his native village of Béarn to his study of the multiple
meanings and complex processes of euphemization and sublimation in Heidegger=s Being and Time,
from his exegeses of the politics of academic discourse to his accounts of the political history of
linguistic unification in France, from his investigations of the production and reproduction of
legitimate language to his critiques of Chomskyian and Saussurian linguistics, Bourdieu=s varied
inquiries exhibit what Isaiah Berlin might term a hedgehog-like ambition to delineate the social and
political implications of defining human beings as language animals. Similarly, Bourdieu shares
with Arendt the conviction that the specifically political functions and content of language cannot be
17
understood adequately by theories which regard it exclusively as a vehicle of communication,
representation, or the exchange of information. What, however, clearly distinguishes Bourdieu=s
views of language from Arendt=s is his acute focus on the ways in which modes of domination and
exclusion are enacted and sustained through concrete linguistic exchanges. Thus, while Arendt
exalts the disclosive and revelatory aspects of public speech, the ways in which public narratives
both reveal a person=s identity and forge associative bonds that sustain a space in which such
revelation is possible, Bourdieu focuses instead on different forms of Adistinction@ that operate in
and through language, namely, those distinctions that work as unnoticed conduits of exclusion.
While Arendt extols the way that words and public speech bond and constitute political
communities, Bourdieu explores the ways in which they quietly wound and dissolve them.
Bourdieu=s account of what he terms Alinguistic competence@ therefore begins from an
assumption that may appear uncontroversial but which he argues is neglected by most linguists and
philosophers of language--that language is not simply a medium of communication, but is also an
instrument of distinction, domination and violence. As such, the ways in which language is used, the
social relations of the speakers, the forms of speech, the setting of speech, and the style in which
speakers speak--things that are irrelevant to those who construe language exclusively as a medium of
communication--are all potentially crucial to an understanding of the meaning of linguistic
exchanges.
In elaborating his political sociology of linguistic or symbolic domination, Bourdieu deploys
a variety of concepts that he has continually refined and enriched over many years, the most
important of which is that of habitus. This concept, which the Scholastics used to translate
Aristotle=s hexis, is revived by Bourdieu in an effort to describe the process through which Ahabits@
18
become incorporated in the body in the form of Adurable, transposable dispositions.@34 As a system
of Asocially constituted dispositions@35 lying at the intersection of social structures and practical
activity, the habitus is the embodied product of an individual=s history, experience (and especially
early childhood experience), and social location, becoming over time an ethos, a set of flexible and
enduring Amental structures@ and Abodily schemas@ that serve to organize, orient and direct one=s
comportment in private and public space. Initially, it is defined in terms of objective potentialities in
which it is situated--i.e., Athings to do or not to do, to say or not to say@36--all of which are in turn
shaped by objective structures of social existence, e.g., Ahierarchies of age, power, prestige, and
culture.@37 As it is gradually modified in accordance with the ever-changing circumstances of one=s
life, however, the habitus generates regular and immediate responses to a wide array of situations
without necessarily being the product of either strategic calculation, or the methodical execution of
rigid rules.
If the habitus is Bourdieu=s conceptual vehicle for describing the genesis and generation of
agents= practical sense (le sens pratique) and comportment in everyday life, Afield@ and Amarket@
are his preferred terms for describing and conceptualizing the specific settings and social contexts in
which individuals act. According to Bourdieu, specific practices and individual acts are generated
neither by an independent, unconstrained habitus, nor by deterministic external or environmental
forces, but rather through the relation between the habitus and specific social contexts. These fields
or markets are themselves conceived as semi-autonomous social spaces, each of which contains
specific regulative principles and prescribes particular values. Moreover, breaking with analytically
empty and abstract concepts such as Asociety,@ Bourdieu emphasizes that these spaces are neither
uniform nor homogenous but rather are socially structured arenas of conflict,38 with each field or
19
market containing a variety of Asocial positions@ occupied by specific agents, i.e., individuals or
institutions. These positions, as well as the relations among them, are determined by the degree of
Acapital@ within each field or market. Importantly, for Bourdieu Acapital@ includes not just
economic capital (material wealth of a type that is Aimmediately and directly convertible into
money@39), but also social capital (social connections with prominent or influential persons), cultural
capital (cultural knowledge or educational credentials) and symbolic capital (social honor and
prestige). Moreover, these forms of capital, while not automatically Aconvertible,@ often can be
converted. So, for example, middle-class parents lacking the economic or social capital requisite for
securing certain types of lucrative jobs for their children often seek to send them to prestigious
schools in order to convert that capital into highly esteemed, well paying jobs.
Bourdieu=s purpose in making such distinctions is to permit an analysis of various social
settings and institutions as differentiated, dynamic and mutable, without thereby embracing the
untenable view that social and political space is essentially anarchic or mercurially fluid. By
utilizing the concepts of field, market and capital, Bourdieu avoids the idea that all social and
political relations obey a single logic or form part of a seamless totality, while nevertheless insisting
that relations are structured and can indeed Aobey an economic logic,@ though not necessarily one
based on Anarrowly economic interests.@40
Employing these central concepts in his analysis of Alinguistic exchanges,@ Bourdieu argues
that just as the habitus inculcates a system of durable dispositions that govern our practice, so there is
also a secondary, linguistic habitus that instills durable dispositions that govern our linguistic
practices. As the product of a specific habitus, these dispositions are inscribed in the body as part of
a Atotal body schema,@ one in which Aone=s whole relation to the social world, and one=s whole
20
socially informed relation to the world, is expressed.@41 Through various forms of linguistic-bodily
discipline, individual agents develop what Bourdieu calls an integrated Aarticulatory style@ which
reveals their class position, social position, and at times more specific group identities. While these
distinctive and contrasting styles are revealed principally in accents, gestures, intonations and other
bodily techniques for speaking, Bourdieu, for example, points out that in France they are also
manifested in two different words for the mouth, each of which has its own cluster of popular usages.
Members of the french lower classes, for example, typically speak with a large and open mouth (la
gueule), which is associated with Amanly dispositions@ that rule out censorship (as well as
Afeminine@ traits such as Aprudence and deviousness as well as >airs and graces=@), and valorize a
virility that frequently manifests itself in verbal or even physical violence (casser la gueule, ferme la
gueule--@smash your face in,@ Ashut your face@). By contrast, members of the bourgeois classes
typically speak with a more closed, pinched mouth (la bouche), one that is Atense and censored, and
therefore feminine.@42
Importantly, Bourdieu emphasizes that among the dispositions inculcated by the habitus is a
sense of the value that one=s Alinguistic products@ will have in specific markets such as school or
the labor market. He maintains that within particular social fields, differential values are accorded to
linguistic products, meaning that although there may be no formal barriers to speech within a
particular field, there are practical barriers to authoritative speech, i.e., speech that is recognized as
legitimate and worthy of attention. As Bourdieu states, AA speaker=s linguistic strategies (tension or
relaxation, vigilance or condescension, etc.) are oriented ... not so much by the chances of being
understood or misunderstood (communicative efficiency or the chances of communicating), but
rather by the chances of being listened to, believed, obeyed....@43 In other words, hierarchies of
21
linguistic legitimacy and authority (what Bourdieu terms Aa high or low acceptability level@44)
informally regulate the operations of linguistic markets, privileging certain linguistic competences as
Acorrect@ and Aacceptable,@ while censoring others.
According to Bourdieu, agents lacking the linguistic competence valorized in a particular
social or institutional domain are faced with essentially three possibilities. First, and least
commonly, they can contest the legitimacy of the dominant language by refusing to recognize it, thus
initiating what Bourdieu calls Alinguistic conflict.@45 Such instances, he asserts, are most likely to
occur during Acrisis situations,@ where Athe tension and corresponding censorships are lowered.@46
Secondly, they might try to euphemize their expressions by casting them into the forms that are
positively sanctioned by the market. These efforts, however, are typically futile, simply because
linguistic competency involves not only grammar and diction, but Aall the properties constituting the
speaker=s social personality.@47
Unlike articles of clothing, these Aproperties@--accent,
pronunciation, bodily comportment--are inscribed in the body over the course of a lifetime and
cannot be exchanged or jettisoned without great efforts of will. Furthermore, even in those instances
where euphemization is possible, it is often achieved only by negating (or being perceived as
negating) aspects of one=s own social or personal identity, or by narrowly circumscribing the range
and content of what can be expressed.48 Finally, and most typically, speakers lacking the sanctioned
forms of competence in a particular social domain may simply withdraw themselves from those
domains, as in the case of the peasant who, Ain order to explain why he did not dream of becoming
mayor of his village even though he obtained the biggest share of the vote, said (in French) that he
>didn=t know how to speak= (meaning French), implying a definition of linguistic competence that
is entirely sociological.@49 Less anecdotally, Bourdieu writes that
22
Speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in
which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence. What is rare, then, is not the
capacity to speak, which, being part of our biological heritage, is universal and therefore nondistinctive, but rather the competence necessary in order to speak the legitimate language
which, depending on social inheritance, re-translates social distinctions into the specifically
symbolic logic of differential deviations, or, in short, distinction.50
What is so disturbing about these forms of censorship and exclusion is not only the fact that they
raise difficult questions about the de facto and de jure basis upon which any shared or authorized
language is constituted, and hence about the basis of politics itself, but also the fact that these
exclusions and silences frequently operate in ways that escape conscious recognition on the part of
those involved. As Bourdieu submits:
The distinctiveness of symbolic violence lies precisely in the fact that it assumes, of those
who submit to it, an attitude which challenges the usual dichotomy of freedom and
constraint. The >choices= of the habitus ... are accomplished without consciousness or
constraint, by virtue of the dispositions which, although they are unquestionably the product
of social determinisms, are also constituted outside the spheres of consciousness and
constraint. The propensity to reduce the search for causes to the search for responsibilities
makes it impossible to see that intimidation, a symbolic violence which is not aware of what
it is (to the extent that it implies no act of intimidation) can only be exerted on a person
predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it, whereas others will ignore it. It is already partly true to
say that the cause of the timidity lies in the relation between the situation or the intimidating
person (who may deny any intimidating intention) and the person intimidated, or rather,
23
between the social conditions of production of each of them. And little by little, one has to
take account of the whole social structure.51
In emphasizing the distinctiveness of this process--namely, the manner in which it operates
causally and materially without being the product of overt force or conscious intention--Bourdieu
draws attention to what I shall call a second dimension of violence. Stated tersely, the onedimensional view designates the standard social scientific construal of violence as involving above
all an agent=s coercive use of physical force (either directly or through the use of various
instruments).52 This view, which is evident in Max Weber=s influential definition of the state as Aa
relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be
legitimate) violence,@53 defines violence expressly in terms of three basic elements: (1) a relation of
domination, (2) a use of instruments of coercion or physical force directly on person=s bodies and
(3) its instrumental, means-end character. Indeed, so common is this idea that even Arendt, who in
AOn Violence@ criticizes almost all previous writers (including Weber) for their reluctance to
distinguish adequately between violence and other terms such as power, authority, strength and force,
includes in her definition two of these elements, differing only on a rather technical rendering of
force as Athe energy released by physical or social movements.@54
Bourdieu, by designating as violent relations that involve neither instrumental calculation nor
the use of physical force or instruments directly on person=s bodies, seeks to illuminate an
inconspicuous mode of domination that operates effectively precisely because it is so Agentle.@
Such violations are not, as Bourdieu emphasizes, identical to the brute physical violence of torture or
rape. Symbolic violence, as we have seen, lacks the intentional and instrumental quality of brute
violence, and works not directly on bodies but through them. Nevertheless, symbolic violence shares
24
with ordinary usage not only an accent on relations of domination, but also on modes of domination
or breaches of dignity that do not involve the use of overt physical force (as when we speak of being
the object of Aviolent denunciations,@ of having been Adone violence@ or having had one=s trust
Aviolated@). By extending the notion of violence to the symbolic realm, Bourdieu thus foregrounds
an often unnoticed mechanism that generates and sustains relations of domination. And to the extent
that such mechanisms go unnoticed, they are, as we have seen, also more difficult to combat.
It is therefore in these ordinary violences which are neither simply consented to nor simply
imposed that Bourdieu=s analyses become most pertinent politically. If, as Arendt argues, the denial
of public speech is the denial of a properly human existence, then questions about the specific
mechanisms of exclusion from public discourse (or the basis upon which one is included in that
discourse) are political questions of the first order. As I have been arguing, they are also the
questions that Bourdieu=s accounts of language, power and violence instructively address.
III
The Power of Speech
Bourdieu=s signal contribution to the politics of language is his delineation of the diverse
ways that systems of meanings and embodied speech sustain processes of exclusion and exploitation
by masking socially valorized norms and hierarchies as natural or meritocratic. By showing how
mechanisms of misrecognition prompt agents to unwittingly accept as legitimate that which is in fact
arbitrary, Bourdieu uncovers a form of violence that is non-physical and therefore not categorically
located in Arendt=s private realm. Indeed, as a form of violence that occurs in the absence of any
conscious intimidation or consciousness of intimidation, the phenomena of symbolic violence escape
Arendt=s specific strictures distinguishing political from pre- or non-political speech. Since these
25
strictures all focus on conscious intentions (to manipulate, misrepresent or coerce),55 they fail to
address the peculiar features of symbolic violence.
If Bourdieu=s political sociology of language exposes a dimension of language and speech
that escapes Arendtian categories, it is nonetheless far from clear that his account, however rich and
provocative, is not fully adequate either. For while Bourdieu=s studies of language and symbolic
violence elucidate forms of domination and silencing inhering in and enacted through language, what
he fails to provide is any positive account of language as a potent source of collective power, i.e.,
power as a capacity to accomplish things by acting together in the name of common ends. This
absence of any articulation of the links between language and power in the paradigmatically
Arendtian sense is in part due to the absence of any well-developed notion of political community in
Bourdieu. As we have seen, Bourdieu conceives of social and political space not only as
differentiated, dynamic and agonistic, but as a structurally unequal Abattlefield@ of forces. And
while it is true that one of his central ambitions is to explore and identify the principal conditions of
a Anon-violent communication,@56 or what Arendt would term the conditions of possibility of
political speech, Bourdieu=s work contains few examples of such communication.
Whatever the ultimate sources of Bourdieu=s neglect of this intersubjective conception of
power, the political stakes of his omission are considerable. For unless one assumes that the mere
exposure of arbitrary hierarchies and norms is sufficient for dramatically attenuating their effects or
eliminating them altogether, then the alternatives to the Arendtian notion of power as something that
Asprings up in between men when they act together@ would seem to be conspicuously limited.
Standard interest group politics would seem to be of limited effectiveness, in part because success in
such politics is usually premised on access to resources that dominated groups rarely possess in large
26
quantities. On the other hand, violence, as Arendt points out, can perhaps produce order and
obedience, but never legitimacy, authority or power.
To bring these issues into sharper relief, I would like to conclude with a brief examination of
a concrete case of the politics of speech within a particular institutional setting. While there are
many recent examples of groups attempting to modify or reappropriate the dominant languages of
political discourse and their representation in that discourseBthe civil rights movement in the 1960s,
the feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, various forms of identity politics in the 1980s and
1990s and most recently various evangelical and religious movementsBI will focus on a case that
might initially appear to be anomalous, but which I have deliberately chosen because of its
provocative nature. It is a case that allows us to see how Bourdieu=s analysis of linguistic
competence and the ability to speak authoritatively might be allied with Arendt=s arguments about
the disclosive aspects of political speech and speech as a source of collective power. The example
revolves around an often heated set of controversies involving the efforts of AIDS activists to take
Aa seat at the table@ of key scientific committees and advisory boards that regulated and funded
AIDS research in the United States. This case offers a particularly rich example of how linguistic
competences valorized in particular institutional settings structure processes of democratic inquiry
and deliberation, operating, in effect, as informal barriers that limit the scope of democratic
participation in issues of public concern. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to observe one
distinctive way in which those barriers were at least partially overcome and what can
happenBpolitically, morally, and epistemologicallyBwhen they are.57
The case involved an emergent public of those affected by AIDS and a set of institutions that
were initially unresponsive to them. As biomedical researchers, pharmaceutical companies,
27
biotechnology firms, members of regulatory agencies, and AIDS activists struggled during the early
1980s and onward to identify the procedures and practices most likely to yield insight into the
causes, treatment, and possible cure of AIDS, a number of increasingly intense disputes emerged. As
one might expect, many of these disputes focused on distributive issues involving public funding of,
and private investment in, AIDS-related research.58 Particularly during the early phase of the AIDS
epidemic, many activists sought to focus public attention on what they viewed as grossly inadequate
federal funding of AIDS research, treatment, prevention, and social services. Often charging the
Reagan administration with severe neglect of the AIDS epidemic, activists and some prominent
elected officials pressed for increased funding to address the crisis.59
By the late 1980s, however, activist attention was increasingly focused on the drug
development process itself. And here a rather different set of issues arose, namely, issues about the
proper direction, practice, and ethics of clinical research. Shifting their attention from the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) to the National Institute of Health (NIH), and, more particularly, to the
bureaucratic entity charged with administering the network of publicly-funded clinical trials of AIDS
treatmentsBthe AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID)Bactivists pursued the lofty and highly improbable goal of inserting
themselves directly into those ACTG committees that made critical decisions about research
priorities and the proper conduct of research. Arguing simultaneously on two fronts, activists
alleged, first, that the closed-door meetings of key committees violated basic democratic norms of
openness and transparencyBone leading activist, Mark Harrington, frequently asserted that Athe
ACTG acted as a secret society@60Band, second, that the ACTG was not, as its defenders maintained,
a Aneutral advisory body.@61 Instead, activists viewed the ACTG meetings as Aa political field,@
28
one in which Athe principal investigators who comprised its advisory committees all had vested
interests.@62 Summarizing activists= objections, Steven Epstein writes: A>Card carrying virologists
dominated the all-powerful executive committee that made final decisions behind closed doors about
which studies to fund. The executive committee insured that the bulk of the resources went to the
giant, high-profile trials of the antivirals, while researchers studying anti-infectives were starved for
funds.@63
Largely eschewing the common strategy within many social movements of challenging the
authority of some experts by enlisting other experts to speak on one=s own behalf, activists instead
aimed to interject themselves as an alternative voice on these committees. In short, they began
demanding Aa seat the table,@ that is, an opportunity to participate alongside scientific and
governmental elites in those forums where deliberations and decisions about the practices and
priorities of AIDS research occurred. Moreover, they insisted that their participation not be
meaningless or token participationBactivists sought to obtain the same voting rights that the principal
investigators themselves enjoyed.64 Although many of the researchers sitting on the ACTG
committees were openly skeptical of these proposalsBas one key researcher remarked, AWhat are
you going to do if you want to have a serious scientific discussion about a promising agent and
you=ve got someone from the Provincetown PWA Coalition who thinks that [the drug] Peptide T is
the greatest thing since sliced bread . . . ?@65BDr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID, eventually
agreed to activists= demands Aand forced the researchers to play along.@66
Importantly, these demands were not accompanied by a wholesale rejection of expert
authority or of the cognitive division of labor. Rather, AIDS activists largely agreed that by its very
nature scientific practice required both specialization and expertise.67
29
However, their
acknowledgment of the legitimate role of specialization and expertise raised an important, and
specifically Bourdieuian, issue: if effective activist participation in debates about biomedical
research requires, among other things, an ability Ato speak in the language of medical science,@68
then how could the voices of lay activists possibly have authority within those institutions that
oversee the conduct and direction of AIDS research? Within these deliberative forums, how could
activist claims and challenges be taken seriously as claims, that is, as interventions that are
recognized by others as having standing? In short, without some basic familiarity with Athe
language of biomedicine,@69 how could theyBand why should theyBbe taken seriously by those they
hoped to persuade?
What is particularly significant in this context is that groups like Act-Up implicitly accepted
the premise of this view, yet nonetheless proceeded to challenge experts on their own terrain, and not
just in the wider political arena. Recognizing the credibility gap that separated themselves from
officials and researchers in the NIH and FDA, treatment activists went about the hard task of
acquiring credibility by Alearning the language and culture of medical science.@70 As Steven Epstein
has remarked: AWhile activists have . . . insisted on the need to bring >nonscientific= language and
judgments into their encounters with medical researchers, they have nonetheless assumed that the
capacity to speak the language of the journal article and the conference hall is a sine qua non of
effective participation.@71 Revealingly, when activists describe their initiation into the world of
medical research, they often depict the process as akin to learning a foreign language or becoming
familiar with the practices of an alien culture.72
Once armed with Aa working knowledge of the medical vocabulary@73 and detailed
understanding of the arcana of clinical trial design, Atreatment activists@ or Alay experts@ were able
30
to spark debates about Aepistemic criteria and experimental validity,@74 raising issues about the
design of clinical trials, the conditions under which patients could be expected to comply with study
protocols, the criteria for inclusion in or exclusion from clinical trials, the value of a Apragmatic
approach@ to clinical trials and a variety of methodological issues.75 They pushed, for example, Afor
institutionalized mechanisms of >expanded access=@76 to experimental drugs, contending that
orthodox policies of Arestricted access@ were at once Amorally offensive@ (in restricting the
availability of experimental treatments exclusively to those persons who were selectedBon the basis
of stringent entry criteriaBto participate in clinical trials77) and destructive of scientists= ability to
conduct reliable clinical research (by making it increasingly difficult for scientists to enlist research
subjects who would comply with study protocols).78 Activists also sought to transform the clinical
trials themselves, both by diversifying the demographic characteristics of the participants in those
trials and by making Athe trials more relevant, more humane, and more capable of generating
trustworthy conclusions.@79 Finally, AIDS activists pressed the FDA for accelerated approval of
promising drugs, maintaining that the very high standards of statistical validity that typically
governed the drug approval process were inappropriate in cases of acute medical emergencies like
the AIDS epidemic.80
More broadly, treatment activists challenged the dominant image of scientific inquiry as a
pure and pristine activity, one that is cleansed of muddy ambiguities and insulated from the
contaminating influences of practical exigencies, ethical demands and political pressures.
Contending that this image of scientific purity was often deployed by mainstream researchers as a
rhetorical device designed to entrench a single vision of the scientific enterprise as the only one that
could rightfully be termed science, activists articulated a view of scientific inquiry that was grounded
31
in an appreciation of the striking Aimpurities@ of biomedical scienceBthe tensions, uncertainties,
ironies, controversies, and contingencies that permeate the institutions and practices of
biomedicine.81 This alternative conception, which they claimed more adequately represented the
staggering complexities and Areal-world messiness@82 of AIDS research, focused on the needs and
desires of patients as well as researchers, the dynamic interplay of ethical and epistemological
claims, the knotty entanglements of power and knowledge, and the value of a pragmatic (as opposed
to fastidious) perspective on the purpose of clinical trials.83 Moreover, in the view of most AIDS
activists a recognition of these factors advanced rather than subverted the quest for good science.84
Although often sharp critics of various aspects of AIDS research, treatment activists were
nonetheless able to forge over time cooperative relationships with epidemiologists, biostatisticians,
bioethicists and other specialists. Indeed, one result of this process was the metamorphosis of
treatment activists into what Steven Epstein has termed Aa new species of expert that could speak
credibly in the language of researchers.@85 To be sure, many researchers were initially reluctant (to
put the matter mildly) to include activists as participants in deliberations and decisions about the
funding and conduct of biomedical research and the approval of new drugs. In addition to doubts
about activists= grasp of the language and practice of medical science, activist efforts to achieve
recognition as legitimate and credible participants in key decision-making bodies were
complicatedBat least initiallyBby another factor that looms large in Bourdieu=s work: styles of
embodied conduct that often violated implicit codes of proper dress, speech and behavior in formal
scientific and governmental arenas. As Dr. Louis Lasagna, the chair of a special governmental
committee formed to examine procedures regarding AIDS and cancer drugs, remarked, AIDS
activists looked and acted in a manner that was strikingly different from other laypersons who spoke
32
about their illnesses. While the typical woman dying of breast cancer was Avery well behaved,@
Awell-dressed@ and spoke in measured tones about the need for new treatments and therapies,
treatment activists were noisy, had a Apenchant for the dramatic@ and Acame dressed in any old way
almost proud of looking bizarre.@86 Sometimes deploying a language and rhetoric that was more
visual than verbal, activists would not uncommonly use highly theatrical modes of communication to
challenge entrenched procedures and underscore their points. As Lasagna himself recounted,
AAbout fifty of them showed up, and took out their watches and dangled them to show that time was
ticking away for them.@87 It goes without saying that these dramaturgical forms of engagement often
violated norms of discourse, deliberation and emotional expression within bureaucratic and
scientific-medical institutions.88
Fortunately, activists= efforts were abetted by two distinctive factors. First, activists and
researchers were bound together not just by shared aspirations but also by relationships of mutual
need and dependence. While AIDS patients and activists undoubtedly needed researchers= highly
specialized medical and scientific expertise, researchers needed patients who were willing to
cooperateBto follow study protocolsBin clinical trials. Without a willingness on the part of people
with HIV and AIDS to participate in trials and conform to study protocols, scientists= own goals
were unachievable. Second, activists were able to leverage to their advantage other norms operating
within the scientific field. Steven Epstein, for example, notes that Aexperts who maintained even
nominal adherence to the notion that scientific arguments should be evaluated >without regard to
person= have often found it difficult to dismiss such arguments simply on the basis of their
>questionable= origin.@89 And here treatment activists= willingness to master the language of
biomedicine while immersing themselves in the minutiae of scientific and clinical research was
33
critical to their success. Indeed, even Lasagna himself could not help but be grudgingly impressed:
AI=d swear that the ACT UP group from New York must have read everything I ever wrote . . . And
quoted whatever served their purpose. It was quite an experience.@90
Although often saturated with friction and discord, the long-term result of these interactions
was a fairly startling shift of understanding among activists and experts alike. Over time, researchers
and biomedical authorities revised their view of activists as well as themselves. Perhaps most
significantly, they came to recognize and appreciate not only treatment activists= mastery of the
languages and cultures of medical science, but also the distinctive repositories of knowledge,
information, and expertise that activists possessed and they did not. Most notably, activists were
able to draw on their links to gay communities and people with AIDS to provide an informed
perspective on Awhat would work in the community,@ that is, on the conditions under which
Apeople with AIDS and HIV would willingly participate in the trials and conform to the
protocols.@91
In such cases, treatment activists= own Aimpure,@ hybrid identities (as persons
positioned simultaneously inside and outside federal health bureaucracies and on both sides of the
lay/expert divide) was a decided asset. It enabled them to complicate and realign conventional
distinctions between experts and laypersons, while also providing them with insights, skills, and
Asituated knowledges@92 needed to act as intermediaries (between various communities, cultures and
constituencies) and translators (between, for example, political and technical languages, or the
languages of the street and the languages of the meeting room). For their part, treatment activists
were also changed by the experience. They developed a deeper understanding of the profound
challenges entailed in bringing together ethical and epistemological commitments, in striking
creative compromises between the competing demands of long-term and short-term goals, and in
34
attending properly to the opposing claims of those who advocated widely different entry criteria for
inclusion in clinical trials. They also came to appreciate better the immense difficulties and labor
involved in finding reliable answers to their questions.
Seen from a specifically Bourdieuian point of view, many aspects of this process emerge in
sharp relief. As Bourdieu=s analysis of linguistic competence suggests, activist efforts to become
genuine participants in deliberations about the design and purpose of clinical trials required at a
minimum Afamiliarity with the language of bioscience.@93 Absent some real competency in this
language, activist interventions in biomedical debates would scarcely have been recognized as either
credible or authoritative. Moreover, it is equally apparent that activist efforts to Ademocratize the
practices of knowledge-making@94 were only partially successful. Just as Bourdieu argues that
Aaccess to legitimate language is unequal,@95 so can one observe in the case of AIDS activism that
the time and background understanding needed to achieve competence in the language of bioscience
was not equally available to all. As studies of AIDS activism have shown, Agay communities
possessed a relatively high degree of >cultural capital=B[that is to say,] . . . they had cultivated a
disposition for appropriating knowledge and culture.@96 It is therefore not surprising, as Epstein
notes, that Athe stars of the treatment activist movement were typically science novices, but ones
who were unusually articulate, self-confident, and well educatedB>displaced intellectuals from other
fields,= according to Jim Eigo, a New York City treatment activist with a background in the arts.
Often these activists were able to parlay other social and personal advantages into a new type of
credibilityBto convert their >capital= from one form into another.@97 In short, while treatment
activism expanded the scope of participation on advisory committees, institutional review boards and
community advisory boards, treatment activists themselves hardly constituted a representative
35
sample of people affected by AIDS. To the contrary, Astratification by gender, race, class, and
education helped to structure access to the >lay expert= identity.@98
While Bourdieu=s theoretical perspective shines a spotlight on the kinds of barriers activists
needed to overcome in order to gain access to, and participate effectively in, key forums where
decisions were made and norms were set, it has much less to say about the rather astonishing
transformations that occurred in the process of participation itself. Here, I would argue, Arendt has
more to teach us. In the first place, the ways in which individual positions shifted and evolved
through the process of spirited debate and discussion is perhaps best captured by Arendt=s
distinction between interests, which in Arendt=s view are shared by members of a group and are the
principal source of conflict in what we call interest group politics, and opinions, which are
distinctive, individual positions reached by political agents Ain a process of open discussion@99 and
debate. Although the discussions between treatment activists and members of the biomedical
establishment were never, as I have noted, fully inclusive in the sense of being open to just anyone
who wanted to participate, activists= success in finding a seat at the table of various committees and
review boards transformed quite dramatically both the self-understandings of the participants
engaged in those deliberations and the outcomes of them. On the one hand, through their
deliberations both treatment activists and professional scientists developed what Arendt refers to as
an Aenlarged mentality,@ that is, an ability to transcend one=s own local or personal perspective by
taking into account where others stand. As Arendt suggestively states, ATo think with an enlarged
mentality means that one trains one=s imagination to go visiting.@100 Judging by the accounts of the
participants themselves and the evolution of their views over time, the often intense confrontation of
different perspectives yielded, more often than not, just this kind of enlarged mentality. For instance,
36
Anthony Fauci, the Director of NIAID and the government=s AIDS research programs, remarked in
a 1989 interview that AIn the beginning, these people [referring to AIDS activists] had a blanket
disgust with us. And it was mutual. Scientists said all trials should be restricted, rigid, and slow.
The gay groups said we were killing people with red tape. When the smoke cleared we realized that
much of their criticism was absolutely valid.@101 Similarly, activists developed over time a deeper
appreciation of the enormous challenges faced by AIDS researchers. While continuing to press for
expanded access to various therapies, they also became increasingly wary of the Ahype cycle@ that
often accompanied the introduction of new experimental drugs. Moreover, by 1992 many activists
began taking a much longer range view of the problem and were advocating a new direction in AIDS
research, one that would place much greater emphasis on basic research.
On the other hand, the democratization of expert authority altered participants understanding
of the community of researchers to include at least in principle all of those involved in the collective
enterprise, which in this case included not only doctors and biomedical researchers, but also patients,
activists and others affected by AIDS. Through their frequently agonistic yet also cooperative
engagements, activists and researchers alike came to recognize the benefits (including
epistemological benefits) of a more inclusive, polyvocal and democratic process of deliberation.
Perhaps more than anything, however, the democratization of expertise yielded new forms of what
Arendt calls Apower,@ that is, the power that is Agenerated,@ as Arendt puts it, Awhen people gather
together and act in concert@ and Awhich disappears the moment they depart.@102 Power, in other
words, is intersubjective: it names, as John McGowan has remarked, Athe creative, public side
effects that attend political action.@ Moreover, it is Awhat keeps the public realm . . . in
existence.@103
37
One of the most remarkable aspects of the emergence of these new forms of political power is
their appearance in arenas and spaces that, from a conventional Arendtian perspective, are deemed
non-political. As is well-known, Arendt viewed the advent of the administrative state, as well as the
vast extension of bureaucratic structures and institutions, as both an index of the expansion of Athe
social@ and a central factor in Athe disastrous shrinkage of the public realm.@104 Although not
without their uses, Afully developed@ bureaucracies, Arendt believed, encourage dangerous forms of
thoughtlessness, diminish a sense of responsibility for broader outcomes, and foster forms of inertia
and automatic behavior that are inimical to political freedom and human spontaneity. Yet in the case
we have just observed, a space of public speech and spontaneous action emerged from within a very
large bureaucratic institution, namely, the federal health bureaucracy. Instead of acquiescing quietly
to its rules and routines, however, activists used their seat at the table to disrupt and change them.
And while it is true that both activists and researchers were deeply concerned about goals and
outcomes, these concerns did not typically degenerate into an instrumentalist attitude the transforms
flexible and provisional goals into fixed and nonnegotiable ends.105 To the contrary, activists
regularly contested instrumentalist (in the strict sense that Arendt deploys this term) and technocratic
modes of discourse, insisting instead that ostensibly technical and instrumental questions be recast
and placed in a wider frame, one that includes neglected matters of ethics, justice, democracy and the
public good. Ultimately, many activists came to see their contribution to these latter issues as
constituting perhaps their most lasting legacy. As two leading treatment activists, Gregg Gonsalves
and Mark Harrington, wrote in 1992: AIf AIDS activists ever leave any legacy other than their own
bodies, it will be, among other things, a movement for national health care and the democratization
of research.@106 While the goal of democratizing biomedicine has yet to, and may never fully, be
38
achieved, there is little doubt that the joint actions of AIDS activists and researchers have reshaped
the institutions and practices of biomedical research, as well as the contours and boundaries of the
scientific and medical fields. They have, in other words, introduced new and unpredicted principles
and practices in the most unlikely of places.
Thus, only something akin to Arendt=s notion of power is likely to provide both a vehicle
and a legitimate normative basis for combating the various forms of exclusion and symbolic violence
that Bourdieu so effectively exposes. In this respect the Arendtian conception of power serves as a
necessary complement not only to Bourdieu=s work, but to the work of a wide variety of poststructuralist writers who adroitly unmask structures of domination and exclusion posing as natural,
eternal or meritocratic relations. If, as I have argued, these undertakings are vital to any serious quest
for a genuinely democratic future, it is questionable whether they alone are adequate for the task of
constituting legitimate forms of public and political power. Indeed, as Sheldon Wolin has aptly
remarked, Athe problem of the political is not to deny the ubiquity of power but to deny power uses
that destroy common ends.@107 If Bourdieu eloquently reminds us of the first truth, Arendt does
likewise with the second.
39
NOTES
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 3.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 146e.
3. J.G.A. Pocock, AVerbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech,@ Political Theory 1
(February 1973): 28.
4. This is to say that for Foucault and MacKinnon language (and for MacKinnon speech in
particular) is inextricably connected to conduct. For Foucault, this implies that language is a mode
of government that designates Athe way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be
directed.@ See Michel Foucault, AAfterward: The Subject and Power,@ in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983), p. 221. By contrast, MacKinnon draws on J. L. Austin=s theory of
performative speech to argue that some forms of speech, notably, pornographic speech, Arequire
understanding . . . more in active than in passive terms, as constructing and performative rather than
as merely referential or connotative.@ These forms of speech can be, and often are also, actions. See
Catherine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 21.
5. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 99.
6. It is precisely this power of pornography to impose meanings and silence women that lends force
to MacKinnon=s juridical prescriptions. Because the addressees of pornography cannot speak for
themselves, it is necessary for the law to speak in and on their behalf.
40
7. On this point see, for example, James F. Bohman, AEmancipation and Rhetoric: The Perlocutions
and Illocutions of the Social Critic,@ Philosophy and Rhetoric 21 (1988): 185-204; William Rehg,
AReason and Rhetoric in Habermas=s Theory of Argumentation,@ in Walter Jost and Michael J.
Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1997), pp. 358-377; and Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), Ch. 2.
8. Although it would be a mistake to deny or underemphasize differences of intellectual and political
context, narrative style, and theoretical orientation, it is equally important not to exaggerate these
differences. Unfortunately, the disparaties in Arendt=s and Bourdieu=s thought are typically easy to
spot, while the continuities are less readily identifiable. In this latter regard, it is worth noting that
both thinkers share, among other things, an important, if also deeply ambivalent, intellectual debt to
the thought of Martin Heidegger. In Arendt=s case, Heidegger was the most influential of her many
distinguished teachers, a figure whom she described late in her life as Athe hidden king@ who
Areigned therefore in the realm of thinking.@ See Hannah Arendt, AMartin Heidegger at Eighty,@ in
Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1978), p. 295. While Arendt eventually became a severe critic of Heidegger=s
philosophical politics, aspects of his thought continued to inform much of Arendt=s work, such as
her theory of political action. For a thoughtful discussion of Heidegger=s influence on Arendt=s
thought see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996). Similarly, Bourdieu has stated that Ain philosophy Heidegger was his >first
love.=@ See Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger=s Being and
41
Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 9. Like Arendt, Bourdieu=s assessment of
Heidegger=s thoughtBand his political thought in particularBwas hardly uncritical. See, for example,
Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1991). Nonetheless, both his phenomenologically informed view of social and political
activity and his conception of the social field owe much to Heidegger=s work. See Dreyfus, Beingin-the-World, p. 9. In addition to the strong Heideggerian influence on their thought, Arendt and
Bourdieu display striking affinities in their normative orientations. As I shall argue below,
Bourdieu=s ideal of Anon-violent communication@ closely resembles Arendt=s account of the
conditions of possibility of political speech.
9. For a view of Arendtian politics as anarchist, see Miguel Vatter, Between Norm and Form:
Machiavelli=s Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). For a
broader discussion of this issue, see Patchen Markell, AThe Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and
Democracy,@ American Political Science Review 100 (February 2006): 1-14.
10. In the secondary literature on Bourdieu=s work, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to
this topic. For one recent attempt to begin exploring Bourdieu=s views of democracy, see Loïc
Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: The Mystery of Ministry (Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 2005).
11. As Benhabib notes, Habermas= intellectual debt to Arendt is apparent in the opening pages of
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. It is also apparent in what is arguably his most
important work of the past two decades, Between Facts and Norms.
42
See The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry in to a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by
Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. by
William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
12. See Loïc J.D. Wacquant, AOn the Tracks of Symbolic Power: Prefatory Notes on Bourdieu=s
>State Nobility,=@ Theory, Culture & Society 10 (August 1993): 12.
13. Hannah Arendt, On Violence,@ in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1972), p. 143.
14. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 200.
15. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979),
pp. 475-476.
16. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 180.
17. Ibid., p. 26.
18. Ibid.
19. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Allanhead, 1983), p. 23.
20. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 178-179.
43
21. Ibid., p. 176.
22. Ibid., p. 200.
23. Ibid.
24. Hannah Arendt, AWhat is Freedom?@ in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books,
1980), p. 146.
25. Hannah Arendt, AWhat Is Freedom?,@ pp. 168-169.
26. Sheila Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 1996), p. 198. Hanna Pitkin remarks similarly that AArendt was, on the whole, not
much interested in institutional arrangements.@ See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob:
Hannah Arendt=s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 257.
27. As Arendt puts it: AThe failure of post-revolutionary thought to remember the revolutionary
spirit and to understand it conceptually was preceded by a failure of the revolution to provide it with
a lasting institution. . . . But in this republic there was no space reserved, no room left for the
exercise of precisely those qualities which had been instrumental in building it.@ See Hannah
Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 232.
28. Hannah Arendt, AOn Hannah Arendt,@ in Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of
the Public World (New York: St. Martin=s Press, 1979), p. 327. See also Arendt, The Human
44
Condition, p. 40; and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev.
ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 289.
29. Ibid.
30. This argument is developed in greater detail in Jeffrey C. Isaac, AOases in the Desert: Hannah
Arendt on Democratic Politics,@ in Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1998), pp. 100-122.
31. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p. 255.
32. Ibid., p. 279.
33. Hannah Arendt, AOn Hannah Arendt,@ p. 327.
34. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 53.
35. Axel Honneth et al., AThe Struggle for Social Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu,@
Theory, Culture & Society 3 (1986): 42. For Bourdieu, the term Adisposition@ is employed because
of its rich semantic content. As he explains, AThe word >disposition= seems particularly suited to
express what is covered by the concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions). It expresses
first the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as structure; it
also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body), and, in particular, a
predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination.@ See Outline of a Theory of Practice (New
45
York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 214.
36. Ibid., p. 76.
37. Ibid., p. 25.
38. Here too there are striking similarities and differences between Arendt and Bourdieu. Just as
Arendt views the Greek polis as an Aagonistic@ space or stage that provides an outlet for self-display
and self-definition, so Bourdieu conceives social fields and markets as spaces of conflict and
competition organized around a quest for distinction defined in terms of the Aprofits@ valorized in a
specific field or market. The difference, of course, is that the agonism of the Greek polis was ideally
oriented toward a fusion of personal distinction and the well-being of the political community,
whereas Bourdieu=s concepts of field and market lack a similar orientation.
39. Pierre Bourdieu, AThe Forms of Capital,@ in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), p. 243.
40. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 50.
41. Pierre Bourdieu, AThe Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,@ Social Science Information 16 (6):
660.
42. Pierre Bourdieu, APrice Formation and the Anticipation of Profits,@ in Language and Symbolic
Power, op. cit., pp. 86-7.
43. Pierre Bourdieu, AThe Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,@ op. cit., p. 654.
46
44. Ibid., p. 656.
45. Ibid., p. 664.
46. Ibid., p. 663.
47. Ibid., p. 655.
48. Bourdieu holds Athat each field draws the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable
(or unnameable) which defines its specificity. In other words, the form and content of discourse
depend on the capacity to express the expressive interests attached to a position within the limits of
the constraints of the censorship that is imposed on the occupant of the position, i.e., the required
formality.@ Ibid., p. 657.
49. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, op. cit., pp. 68-9.
50. Ibid., p. 55.
51. Ibid., p. 51.
52. In this respect it contains affinities with what Steven Lukes calls Athe one-dimensional view of
power.@ Like that view of power, the one-dimensional view of violence limits the scientific scope of
the term to acts involving directly observable, manifest conflict. See Power: A Radical View
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers, 1984), pp. 11-15.
53. Max Weber, APolitics as a Vocation,@ in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max
47
Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 78.
54. Hannah Arendt, AOn Violence,@ in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1972), p. 144.
55. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 200.
56. Pierre Bourdieu, AUnderstanding,@ in Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social
Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 608.
57. One might contend that this caseBfocusing as it does on the efforts of AIDS activists to attain
entry into those committees, boards, and funding bodies that powerfully impacted the conduct and
direction of scientific research into HIV and AIDSBis an awkward if not inappropriate vehicle for
exploring Arendt=s views of speech and action. One might argue, for instance, that the very issues
which AIDS activists sought to politicizeBissues of the body and of biological lifeBare precisely the
kinds of social issues that Arendt excludes from the sphere of politics. From this perspective, AIDS
activists= politicization of AIDS research might be seen as a distressing symptom of the modern
tendency to blur, if not erase, critical distinctions between the private, the social, and the political
spheres. While such a view is not entirely unwarranted, I believe it obscures important complexities
and ambiguities in Arendt=s work and in the interventions of AIDS activists. Regarding Arendt=s
work, I would contend that her distinctions between different spheres human activity are not most
charitably or productively conceived as fixed and nonnegotiable ontological categories that facilitate
a tidy compartmentalization of some issues, activities and classes of people as intrinsically suited for
the public and political realm and others as not. Rather, I follow a number of scholarsBmost notably
48
Hannah Pitkin, Bonnie Honig, and Linda ZerilliBin arguing that Arendt=s distinction between the
social and the political is not necessarily intended to debar all social concerns from the precincts of
politics but, as Zerilli has put it, to warn Aagainst the introduction of the instrumentalist attitude that
such concerns often carry with them. Insofar as expediency is held to be the highest criterion, the
instrumentalist attitude treats democratic politics as a means to an end, which almost inevitably leads
citizens to allow the actions and judgments of experts to substitute for their own. . . . There is neither
a determinate group of persons nor a determinate class of objects that is by definition social, not
political. Instead, there is a tendency to develop an anti-political sensibility . . . against which we
need to be on our guard.@ See Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 3-4. See also Hanna Pitkin, AJustice: On Relating the Public
and Private,@ Political Theory 9 (August 1981): 342; and Bonnie Honig, AToward an Agonistic
Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,@ in Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist
Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995),
pp. 135-166. In this reading of Arendt, the key question regarding AIDS activism isn=t whether the
issues activists sought to raise were inherently political or nonpolitical, but whether their attitudes,
sensibilities, and modes of discourse were dominated by instrumental considerations, the criterion of
expediency, and Aends@ rather than Agoals.@ The last of these factorsBends and goalsBis
particularly salient, as Arendt insists that Aends are not the same thing as goals, which are always
what political action pursues; the goals of politics are never anything more than the guidelines and
directives by which we orient ourselves and which, as such, are never cast in stone, but whose
concrete realizations are constantly changing because we are dealing with other people who have
49
goals. Only when brute force with its arsenal of means is introduced into the space between people .
. . do the goals of politics become ends which are as firmly defined as the model on which any
physical object is produced and like it determine the choice of means and justify and even sanctify
them.@ See Hannah Arendt, AIntroduction into Politics,@ in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), pp. 193. As this passage indicates, Arendt=s conception of
politics and the political sphere places great emphasis on how practical purposes are pursued, that is,
whether they are pursued in a flexible and open-ended manner or are guided by Afirmly defined,@
Aready-made formulas.@ The (or at least one) great danger to the vitality of political life and action,
as Arendt understands it, consists in the atrophy of goals into ends and of action into execution. On
the distinction between action and execution, see Arendt, On Revolution, p. 264. Consequently, it is
not surprising that those moments of political ferment which Arendt most deeply admiresBfrom the
revolutionary councils in Russia and Hungary to the anti-Nazi resistance movements during World
War II to the non-violent wing of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United StatesBare notable
in part because those who participated in them were animated largely by the pursuit of goals rather
than ends. As I will argue below, AIDS activists attempt to democratize scientific institutions evince
a similar concern with goals rather than ends.
58. For a thoughtful, and Arendtian inspired, discussion of some of these issues, see Mark
Reinhardt, AActing (Up) in Publics: Mobile Spaces, Plural Worlds,@ in The Art of Being Free:
Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp.
142-178. While Reinhardt provides an insightful analysis of ACT UP=s activities outside formal
governmental ans scientific institutions, he does not examine what is my primary concern here,
50
namely, treatment activists= participation in deliberations within biomedical institutions.
59. Although the first known cases of AIDS were reported by the Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) in 1981, President Ronald Reagan remained conspicuously silent about the disease until
asked about it by a reporter during a September 1985 news conference. Moreover, it has often been
noted that Reagan failed to make any Aextensive public comments on AIDS until 1987,@ when he
spoke on the eve of the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington, DC. See Robin
Toner and Robert Pear, AThe 40th President: The Opponents; Critics See a Reagan Legacy Tainted
by AIDS, Civil Rights and Union Policies,@ New York Times, June 9, 2004. By that time more than
20,000 Americans had already died of AIDS. Indeed, perhaps the most memorable slogan associated
with the AIDS movement in the United StatesBASilence=Death@Bwas inspired in no small part by
President Reagan=s own conspicuous silence on the issue. Importantly, President Reagan=s
reluctance to publicly acknowledge the AIDS pandemic was accompanied by a similar reluctance to
fund adequately AIDS-related research. In a 1985 op-ed article, Congressman Henry Waxman
excoriated the Reagan administration for cutting Aresearch budgets by millions of dollars, while the
nation=s treatment costs have already run into the billions.@ See Henry A. Waxman, AFighting an
Epidemic in the Absence of Leadership,@ Washington Post, September 4, 1985, H19, Health. On the
failure to adequately fund fund AIDS research, see Epstein, Impure Science, p, 187; and Deborah
Gould, ARock the Boat, Don=t Rock the Boat, Baby: Ambivalence and the Emergence of Militant
AIDS Activism,@ in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate
Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 136.
51
60. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 285.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid. Elsewhere Epstein submits: AAs activists saw it, the big names in AIDS anti-viral research
. . . dominated the committees that voted, predictably, to fund the kinds of studies that these
researchers did@ (p. 284).
64. Ibid., p. 286.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 350.
68. Epstein, AThe Construction of Lay Expertise,@ p. 410.
69. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 231.
70. Epstein, AThe Construction of Lay Expertise,@ p. 417.
71. Ibid.
72. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 231.
52
73. Ibid., AThe Construction of Lay Expertise,@ p. 416.
74. James Bohman, ADemocracy as Inquiry, Inquiry as Democratic: Pragmatism, Social Science,
and the Cognitive Division of Labor,@ Journal of Politics 43 (April 1999): 600.
75. Epstein, Impure Science, ch. 7.
76. Ibid., p. 228.
77. Since many demographic groups were significantly underrepresented in AIDS trials, this was not
a trivial issue. In a 1989 exposé published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, Robert
Steinbrook reported that Ablacks, Latinos and intravenous drug users are substantially underrepresented in ongoing federally sponsored trials of new AIDS drugs. As of Aug. 28, 20.4% of the
7,659 patients who have been enrolled in National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) trials were black or Latino. By comparison, about 42% of adult AIDS patients in the United
States are black or Latino. In the trials, 11.3% of the enrolled patients were previous or current users
of intravenous drugs. By comparison, 27.5% of all adult AIDS patients report previous or current
intravenous drug use. Women represent 6.8% of the enrollees in the trials, compared to 8.9% of all
adult AIDS patients.@ See Robert Steinbrook, AAIDS Trials Shortchange Minorities and Drug
Users,@ Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1989, 1.
In addition to the demographic issues, activists argued that the insistence on stringent entry
criteria for clinical trialsBhowever understandable and well-intentioned they may have been in the
abstractBproduced an incentive structure that was in some sense morally perverse. In the interest of
insuring that studies were grounded in Aclean data,@ principal investigators often excluded persons
53
who were currently taking, or had previously taken, other medications. Additionally, Asometimes
those enrolled in studies who took so much as an aspirin without explicit permission were threatened
with expulsion.@ These criteria encouraged people with AIDS and HIV to avoid early treatment,
since such treatment might disqualify them from inclusion in future studies that held more promise.
As one AIDS activist, Terry Sutton, poignantly described the dilemma: AThe idea of clean data
terrifies me, because it punishes people for trying to treat early. My roommate . . . has made the
decision not to treat early because of the pure subject rule, What he says is >I want to be a pure
subject so that I can get access to the best protocol once it starts to move.= You only get to be a pure
subject once.@ As Epstein observes, these concerns led to an interrogation of Athe presuppositions
of scientific >cleanliness.= Did clean data come only from >pure= subjects? Was >messy,=
>impure= science necessarily bad science?@ See Epstein, Impure Science, pp. 254-56.
78. Martin Delaney, for example, contended that policies of restrictive access undermined
scientists= ability Ato conduct clinical research. @ As he noted: AAIDS study centers throughout the
nation tell of cheating, even bribery, to gain entry to studies; mixing of drugs by patients to share and
dilute the risk of being on placebo; and rapid dropping out of patients who learn they are on placebo.
. . . Such practices are a direct result of forcing patients to use clinical studies as the only option for
treatment.@ See Martin Delaney, AThe Case for Patient Access to Experimental Therapy,@ Journal
of Infectious Diseases 159 (March 1989): 416-419.
79. Ibid., pp. 228, 339. For an interesting analysis of the former issue, see Steven Epstein,
54
Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Cicago Press,
2007). Regarding the latter issue, activists challenged on ethical and pragmatic grounds what was
widely accepted as the methodological A>gold-standard=@ in biomedicine, namely, randomized
clinical trials (pp. 196-198). Here activists questioned, among other things, whether the use of
Adouble-blind@ placebo controlled experiments were ethical in cases where the study=s research
subjects suffered from a potentially fatal disease. They also questioned whether such controls were
either possible or necessary (pp. 202-204).
80. Although activists= arguments for accelerated approval of experimental AIDS drugs ultimately
prevailed, they were certainly not uncontroversial. Indeed, there was considerable disagreement
among researchers themselves regarding the wisdom of an accelerated drug approval process, with
some agreeing with activists= contentions that a quicker approval process was justified by the
urgency and deadly nature of the AIDS epidemic, while others worried about the long-term
implications of such a precedent, wondering if it might provide an incentive for pharmaceutical
companies to push for approval in the absence of adequate data (pp. 276-279). Interestingly,
activists= views also evolved over time. While the vast majority of activists remained committed to
a policy of fast track drug approval, they also became increasingly concerned about the ways in
which drug companies might abuse the policy. If accelerated approval ultimately yielded Amediocre
drugs@ that were no more effective than currently available treatments, then it was difficult to
understand how the policy could possibly benefit AIDS patients (pp. 315-318). Here, as in so many
areas of AIDS research, the quest for easy answers was extraordinarily elusive.
81. Ibid., pp. 256-258.
55
82. Ibid., p. 257.
83. On the distinction between Apragmatic@ and Afastidious@ perspectives on the purpose of
clinical trials, see ibid., pp. 255-256, 342.
84. Ibid, pp. 2, 235-264, 330-353.
85. Epstein, AThe Construction of Lay Expertise,@ p. 417.
86. Ibid, p. 232. Epstein cites other examples as well: ASusan Ellenberg, the chief biostatistician
assigned to the ACTG trials at NIAID, recalled seeking out the ACTUP/New York document in
Montreal in response to her own curiosity: >I walked down to the courtyard and there was this group
of guys, and they were wearing muscle shirts, with earrings and funny hair. I was almost afraid. I
was really hesitant even to approach them . . .=@ (p. 247).
87. Ibid., p. 232.
88. For an excellent discussion of the changing Aemotion culture@ within the AIDS movement in
the United States, see Gould, ARock the Boat, Don=t Rock the Boat Baby,@ pp. 135-157.
89. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 335. As Epstein notes elsewhere, once activists demonstrated their
competency in the language of biomedicine, they Adiscovered that researchers felt compelled, by
their own norms of discourse and behavior, to consider activist arguments on their own merits@ (p.
231-2).
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90. Ibid., p. 232.
91. Ibid., pp. 248-249.
92. Donna Haraway, ASituated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Priviledge
of Partial Perspective,@ Feminist Studies 14 (Autumn 1988): 575-599. In this influential essay,
Haraway defines situated knowledges as Apartial, locatable, critical knowledges@ (p. 584).
93. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 231.
94. Ibid., p. 351.
95. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 146.
96. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 12.
97. Ibid., pp. 229-230.
98. Ibid., p. 293.
99. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 268.
100. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant=s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 43.
101. Epstein, Impure Science, p. 235. As Epstein points out, researchers transformed view of
activists is mirrored in activists own A transformed conception of the identity of the antagonist. In
place of the charges of genocide that activists had used in the early days of ACT UP to frame their
57
critiques of the research establishment, these activists were now often inclined to acknowledge the
good intentions of researchers@ (p. 328).
102. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 244.
103. Ibid., p. 200.
104. Hannah Arendt, AOn Violence,@ in Crises of the Republic (New York and London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 178. As Arendt asserts, bureaucracy Ais the most social form of
government.@ See Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 40.
105. Garrath Williams captures nicely this aspect of Arendt=s worries about the logic of ends and
means: Aan end trumps all other claims: in its absolute nature lies justification for the means of
realization, and these, in turn, will tend to be destructive of human living and acting together.@ See
Garrath Williams, ALove and Responsibility: A Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt,@ Political Studies
46 (December 1998): 941.
106. Gregg Gonsalves and Mark Harrington, AAIDS Research at the NIH: A Critical Review. Part
I: Summary@ (Treatment Action Group, New York, 1992, photocopy), pp. 1-2, quoted in Epstein,
Impure Science, p. 353.
107. Sheldon Wolin, AOn the Theory and Practice of Power,@ in Jonathan Arac, ed., After Foucault
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 198.
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