English version for « 

Carte Blanche: MK2 », The Museum of Modern Art of New York

(MoMa), June 5-23, 2014, New York, USA
Organized by Dave Kehr (Adjunct Curator) and Sophie Cavoulacos (Curatorial
Assistant), Department of Film
https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1436
Version française : parue sous le titre « Je lutte des classes », dans Étienne Rouillon
(avec la participation de Marie Descourtieux) (éd.), Une autre idée du cinéma. MK2
40 ans après…, Paris, MK2 Agency, 2014, pp.82-83

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Je lutte des classes*

Bourdieu, Foucault, Eribon…rap music and cinema in the MoMa

By Philippe Corcuff
Translated by Jennifer Gay

The relationships between the classes are less visible in the media today. Yet they
are far from having disappeared from contemporary society, and therefore from the
field of knowledge of critical thinking. However, they are addressed in their points of
intersection with other forms of oppression (gender, “racization”, heteronormativity,
etc.) and in their interactions with another major structuring logic of the time:
individualization. The specificities and the tensions between two of the still-most-
discussed intellectual figures in the world, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu,
seem, from this point of view, important.

Between Bourdieu and Foucault

Pierre Bourdieu extended in crucial aspects the analyses of class oppression

advanced by Marx. In particular, he took into account cultural capital, alongside
economic capital. And he took an interest in the mechanisms specific to symbolic
violence. He also broadened the focus to other forms of domination, such as male
domination. Finally, his notion of individual habitus—understood as the way
tendencies to feel and act unconsciously become part of individual bodies through
social learning—highlighted that the paradox of the irreducible uniqueness of each
person is to be constructed by collective experiences. Emancipation would therefore
occur, in the wake of Spinoza, through the collective and individual knowledge of the
social determinisms weighing on our lives.

The early Michel Foucault was initially focused—for example in History of Madness in
1961, or in Discipline and Punish in 1975—on the binding nature of social norms
embodied in the dispositifs of knowledge/power. Those norms—though he was more
interested in the mad/not mad division or in sexual norms—could be class norms.
Resistances to those norms emerged from those subjected to them. Then the later
Foucault opened the field of “subjectivation”, seen as the emergence of a more
autonomous subjectivity, with the two last volumes of The History of Sexuality in
1984: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. In these later texts, and in their
stimulating reading by American feminist theorist Judith Butler, we find several
approaches to establishing passages between the two Foucaults: subjectivation
would be dependent on dominant norms, while authorizing a space for
autonomization. It would be a “response” to social norms in the makeshift creation of
more or less inventive personal lifestyles and would not be only a matter of
knowledge, as with Bourdieu.

Bourdieu and Foucault? Didier Eribon is one of the rare contemporary critical thinkers
to have worked with tools borrowed from both, in particular in his beautiful
sociological autobiography of a gay son of the working class, Returning to Reims
(2009). A few cultural fragments drawn from roman noir, film, and rap can also help
us to make the echoes of Bourdieu and Foucault resonate in tonalities specific to the
cultural registers in question, and not via the poor modality of illustration. Sociology,
philosophy, literature, film, and song certainly constitute specific forms of
investigation, but their dialogue reveals heuristic potential.

Social criticism

In one of David Goodis’s classic novels, The Moon in the Gutter [1] a certain
inevitability of class relations affects the docker, William Kerrigan. They keep him
from pursuing a love affair with a young woman from a privileged background. “It
struck him full force, the unavoidable knowledge that he was riding though life on a
fourth-class ticket.”[2] The last of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux Louisiana
detective series, The Glass Rainbow [3] features the son of an old moneyed family,
Kermit Abelard. “Condescending and arrogant,” without even noticing (“snapping his
fingers” at Robicheaux, for example), he carries in his body the stigmata of the ruling
class [4].

In Claude Chabrol’s 1995 La Cérémonie [5] the shame of the illiterate maid (Sandrine
Bonnaire) is revived on a daily basis in the bourgeois household where she works,
between unconscious class contempt and laid-back paternalism. Chabrol has several
times called it his “most Marxist” film. There is also some Bourdieu in the passage
from ordinary symbolic violence to “extraordinary” lethal violence.

In her song Between the Lines: Nailed to the Ground [Entre Les Lignes: Cloués Au
Sol], rapper Keny Arkana expressed the deep effects of social oppression: “We
endure a world we can’t keep up with/it makes us retreat, leaving marks on us.” [6] In
Casey’s rap Unlimited Dreams [Rêves illimtés], she explores her socio-racial
condition: “Living in the projects with the cold high towers/What defines me is I’m
Black and have no power.”[7] Furthermore, within the “gendered” division of the
social order, an “androgynous look” makes her “the excluded girl with the masculine
face.”

Resistance and emancipation

Resistance to dominant social logics encourages some initial emancipating steps.

The construction of an individual style emerges for Casey: “Freaked out about this
big supper/I just want to beat out my own tempo.”[8] Keny Arkana, engaged in alter-
globalist movements, endeavors to bring together personal spirituality and radical
collective action, “because changing the world starts with changing yourself.”[9]
In his 1972 film, Coup pour coup,[10] Marin Karmitz introduces us to the cooperative
space of a textile workers’ strike in Rouen as a place of individual subjectivations in
the face of employment and patriarchal pressures. The Maoist-inspired political
framing of the period is overwhelmed by the cinematographic grasping of the singular
faces and individual voices of liberation in the course of collective dialog. In the end,
the personal is not crushed by the collective, as in much of the empty jargon of
activism, but drinks at the well of the collective, and vice versa.

Depicting the difficult struggle to unionize a textile factory in the American south,
Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae (1979) describes the dual emancipation of a worker and a
woman (played by Sally Field), a strong personality discovering herself through
collective action.

In Nadia et les hippopotames (1999) [11], Dominique Cabrera takes on the major
French social movement of the winter of 1995 only a few years after it happened,
through the prism of the tension between the social marginality of Nadia (Ariane
Ascaride) and the stable points of reference of the railroad unionists. Remaining on
the sidelines of organized collective action, Nadia eventually moves in closer, with a
fragile and still uncertain maybe. Serge (Thierry Frémont), the leftist militant,
reappropriates the tradition of his father, “an old Stalinist with Cossack discipline.”

Through these various cultural shards we perceive the possibility of articulations

between individual subjectivation and social struggle. As in the slogan “je lutte des
classes” of the graphic collective “Do not fold” during the 2010 demonstrations
against retirement reform.

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* The French expression for “class struggle” is “la lutte des classes”. Here the
feminine definite article (la) is replaced by the first-person subject pronoun (je), which
by implication changes the substantive “lutte”—struggle—to the first person
conjugation of the verb “lutter”—to struggle – Trans.

[1] The Moon in the Gutter (1953); adapted for the screen in 1983 by Jean-Jacques
Beineix, with Gérard Depardieu.
[2] Op. cit.
[3] The Glass Rainbow (2010).
[4] Op. cit.
[5] Produced by MK2.
[6] From Entre ciment et belle étoile, Because, 2006.
[7] From Libérez la bête, Ladilafé, 2010.
[8] Op. cit.
[9] Op. cit.
[10] DVD from éditions MK2.
[11] For which I was co-screenwriter with the director.