CONFORM, FAIL, REPEAT

“In Conform, Fail, Repeat, Christopher Samuel presents a thought-provoking and timely exposition on the sociology of social movements. Drawing upon the concepts articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, Samuel provides fresh insights and new ways of thinking about power and dominance within collective struggles for justice, the conformity and failure inherent to social movement participation, and the conflict between the competing visions that characterize social movements—radical transformative change or the immediate elimination of suffering. Conform, Fail, Repeat concludes by sketching out a new model of “symbolic democracy,” which academics and activists alike should find to be challenging and informative.”

—Tom Warner, Queer activist and author of Never Going Back, A History of Queer Activism in Canada and Losing Control, Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights

“What might the next left look like? Putting the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to impressive and challenging work, Christopher Samuel suggests a critical and realist approach to twenty-first-century movements struggling for human emancipation. Looking at specific moments including the G20 protests and Black Lives Matter, Samuel provides refreshingly original and non-polemical insight into some of the most contentious issues those movements face—such as how to reconcile political effectiveness with internal democracy and how to avoid the seemingly perpetual pattern of movements losing sight of the revolutionary visions that inspired them. A must-read for leftists as they seek to understand, and to change the very shape of, a storm-tossed political world.”

—Ian McKay, author of Reasoning Otherwise and Rebels, Reds, Radicals

Conform, Fail, Repeat

© 2017 Christopher Samuel

First published in 2017 by

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Contents

Preface

1Power and Struggle

2Critical Theory and Social Movement Research

3Conformity and Failure

4Collective Identity and Symbolic Power

5Tactic and Antinomy

6Suffering and Justice

7New Stakes and New Strategies

8Resistance and Democracy

Notes

Index

Preface

This book offers a philosophically informed study of power and collective struggles for justice. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche tells us, “There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher’s ‘conviction’ appears on the stage—or to use the language of an ancient Mystery: Adventavit asinus / Pulcher et fortissimus (The ass appears, beautiful and most brave).”¹ Since its appearance is inevitable, here is my philosophical conviction: Power is supple, its mechanisms hide as often as they reveal themselves, and for those who lack power, there is no obvious strategy for combatting injustice without replicating it. I am also convinced, however, that for groups that are systematically disempowered, that are exploited, excluded, humiliated, or simply made invisible, acting collectively is the only way to overcome the mechanisms by which the powerful maintain their advantages.

Let me also acknowledge the emotional and biographical roots of that conviction. At bottom, my ideas about social movements are informed by feelings of loss, disappointment, and frustration. When I first came out as a queer man, in Alberta in 1998, I had already been involved in left-wing politics for a number of years and was a committed Marxist. Naively, I expected LGBT politics to fit neatly with my radical economic leanings, but I came out in a time and place where liberationist and queer impulses were already more or less swamped by a rights-based political strategy focused on relationship rights and anti-discrimination legislation.

In particular, I recall an activist meeting in Edmonton where the chair, a lawyer and long-time activist, easily sidelined suggestions she didn’t like by asserting that “one good idea per meeting is enough,” as though that were a well-established rule. Not coincidentally, the radical and difficult ideas never seemed to meet the “one good idea” quota. Power imbalances are not just about laws and police. They are about cultural skills, social connections, and the ability to present partisan preferences as neutral and objective.

Over the next decade, I became increasingly involved with the New Democratic Party, eventually working as a legislative staffer. I also sat on numerous NDP committees, including election planning committees, and worked on the central campaigns for a number of elections. There’s nothing like a paid role to teach you the importance of compromise, making the best use of scarce resources, and the need for concrete, practical assessments of political opportunity. I experienced a personal deradicalization that was directly comparable to the deradicalization I mourned in lesbian and gay politics.

It’s a hard thing when your head and your heart are so badly aligned. This book is the result of my effort to think through that misalignment and to reconcile my radical impulses with the immediate demands of political life. I am not sure it actually achieves that reconciliation. Instead, the book creates space for being okay with that lack of alignment. I hope it helps people who care about justice to recognize when sincerely held commitments to radical change and pragmatic effectiveness are mutually exclusive and—as importantly—to learn how to act within those kinds of impossible spaces.

I will use key concepts from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to pry open that door. Bourdieu’s work brings together a number of philosophical and sociological trajectories and commits itself to centring social conflict. It is easy to get lost in some of his technical language (habitus, allodoxia, and so on), but ultimately, he gives us a way of thinking about how people navigate social spaces that are fundamentally built on the conflicting goals and resources of people in those spaces. Nonetheless, Marxists may find Bourdieu’s use of the term “capital” to be somewhat idiosyncratic. For Marxists, capital has specific function and meaning within political economy; Bourdieu uses the term to describe context-appropriate resources. I will explain capital, habitus, and other technical terms as the argument unfolds.

When you get past the idiosyncratic language, Bourdieu’s approach shows how economic privilege, class privilege, political access, cultural skill, and collective action translate into advantages and disadvantages in various settings. Specifically, it lets us understand how those often-unrecognized features of power infiltrate settings dearest to those who fight for economic, sexual, racial, environmental, gender, and other forms of justice. Power infiltrates movement and activist spaces; the framework I develop here helps explain why some voices within movements are heard while others are silenced.

Bourdieu also gives us tools to think about the emotional life of domination and social movement participation. For example, activists gain emotional support from the activists around them. Such mutual support often keeps activists afloat in a world where progress seems painfully incremental and easily reversed. It’s easy for activists to forget that the emotional support gained through activism is not a common experience for most people. Particularly for many LGBT/Q people, difference is painful. For them, short-term gains and equality based on sameness aren’t about selling out, they’re about survival. Within the alterglobalization movement, the same is true about activists who are more interested in reducing poverty in the short-term than building toward an anti-capitalist revolution. In both cases, short-term gains are about demanding that people’s immediate quality of life not be sacrificed for distant movement successes.

The argument I develop in this book offers new ways of thinking about conformity and failure. Rather than treat conformity and failure as the mistakes and shortcomings of particular movement groups, I show how conformity and failure operate as inherent to social and political spaces. Movements can’t help but reproduce conformity and failure because that is how social spaces work. Conceiving of conformity and failure as intrinsic to social space recognizes the complex ways in which movement strategies are connected to practical assessments of the political landscape and informed by the affective realities that are themselves products of that political landscape. Of course, my argument is also rooted in the utopian pull toward something more radical, more sustaining than incremental compromise. Willingness to fight and fail in the name of a vision is a cornerstone of progressive activism.

In short, our world is contradictory and unjust. Power expands and mobilizes those contradictions, for the benefit of some and at the expense of others. There’s no easy escape from power’s circuits, but by using Bourdieu’s concepts to think about conformity and failure, we can make power a little less hidden and, I hope, a little easier to confront.

Acknowledgements

When critiquing social movements, particularly those that bear a close identification with one’s own sense of justice and injustice, it is easy to allow critique to overshadow the hard work, dedication, and willingness to risk physical harm and imprisonment that activists have put into those movements. That is not my intention here. However strongly I disagree with much that has happened in contemporary social movements—LGBT/Q and alter-globalization in particular—I nonetheless consider progressive movements to be my political home. In particular, I want to acknowledge the fact that past struggles of the LGBT/Q community, however fraught with contradictions, have made it infinitely easier and safer for me to write this critique.

I also want to single out Eleanor MacDonald for expanding my thinking, challenging me to go further and in new directions. I want to thank Eleanor for her incredible kindness, support, and friendship. I am also truly grateful for the guidance—intellectual and practical—provided by Zsuzsa Csergo, Abigail Backan, and Cindy Patton. I feel privileged to work with Amanda Crocker and the staff and Editorial Committee at Between the Lines and am deeply appreciative of their support for this project. The careful editing work of Tilman Lewis has made the work considerably more readable. My thanks also to Scott Schaffer for his comments and guidance.

A version of chapter four has previously been published as “Symbolic Violence and Collective Identity: Pierre Bourdieu and the Ethics of Resistance,” Social Movement Studies 12,4 (2013), 397–413, and is available at www.tandfonline.com. A version of chapter five has previously been published as “Throwing Bricks at a Brick Wall: The G20 and the Antinomies of Protest,” Studies in Political Economy 90,1 (2012), 7–27, copyright © Studies in Political Economy. It is reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of Studies in Political Economy.

Finally, this project would not have been completed without support from friends and family. Special thanks to my father, Lawrence Samuel, and sister, Kathleen Samuel. My mother, Judy Samuel, passed away before completion of this project, which I regret very much.

Above all, of course, my thanks go to my partner, Cory Hayden. He has lived with this project longer than anyone should have to, and he has done so with love and good humour.

This work was written on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, sites of human activity for fifteen thousand years. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island.

Money and Pride

When the leaders of the world’s most powerful economies, the G20, descended on Toronto in June 2010, they were met by a state that had spent nearly a billion dollars to host the event—spending that included an infamous $9.4 million security fence and mobilizing thousands of police officers. Leaders were greeted by a chief of police willing to misrepresent the law in the interest of maintaining peace, thousands of peaceful protesters, a contingent of property-smashing Black Bloc activists, and a population that was largely unaware of the political, economic, and ideological stakes involved in the confrontation.² Fallout from this struggle included the arrest of a thousand protesters, lawsuits against the Toronto Police Service, and several investigations into police behaviour during the protests.³ Despite sizable and highly visible demonstrations and protests, the G20 agreed to introduce aggressive austerity measures in their respective economies, the impact of which continue to be felt most by those who are already the most vulnerable, economically and socially.

That same summer, Pride Toronto, the non-profit organization responsible for organizing Canada’s largest LGBT/Q festival, made a series of controversial decisions.⁴ These decisions brought to the surface struggles among festival organizers, politically engaged queers, municipal politicians, and the significant numbers of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people who want pride celebrations to be about partying and apolitical cultural visibility. The organization’s close relationship with the City of Toronto—and particularly its reliance on $250,000 in annual municipal funding—contributed to its initial decision to require all signs in the 2010 Pride Parade to be vetted by an ethics committee. Although the vetting process was applicable to all potential participants, it was clearly intended to silence a particular group, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA). In light of strong criticism from those who argue that pride celebrations should include contentious political claims and solidarity movements, Pride Toronto replaced mandatory sign vetting with a narrower restriction that specifically prohibited the phrase “Israeli Apart-heid.”⁵ Still facing backlash, including from long-time activists and prominent members of Toronto’s LGBT/Q communities, Pride organizers backed down entirely, eventually committing parade participants only to the city’s Non-discrimination Policy. Neither QuAIA’s core messages nor the phrase “Israeli Apartheid” were considered in breach of this policy.⁶

Immediately following these efforts to censor certain voices within the celebrations, Pride Toronto provoked further anger by participating in a reception for Toronto police chief Bill Blair less than a week after officers at the G20 summit allegedly segregated and detained LGBT/Q protesters, while using excessive force and homophobic language.⁷ In 2016, Black Lives Matter–Toronto (BLM TO) brought similar issues to the fore when they briefly brought that year’s Toronto Pride Parade to a stop. In a tactic reminiscent of sit-ins and die-ins from the 1980s and 1990s, BLM TO stopped the parade to call out anti-Black racism and other forms of racism and marginalization that have become embedded in Toronto’s official pride festivities. BLM TO’s most highly debated demand—that police be excluded from future pride parades— unleashed a year-long debate about racism, inclusion, and how to make Pride Toronto supportive of, and accountable to, Toronto’s racialized communities. Needless to say, Pride Toronto’s institutional and political orientations remain highly contentious.

The task I set myself for this book is to integrate two distinct kinds of inquiry: normative political theory and social movement studies.⁸ Normative political theory is the rigorous philosophical pursuit of principles of justice. In particular, this type of political theory is concerned with how social institutions and interactions either promote or hinder justice. For queer and postmodernist readers, the phrase “normative theory” may raise flags. Queer theory and politics resist “normalization” and the idea of “normalcy” as a life goal. Queers resist the violence—both overt and subtle—by which individuals are forced to “be normal,” to embody the pliable and passive vision of the good citizen demanded by heteronormativity and consumer capitalism. I share these concerns and hope to show that normative theory can offer a robust defence against the deadening homogeneity produced by normalization and normalcy.

As the philosophical pursuit of principles of justice, normative political theory can find plenty of meat on the bones of alterglobalization and LGBT/Q politics. Freedom of speech and expression, the relationship of capitalism to egalitarianism, civil disobedience, community, and identity are well-covered topics in political theory and activist circles alike. Some theorists and activists go further to ask about the rules of fair political conflict, what constitutes violence, and whether political violence can be justified. Considerable ink has been spilled and comments pages have been flooded with arguments about the relationship of international politics to local communities and of sexual practice to political identities. Political theory, though, too often abstracts those questions in search of general moral principles or democratic mechanisms capable of accommodating these questions without resolving them. As generations of activists can tell you, increasingly sophisticated abstract reasoning will not balance out conflicts over egalitarianism, the role of civil disobedience, and so on. Theory on its own is insufficient; justice demands philosophically sophisticated, thoughtful, and passionate collective action.

In undertaking to integrate normative political theory with social movement studies, I turn to moments from the LGBT/Q and alterglobalization movements for two reasons. First, my own modest activist history is closely connected to those movements. I entered LGBT/Q politics when the Alberta government was fighting tooth and nail to prevent inclusion of sexuality in its civil rights legislation. Throughout that fight and the ensuing struggles, I saw tensions between fundraising-centred legal strategies and feminist-informed efforts to build social and community networks. I saw professionals run meetings in ways that tolerated and then silenced radical and non-conforming activist energies because they were “impractical.” Over the next two decades, I’ve followed and been caught up in various passionate struggles over sexual difference, the meaning of belonging, and how to prevent a single mainstream identity from swamping LGBT/Q communities’ diversity. At the same time, I’ve participated professionally in political organizations that depend for their existence on rules and structure, first as a researcher for the NDP and now for the labour movement. My professional experience has tempered my radical leanings with an appreciation of how important practical victories are for nurturing a long-run political project.

Second, LGBT/Q and alterglobalization movements elegantly illustrate the tension faced by all social movements.⁹ This tension has been described in myriad ways: as conflict between reformism and radicalism, pragmatism and idealism, capture and independence, representation and affinity. The tension recurs in philosophic and activist literature because it is maddeningly difficult to overcome. In fact, as I hope to make clear, normative theory will advance only if:

•it develops the tools necessary to perceive and appreciate the poles in these dyads in concrete relations to each other;

•it exposes these relations as symptoms of extensive and often subtle forms of domination; and

•it can find ways of breaking open these relations to uncover novel, more just ways of resisting that domination.

Indeed, the tensions between radical and reformist versions of alterglobalization and LGBT/Q movements represent more than mere alternative strategies. The antagonism between radical and reformist political projects is a feature of domination itself.

Carefully integrating normative political theory and social movement theory will move us toward new ways of resisting domination without falling back into interminable debates over goals and strategies. The goals-and-strategies debates are serious and sincere: activists engage in contentious political activity because they want to change things, and even when large changes seem impossible in the short run, activists still feel compelled to do something. Scholars of social movements and normative theory often neglect how viscerally felt activist commitments are—fear of police violence, fear of gay-bashing, witnessing loved ones succumbing to AIDS, or struggling to put food on the table are not merely intellectual commitments. Moreover, activists’ desire to do something cannot help but force them into a messy choice between idealism and practicality, and it does so repeatedly across movements and within each activist’s own protest career. Because the stakes are so visceral, so lived, it is vital, without abstracting from lived suffering, to recast these debates within a broader framework of justice. Such a framework might shift energy away from accusations and counter-accusations of utopianism or selling out, and toward productive forms of conflict capable of reducing injustice.

Understandably, many activists have an impulse to immediately alleviate suffering. The emphasis on equal rights in LGBT politics, the demand by some elements of the alterglobalization movement for peaceful protests, safe from police violence: these are laudable efforts to reduce suffering in the short term. Nonetheless, the more radical versions of these politics—the queer refusal to be “normal,” the Black Bloc willingness to put activist bodies on the line to tear down capitalist modes of property—are similarly interested in reducing suffering. They are simply willing to take bigger risks now in the hope of attaining greater human flourishing and freedom from suffering in the future. Ultimately, it is a question of strategy whether one ought to pursue immediate, practically feasible reductions in suffering or risk short-term suffering for radical long-term transformations.

Still, movement strategies demand both practical and normative evaluation. I will argue that structures of domination distort strategic thinking in normatively important ways and that we need to understand those distortions before evaluating particular strategies and tactics. This understanding depends on our willingness to think about suffering as a social and political phenomenon and on an insistence that the starting point of normative theory should be attention to suffering.

Suffering and Critical Theory

Broadly speaking, this book is an exercise in a specific type of normative theory, namely critical theory. Although critical theory has fairly concrete foundations, thinkers have taken it up in diverse ways, so it is best described as an orientation or philosophical disposition rather than a definite set of tools. The roots of critical theory extend back at least to Karl Marx, but it took on its characteristic combination of methods and strategies through a group of thinkers—Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer pre-eminent among them—associated with the Frankfurt School (more accurately called the Institute of Social Research) in Germany prior to World War Two. The timing of the Frankfurt School’s emergence is important: the rise of the Nazi party meant that the school had to be relocated, forcing the school’s leading intellectuals to flee their home while bearing witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.

First-generation critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School combined Marx, Nietzsche, Max Weber, G.W.F. Hegel, and psychoanalytic thought to challenge dominant philosophical approaches and social and political institutions. This formal philosophical project was, however, motivated by a deeply felt awareness of suffering and a commitment to exposing the oft-hidden and misrecognized relations of power that perpetuate that suffering. Adorno’s oeuvre is particularly important in this regard. He worked ceaselessly to expose the Enlightenment roots of fascism, its inevitability given the growing instrumentalization of life and culture within capitalism, and the authoritarian features of that instrumentalization present even in non-fascist states such as the United States. Much of Adorno’s postwar writing is a palpable effort to work through his grief in the face of the Holocaust’s destruction of life, culture, and philosophy. It is in that spirit that, in taking on the challenge of knitting together social movement and normative political theory, I have tried to maintain the centrality of suffering and its relationship to justice.

Naturally, normative theory is not concerned with every instance of suffering. It is not our task to evaluate the moral import of suffering that happens naturally or by happenstance. Indeed, some pain and suffering is necessary for us to develop a capacity to act in the world. Theory should, however, attend to how suffering is distributed (which groups tend systematically to suffer more than others, and what the form or quality of their suffering is) and how evenly distributed the resources needed to redress or overcome that suffering are. I will argue for a fairly broad conception of both suffering and resources, to make explicit the connection between durable relations of power, durable conditions of suffering, and the diverse skills, dispositions, and social networks that serve as resources relevant to considerations of justice.

This approach exposes the distorting effects of power in two significant areas. First, the power relations that create strategic and tactical impasses also infiltrate and distort the very goals that movements set for themselves. Second, radically unequal relations of power create impasses wherein there is no strategy or tactic that perfectly—or even adequately—balances utopian vision with political practicality. These distortions take many forms, but they are most recognizable where movements reduce their transformative aspirations, often making compromises that benefit some segments of the movement at the expense of others. Conceptually reconceiving justice as a response to suffering in the face of complex and shifting distortions allows us to rethink how movements engage in political conflict.

This kind of conceptual work is not without precedent. Adorno captured one facet of power’s disrupting and distorting nature in his insistence that features of the world ought to be described as both true and false. He argued, for example, that separating psychological and sociological explanations for human activity is true because there is an actual split between the psychological and sociological: we cannot understand individuals by explaining their actions only through reference to social structures any more than we can understand society as simply an aggregation of actors. Nonetheless, biographically individual agents are socially constituted in normatively important ways, so analytically separating the sociological and the psychological appears false.¹⁰ Recognizing the simultaneous truth and falsity of social phenomena is the first step in identifying the mechanisms of power that allow social paradoxes to persist. Next we need to understand what damage these paradoxes create and who benefits from this damage.

Paradox need not be conceptualized in abstract, formal terms—in fact, it shouldn’t be. For example, same-sex marriage and popular pro-LGBT YouTube campaigns (which we will look at more closely in chapter four) are likely to bear truth, in that they mitigate some forms and instances of suffering, but also falsity, insofar as they reproduce and conceal others. In certain political contexts (as we will see in chapter five), collective action is bound to be self-defeating, forcing activists to turn to one of two equally ineffective protest tactics. Here, paradox turns activist energies back on themselves, rendering protest both true and false.

Using critical theory to evaluate social movements should not, therefore, mean trying to establish the truth or falsity of one set of movement goals over another, or of one set of tactics over another. We should interpret the tension between truth and falsity in these instances in order to catch a glimpse of new possibilities. Critical theory starts with the premise that not only do unnecessary suffering, harm, exploitation, environmental destruction, and myriad forms of oppression structure existing social relations, but harm, exploitation, and destruction also systematically benefit some groups at the expense of others.¹¹ The practical work of using critical theory to critique harm and exploitation proceeds by understanding the mechanisms of suffering and destruction that currently exist, and mining existing social relations for glimpses into a world that would be less harmful and destructive. Suffering, destruction, and exploitation make social relations false, but resistance to those relations provide a hint of possible truth. Critical theorists and activists alike use existing injustices as a sort of inverse roadmap to more just relations. As Loïc Wacquant argued, critical theory “trains the weapons of reason at socio-historical reality and sets itself the task of bringing to light the hidden forms of domination and exploitation which shape it so as to reveal by contrast the alternatives they thwart and exclude.”¹²

Negating the Negation

Critical theorists often describe exposing hidden forms of domination as “negating the negation.” The phrase has Hegelian roots, but for now, let’s think of “negation” as the social and political institutions that prevent—or negate—full human experience and expression. Negating that negation entails challenging confining and dehumanizing institutions to open spaces outside or beyond them, without necessarily articulating a complete vision of what a just, negation-free society would be. Critical theorists defer articulating such a vision, largely because the existing negation—oppression, violence, unequal power relations—obscures our vision of how truly just social arrangements might appear. Instead, critical theorists help articulate and expose existing negations to support political efforts to alter or cancel them out.

The strength of social movement theory, in contrast to critical theory, is that it treats collective action as a puzzle to be explored and not simply a force to be unleashed by a set of critical insights. The collective aspect of collective action cannot simply be assumed. The tensions between the biographically individuated bodies of activists—their individually experienced emotions, sensations, and visceral reactions to suffering on the one hand, and sociologically distributed commonalities, political opportunities, and the social and cultural production of meaning on the other—are politically and morally significant. Social movement theory offers a wide range of conceptual tools and empirical evidence to help understand the dynamics through which movements resolve these tensions in order to challenge domination.

Individuals join together to engage in political action, but their transformation from individual agents to a collective actor traverses a contradictory and uneven terrain of possibilities and obstacles. Therefore, the distortions and impasses facing social movements are as relevant to normative theory as the injustices that provoke collective action in the first place. Both parts of the phrase “collective action” merit critical analysis, and although power’s intransigence demands that we move beyond critique and into confrontation—that is, action—domination’s complexity requires dialogue, debate, and plural strategies to figure out how to act collectively. Collective action brings no guarantees, and how we negate the negation matters a great deal. Integrating normative theory with social movement research will allow us to identify false or distorted efforts to negate the negation. That is, it allows us to identify modes of resistance that do not free us from the harm and destruction of existing social relations because they in fact replicate, without negating, those relations.

Bourdieu: Structure and Agency

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist and activist intellectual on whose framework I draw, fits squarely within the critical theoretical camp, relying on a constellation of Marx, Weber, and phenomenology. Bourdieu’s central contribution was what he called a “general science of the economy of practice” capable of overcoming “the most fundamental, and the most ruinous” division in social science: the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism.¹³ The technical language of objectivism and subjectivism represents a fairly familiar debate for Marxists and other left-wing thinkers: Can we best understand human activity through reference to broad structures (class, the economy, gender, ideology, and so on), or should we focus on individual people’s ideas, preferences, biases, and desires? Bourdieu’s genius was in developing a way of understanding structure and individual as intricately linked. He recognized that, although there are rules and practices that are relatively stable, people make choices within those rules and practices. That is, people do not simply act out the demands imposed on them by class and gender, they engage in practical strategies to navigate within those structures. In short, he restored a sense of agency to how we understand individuals in relation to social structures.

To explain how people can act as agents—that is, how they exercise agency within social structures—he developed a novel form of social phenomenology.¹⁴ Where traditional phenomenologists make claims about agents and their ability to act in the world through close analysis of experience, Bourdieu’s critical appropriation of phenomenology insists on interpreting experience dually: both as an agent’s effort to act in the world and as the product of sociologically structured and durable relations of power. Bourdieu’s social phenomenology includes a motivational structure (interest or illusio), a set of dispositions through which agents act (habitus), and an agonistic social space (field) in which agents struggle to accumulate the resources (capital) necessary to improve and/or defend their position in that space. We’ll look at these features in some detail in chapter three, focusing on habitus in particular. Over the course of the book, I’ll link each component to social movement research.

It is something of a puzzle that North American scholars (particularly political scientists) have been slow to attend to Bourdieu’s novel sociological approach. His work is well known in European contexts, and his contemporaries—particularly Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida—are staples in North American social, cultural, and political thought. Bourdieu’s absence may be partially explained by the fact that his work is not intelligible within North American disciplinary boundaries.¹⁵ Bourdieu gave little attention to political science’s traditional areas of concern such as demonstrations, strikes, state policy, war, legislatures, constitutions, decision-making, and coalition building.¹⁶ Nor did he focus on social movement theory specifically.¹⁷ Moreover, although sociologists and political scientists have taken up Bourdieu in areas of concern to political science such as the study of nationalism, state theory, and international political economy, there is little social movement research using Bourdieuian insights.¹⁸ The absence is not total; there have been a few attempts to integrate Bourdieu’s thinking tools with social movement categories. Nick Crossley, for example, has argued that Bourdieu’s most important conceptual innovation, the habitus, needs to be rethought both for its potential to become a “radical habitus” disposed toward further participation in contentious politics and in terms of the more general question of how habitus can be transformed, more or less intentionally.¹⁹ Others have sought to make use of Bourdieuian analysis to understand political violence, collective identity, ethnic conflict, institutions and opportunities, and cultural change.²⁰

Although this list may appear comprehensive on first blush, compared to the voluminous debates over the complexities of social movements, it is surprisingly small. Worse, it includes a somewhat glaring omission: there have been almost no attempts to integrate Bourdieu’s sociology simultaneously into social movement research and normative political philosophy.²¹ In part this may result from Bourdieu’s own scholarly bias. Notwithstanding his belief that intellectuals ought to be part of a collective effort to identify and critique hidden hierarchies and sites of domination, Bourdieu was wary of social and political theory generally.²² Nonetheless, Bourdieu’s sociological framework provides precisely the conceptual tools needed to critically move from empirical observation of institutions and patterns of domination into normative evaluations of efforts to resist domination. Again, in the language of critical theory, Bourdieu’s conceptual tools allow us to analyze how existing social relations negate human experience and to make normative judgments about how collective actors resist that domination—how they negate the negations created by existing social relations.

Bourdieu argued that any analysis of social practice must begin with empirical observation of the practice itself, and he limited his own theoretical innovation to developing and refining what he called “thinking tools” based on empirical observations.²³ He insisted that these tools be deployed in context-sensitive ways to avoid reifying them. That is, he cautioned against turning his tools into dead concepts, applied without attending to concrete conditions and experiences. Moreover, each tool is fundamentally incomplete and incoherent without its relational integration into the others. Thus, Bourdieu’s central thinking tools—habitus, field, and capital—represent inseparable components of a theory of practice intended to link the production, meaning, and experience of subjectivity and action to the demands and opportunities of objective structures.

Bourdieu’s tools provide a novel account of behaviour, namely that agents are only able to act because of the inextricable link between the social context (field) in which they act and the practical reason they use to select strategies within that context. He called the set of dispositions that produce practical reason “habitus,” and he used the concept to overcome the division between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to social science. Further, Bourdieu developed a specific critique of how relations of power foster a logical consensus capable of concealing the domination this consensus supports. He called this effect “symbolic power,” and he used it to explain the complicity of dominated actors in their own domination. I will argue that Bourdieu’s understanding of the relationship between individual practical reasoning and the structure of the social space within which that reasoning occurs permits a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between key social movement concepts: “collective identity” and “repertoires of contention.” A Bourdieuian critique of the particular social relations that concretize domination-concealing consensuses about meaning will help social movement researchers understand how movements in contemporary capitalist societies are pushed into strategic impasses and sapped of their transformative potential.

As valuable as Bourdieu’s framework is, it does not tell the whole story. Here again, political theory as a distinct project sits somewhat uncomfortably with Bourdieu’s own methodology. The difference is fairly simple: Bourdieu insisted on close empirical observation in order to understand action, whereas political theory makes general claims about justice and injustice. The version of political theory that I offer here relies on conceptual critique to understand power’s relationship to justice. My arguments sit in a middle space between close empirical observation and detached, abstract reason. My reliance on LGBT/Q and alterglobalization movements is, therefore, illustrative rather than empirical. Bourdieu dismissed normative political theory as “merely metaphysical.”²⁴ His dismissal devalues the role that critical inquiry plays and, despite his own normative commitments, unhelpfully distances scholarly inquiry from movements.

What constitutes “metaphysical thinking” deserves some attention, because Bourdieu is wrong to treat normative theory and metaphysical thought as the same. I agree that metaphysical thinking can be damaging. Students of political philosophy will be familiar with metaphysical thinking from Plato and Aristotle, who were interested in trying to understand how particular and transient phenomena relate to absolute and universal phenomena. They saw deviations from the absolute and the universal as aberrations to be remedied. This is the root of the kind of thinking that Bourdieu rightly rejected. Metaphysical thinking in this sense is a deep-seated and often-unrecognized belief that the world is fundamentally morally well ordered and that injustice is a symptom of departure from that order. With Hegel and Marx, the supposedly well-ordered nature of the world took on a more dynamic character, but for them, suffering and injustice remain aberrations to be worked out through historically developed ideas and action. In its contemporary mode, metaphysical thinking often takes the form of a relentless ideology of positive thinking or, worse, the often-heard consolation that when something bad happens it is because “the universe is trying to tell you something” or “has plans for you.”²⁵

In whatever form it appears, metaphysical thinking serves two functions. First, metaphysical thinking holds the promise of a roadmap. It promises that if we understand the order of the universe, we can work out pathways in keeping with the universe’s moral order and toward a more just set of social relations. Second, it provides comfort. However bad things are, metaphysical thinking tells us, they are only temporary. Eventually the justice intrinsic to the universe will manifest through some gravitational mechanism—rational thought, religion, class conflict, political theory—that will pull us inexorably toward a state of things in accordance with the universe’s well-ordered nature. Metaphysical thinking therefore provides an account of how to act and the psychological energy to keep fighting. Unfortunately, the hope provided by metaphysical thinking is false, or at least misplaced. Imagining that the universe is well ordered fosters unhelpful dispositions toward suffering and action, and adds to the ties binding us to futile debates about strategy and tactics. My goal is to escape metaphysical thinking in order to act more directly on the world before us as it actually is.

While I agree with Bourdieu regarding the importance of rejecting metaphysics, he was nonetheless wrong to equate normative political theory with “merely metaphysical” thought. On the contrary, Bourdieu’s sociology offers philosophical and sociological resources to disentangle movement debates from their metaphysical distortions while nonetheless making positive claims about how to act collectively. LGBT/Q history is rife with the erroneous belief that reducing suffering in the quickest way possible will bring us inherently closer to a state of justice. By treating reductions in suffering as intrinsically justice-promoting, the movement forgets that it matters how the negation is negated. Worse, mainstream LGBT strategies risk ossifying distorted social relations by validating rules of social space that hierarchically distribute rewards, authorize some groups at the expense of others, and promote pro-conformist dispositions. Similarly, although the alterglobalization movement shows symptoms of mistaking action as such with agency, it also provides an opportunity for careful reconsideration of core concerns of political theory such as autonomy and representation. Erasing the distinction between acting and acting successfully, as some proponents of the alterglobalization movement do, inserts a metaphysical sort of optimism where none is warranted and, I suspect, where most activists would be surprised to find it. I challenge these metaphysical errors by insisting that action be understood as the product of hierarchically distributed opportunities, misrecognized rules that benefit some at the expense of others, and ultimately, preconscious calculations of chances and resources.

In what follows, I articulate LGBT/Q and alterglobalization dilemmas as primarily constructed through the tension between conformity and failure. Careful readers will recognize conformity and failure as a variation on reformist/radical, pragmatic/idealist oppositions. The version of this tension I develop is rooted in the claim that although failure to conform to the rules of specific social spaces provides a measure of freedom, success requires conforming to that space’s demands and replicating its rules and hierarchies. Therefore, I suggest that within social movement politics there is a fundamental tension between freedom and success. However, by conceiving of the tension between conformity and failure as a background condition, I hope to empty conformity and failure of their value-laden affective content and their tendency to unduly focus attention on outcome. On its own, action as such is unrelated to justice and, where people act in conditions of domination, the outcomes of action can be true only at the cost of also being false. Action therefore bears on justice only when it is pulled out of the hierarchies of opportunities and rules for action that appear to make the action possible. Normative value does not come from the quality of action or the quality of outcomes, but from the relationship we cultivate toward the background conditions of suffering, conformity, and failure.

Moving from sociological theory and social movement research to a mode of acting collectively and without metaphysics is no simple task. The next two chapters establish conceptual foundations through a critical overview of social movement theory and my adaptation-centred use of Bourdieu’s key thinking tools. I then move on to two illustrations of how social movement theory can be mobilized for normative analysis: North American LGBT/Q movements and the G20 protests in Toronto, 2010 (chapters four and five, respectively). Both illustrate the tension between conformity and failure. In the case of LGBT/Q communities, the choice appears to be between reducing short-term suffering while enforcing sameness and inequality on the one hand, and producing new forms of difference without political impact on the other. At the G20 protests there appears to have been no strategy that could be simultaneously ethical and effective. In both cases, movement participants rely on unjust sources of power derived from broader patterns of domination to move forward their political vision, generally at the expense of either freedom or success.

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