subject’s ‘real’ interests, this approach avoids claims of ‘false consciousness’ by, instead, highlighting how these interests came to be – how these interests are themselves structured by a whole series of power relations that shape what can/cannot be thought and practiced. In short, it focuses on how context- and conduct-shaping are very much entwined by examining the construction of preferences, rather than measuring them up against a set of ‘real’ interests. Beyond Hay: On the importance of Bourdieu and Foucault to preference shaping Rather than eliding the structure-agency debate through claims of co-constitution, we suggest that both Bourdieu and Foucault provide important insights into the mechanics involved in these intertwined processes. Indeed, as we highlight below, their immanent, or decentred, appreciations of these workings of power provide novel ways forward in thinking through the shaping of preferences. Like Hay, both Bourdieu and Foucault, to the extent that they acknowledge the structure-agency debate, emphasise their co-constitutive nature. However, in doing so, they acknowledge the limits of such a debate and the need to go further if we want properly to understand the workings of power. Bourdieu, for example, refers to the distinction – in his words a distinction between mechanism and finalism – as ‘a false dilemma’. More specifically, in relation to questions of structure he argues for the need to ‘abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction’. At the same time, however, he also rejects the view that this somehow implies a reduction to agency alone: we should not ‘reduce the objective intentions and constituted significations of actions and works to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors’ (Bourdieu 1977: 72, 73). In short, neither is adequate. Importantly, it is in this context that Bourdieu turns to his concepts of habitus and practice in order to resolve this analytical tension. Rejecting abstract theoretical categories of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ and attempts to plot interactions between the two, he argues that the site of analysis should instead be practice as it occurs within the confines of habitus. He suggests that practices in habitus are products of a scheme
Foucauldian approach operates in practice on the surface of thought: on what is said and on what is put into action. We are thus able to explore the third face of power by charting a subject’s language and behaviour. 6) Bourdieu, Foucault and the third face: Similarities and Differences We have argued that one can defend Lukes’ idea of a third face of power using either a Bourdieusian or a Foucauldian perspective. Here, we briefly discuss the similarities and differences between these approaches. In so doing we not only respond to Hay’s critique of Lukes, but also detail how both perspectives can help chart the construction of preferences. While Bourdieu and Foucault have different conceptualisations of power and approach the issue from different theoretical traditions, they share an understanding that agents’ preferences are shaped by processes of which they are not necessarily aware; what we have termed a pre-conscious, or a social unconscious, dimension. Such an approach does not undermine the autonomy of agency or the subject, which is Hay’s main concern about Lukes’ third face of power, but, rather, acknowledges the subtle, but crucial, way in which power operates to affect individuals. Moreover, Bourdieu and Foucault are both concerned with the same question: how does a social system, despite obvious inequality and disadvantage, survive without depending upon explicit forms of repression or physical coercion to maintain order? As such, both are interested in uncovering the hidden, and often unobservable, nature of power and agree that we should move away from the state-based notion of centralised power and control that was the concern of theorists such as Marx and Weber. If we focus first on what they share, here there is clearly methodological agreement. Both see the first task as isolating the operation of power within a population, a discipline or a particular social field, but, at the same time, see such a particular operation of power as reflecting the workings of power in society at large. Foucault, for example, explores the dynamics proper to a technology of power, charting the historical production of discourses on madness, so as to tell a larger story about Western civilization. Similarly, Bourdieu isolates communities – in Algeria, for example – or particular social fields – the educational field, the artistic field, the
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