I'd like to pick up on a point Pierre Bourdieu was making about the young intellectual talking about rap, and shifting the focus to culture. Don't you think that with your notion of 'habitus' you are in danger of obfuscating the basic economic determinants of people's possibility for emancipation -- by talking about capital and culture and ideology, when, ultimately, if they haven't got the means to go and read a book then they don't get emancipated in that way? The other thing I would like to question is the notion of doxa. If people internalize their own domination, and in a sense it is subconscious and they are happy with it, then don't you run into trouble trying to justify the idea of emancipation?

PB Are you saying that you suspect I have a sort of intellectual bias and that there is only one way to escape? Is that your impression?

You criticize the young intellectual for talking about rap as if this was a means of emancipation; but in your notion of 'habitus' you are incorporating culture as a determinant, and it could be that focusing on culture in that way shifts the emphasis from economic determinants that do still provide access to means for emancipation.

TE I would like to formulate the point like this. Your concentration on culture is shifting the emphasis away from the economic determinants that prevent people from being emancipated. You are reacting to economism by lifting economic imagery into the cultural sphere rather than by registering the weight of the material and economic within culture.

PB Maybe you are right. I tend to bend the stick too much, as Mao Tse-tung said, while trying to correct the previous bias. In this domain the dominant critical vision is in danger of economism. I tend to insist upon the other aspects, but maybe I am wrong. Even if in my head I have a better balance, I tend, in exposition of my ideas, to insist on the less probable, less visible, aspect -- so you may be right.

TE The second point is interesting -- about people internalizing and so feeling happy with their oppression. Wouldn't one have to argue that they cannot be really happy if they are oppressed?

But if you are talking about the subconscious -- if part of your subconscious habitus determines how you are -- then it becomes very difficult to change it. Fair enough, you can't attribute happiness, but at the same time you can't attribute sadness; whereas Marxism and ideology would want to retain the notion of the actor fighting against something that seems wrong. With doxa you lose that; you don't begin to wonder what the point is -- there is no drive to emancipation.

PB I think this question of happiness is very important. The doxic attitude does not mean happiness; it means bodily submission, unconscious submission, which may indicate a lot of internalized tension, a lot of bodily suffering. I am currently conducting a survey in which I interview persons of indefinite social status -- those who occupy

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