On the Coercion of Symbolic Violence

To help with the conversation on defining a "real" anybody (anarchist, socialist, etc.) or claiming them to be otherwise, I thought I would add the following (which is from an essay I wrote on violence):

According to Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence is the exercise of recognized constraint – that is, to move the indicative to the imperative by moving from the individual to the collective and making claims on one that they must attend to an action if they are really part of that group. Bourdieu gives the following example: “If I am an incarnate [a delegate or such] of the collective of the group, and if this is the group to which you belong, which defines you, which gives you an identity, which means you really are a teacher, really a Protestant, really a Catholic, etc., you really have no choice but to obey.” It is coercion that is not physical but that takes as its object of manipulation the identity of the individual. In other words, symbolic violence is the violence carried out by what Bourdieu calls symbolic power – “a power which presupposes recognition, that is, the misrecognition of the violence that is exercised through it.”

Quotes are taken from Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 209 & 212.