The conversation between Fanon and Bourdieu raises questions of violence and colonialism, and the relation between them. Despite the insight and sympathy with which Bourdieu grasped the realities of colonial domination and resistance in Algeria, these were not the insights he was to take back to France and use in the elaboration of his theory of social order. Rather, what he took back to France to work into a suite of theoretical innovations for understanding society were the insights he drew from his study of rural indigenous society. In consequence, his work has very little to say about social change, transformation, resistance and revolution beyond those occasional and suggestive passages we noted in Conversation 2, frequently marked by references to Algeria or colonisation more broadly. On the face of it, therefore, Bourdieu should have little to say to South African social reality.

But the division between Fanon and Bourdieu – real violence in the colony, symbolic violence in the metropolis; revolution in the colony, invisible and unchallengeable domination in the metropolis – may be too stark. The relationship between symbolic violence and physical violence is much closer than such dichotomies make it appear. And as with symbolic violence, the relationship between the state, the law, and popular violence in communities is a complex and reciprocal one.

This reflection proceeds through a discussion of seven propositions regarding physical violence, drawn from ongoing research into the dynamics of social change in South Africa.

Collective violence on the part of subalterns is frequently a response to the symbolic violence that works to silence them.

Fanon certainly thought so: one reason why subaltern violence was necessary was that it was the only way to break the internal chains of oppression. South Africa's Steve Biko and other intellectuals of the Black Consciousness movement also argued that the first necessity in the struggle for freedom was that blacks should overcome the internal complex of inferiority fostered by white racism. The symbolic violence of

racism, in other words, has enormous force in the colonies. It has been argued by some that popular violence in South Africa, particularly ethnic and xenophobic violence, has roots in the self-denigration fostered by the symbolic violence of racism.