Beyond Bourdieu

Will Atkinson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509507498, 9781509507481
• eBook ISBN: 9781509507528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably the most influential sociologist of the twentieth century, especially since the once common criticisms of his determinism and reproductionism have receded. Now, however, his intellectual enterprise faces a new set of challenges unearthed by decades of sympathetic research: how to conceive the relationship between society and place, particularly in an increasingly global world; how to recognize the individual as a product of multiple forces and pressures; how to make sense of family relations and gender domination; and, ultimately, how to grasp how we each come to be the unique beings we are.

This book tackles these challenges head on, starting from the philosophical core of Bourdieu's sociology and taking in hints and suggestions across his corpus, to propose a range of novel concepts and arguments. In the process it outlines a new way of looking at the world to complement Bourdieu's own – one in which the focus is on the multiple social structures shaping individuals' everyday lives, not the multiple individuals comprising a single social structure.

1
Introduction

There is no doubt about it: Pierre Bourdieu is the single most influential sociologist of the later twentieth century. The concepts which made his name – habitus, capital and field, the latter also encompassing his notion of ‘the social space’ as a national balance sheet of symbolic capital and symbolic power – now, well over a decade after his death, pervade not just his own discipline but the full gamut of social sciences and humanities. Rarely does a month go by, it seems, without a book or article exploring their relevance for this or that subject, or this or that social or intellectual problem. Nor are they any longer confined to their European, let alone French, crucible, finding themselves innovatively applied in research from Shanghai to Chicago and given novel spins as new times and different national contexts demand. Some, especially in the US, have built on Bourdieu's general orientation in his later work to champion an all-purpose ‘field theory’ (see e.g. Fligstein and McAdam, 2011; Green, 2014; Hilgers and Mangez, 2014), while others, fascinated by the ground-breaking statistical techniques he advocated, have sought to map out the social spaces of their respective nations and their homologies in the manner of Distinction, Bourdieu's (1984) magnum opus (e.g. Prieur et al., 2008; Rosenlund, 2009). Still more continue to document and elaborate the process through which cultural capital is reproduced over the generations (e.g. Reay, 1998; Lareau, 2003). Numerous scholars, meanwhile, have dedicated almost their entire careers to clarifying, introducing and extending Bourdieu's theoretical tools – no mean feat given their richness, apparent flexibility and dispersion throughout Bourdieu's hefty corpus. In his own terms, then, it seems evident that the spirit and the language of Bourdieu's brand of sociology have come to occupy a somewhat dominant position within the global sociological field, framing research projects and driving debates all across the face of the Earth.

This is not to say the Frenchman is without his critics or doubters, or that all of his concepts have been well understood by even those sympathetic to him. Many, for example, resist his influence on social science on abstract theoretical grounds, if not – since, like Marxism before him, his perspective has been perceived as a threat to the cherished ideals of liberal capitalism – on raw political principle. His theory has been decried as determinist: the habitus, being nothing but an internalization of social structures, was simply another way of painting people as idiotic ‘judgemental dopes’, to use Harold Garfinkel's famous phrase (Alexander, 1995; Ranciere, 2004). It was depicted as obsessed with social reproduction at the expense of social resistance and change: fields shape habitus, habitus shapes fields, and so the cycle continues forever (Jenkins, 2002). And it was labelled as utilitarian in its view of human beings – we are all seemingly plotting and scheming to maximize our capitals in any field in a purely instrumental manner (Honneth, 1986) – and, at the same time, somewhat overemphatic about the non-conscious, unreflexive, automatic, corporeal nature of practice (Sayer, 2005). Meanwhile even Bourdieu's defenders and appliers have all too often superficially understood and watered down his concepts, combined them with all kinds of antagonistic notions drawn from disparate intellectual sources and subjected them to rounds of critical modification on questionable grounds.

As Bourdieu (1993a, 1997a, 1999a), Wacquant (1993) and others (e.g. Swartz, 1997) frequently lamented, both the enemies and the well-meaning enthusiasts have tended to fall prey to the troublesome allodoxia effect – the mistaken reading of one thing as another premised on distance, whether spatial or social, in this instance generated by viewing a body of thought forged in one intellectual field through the lenses and problematics provided by altogether different ones (Bourdieu, 1997a: 451). Hence Bourdieu's theory has often been equated with neo-Marxism, or functionalism, or utilitarianism, and his concepts robbed of their analytical power by being used as little more than fancy synonyms for existing and somewhat vague notions: habitus becomes simply another way of saying ‘character’ or ‘self’, the label field gets applied to any and every social context, group or situation, and capital becomes an ornamental alternative to the plain term ‘resources’. Worse, as we will see in due course, these supposedly innovative applications can sometimes obscure the pertinent set of generative relations and lead researchers and their readers astray. Ultimately, there has been constant oversight of the fundamental tripartite philosophical core of Bourdieu's vision of the social world from which all his concepts derive their specific meaning and function (in Cassirer's sense): the ‘three Rs’ of recognition, relationalism and applied or historicized rationalism.

On the first count, linking up with – but giving a much richer sociological architecture for – the latest developments in critical theory pushed by Axel Honneth (1996), the major spring of human action, and thus so many specific quests for capital, is not a cold, calculating, instrumental imperative to maximize profit or reproduce domination, as so many critics, sympathizers and revisers have read into Bourdieu's writings over the years (including Honneth at times), but the highly emotive search for a reason for being, generally available in the form of worth and value in the eyes of others. Second, since the desire to attain such recognition from others seems inexorably to entail struggle to be seen as worthier than others through the imposition of certain arbitrary symbols and properties as legitimate (rendering them misrecognized), human beings and their schemes of perception organize around so many systems of difference, dominance and contention vis-à-vis certain definitions of worthiness – i.e. fields – such that any person, practice or property is defined not by some intrinsic essence or substance, as Aristotelian metaphysics had it for centuries, but by their position relative to other people, practices or properties in any one such system. Individual projects and strategies thus flow not from an autonomous cogitator, or homo clausus to use Norbert Elias' (1978) phrase, but from a sense of one's place and the possibilities inscribed in it, and resistance, far from being marginalized or absent in Bourdieu's account as some friendly and not-so-friendly critics complain, is endemic. Third, the Frenchman's concepts are rooted in a specifically Gallic tradition of historical epistemology in which systematic reason and the quest for objectivity are only made possible by the development of certain social conditions and in which reality can never be grasped ‘as is’ but can only ever serve as an ideal to be approximated to better and worse degrees (as judged by logic and evidence) through constructed models of the object under investigation. To add two further ‘Rs’ to the mix, this brand of rationalism thus accommodates a form of realism, insofar as the existence of objective social structures shaping and constraining perception is admitted, even if we will never render them other than through approximating models (see further Wacquant, 1989; Vandenberghe, 1999), but also necessitates reflexivity on behalf of the researcher, that is, the studied bringing-to-light of one's position in the space of sociological production and the interests and limitations it might impose on intellectual practice.

Bourdieu also spoke of the habitus encompassing a ‘dispositional’ philosophy of action – which somewhat spoils the Rs theme – but I have made the case elsewhere that, to avoid slipping into determinism and epiphenomenalism, this should be more wholeheartedly rendered using the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz (Atkinson, 2010a, 2010b, forthcoming a). On this reading, to put it concisely, the habitus comprises the ‘horizons’ of perception. This is premised on the phenomenological foundation that conscious experience is bifurcated into a ‘theme’ and a ‘horizon’. The theme refers to whatever conscious attention is focused on, whether they be inner thoughts or objects in the world, though this can be split further into the core (the preponderant focus of attention) and the periphery (that which is within conscious awareness but more marginally so, such as certain background sounds, bodily postures and sensations, etc). The horizon, on the other hand, is all that is automatically co-given in perception without actually being directly presented in the sensual input. This includes an intuition of aspects of a percept not seen (e.g. an object's posterior), or qualities not experienced (e.g. its weight), but also, more importantly, its simultaneous exemplification of multiple classes or ‘types’ of object, of varying generality, with typical properties, patterns of activity and relations with other objects. Other people are experienced in the same way: when we perceive a person, we automatically attribute subjectivity to them, assume they see us as we see them, and perceive them as exemplars of so many types of person who talk, act and think in typical ways. Anticipation of likely or possible futures, what Husserl dubbed protention, is thus written into the present, co-given with perception of (including inner thought about) an object, subject or event. Often this is experienced as an awareness of ‘I can’ at the level of motor capacity – something is graspable, climbable, doable, etc., on the basis of protention of one's own corporeal facility and the environment into which it is geared (Merleau-Ponty's ‘corporeal schema’). Sometimes, of course, it is experienced as an ‘I must’, calling out a certain response quasi-automatically – with ‘intention-in-action’, as Anscombe puts it – but protention also underpins consideration and projection of longer-term goals insofar as certain futures enter thematic consciousness as possible before being stamped with the decisive ‘voluntative fiat’, to use Schutz's phrase, while others are discounted or, more importantly, never even enter consciousness because they are unthinkable. Tying this back up to relationalism and recognition, however, and going beyond phenomenology by itself, it has to be acknowledged that the typifications and sense of the possible constituting the horizons of perception are rooted in the oppositional stances and labels defining particular fields as well as the conditions of existence provided by possession of capitals within them.

This cluster of philosophical postulates, I believe, offers a fertile basis for investigating the full panoply of human endeavour, and many of the problematic interpretations and uses of the specific conceptual ‘tools’ they animate stem from their neglect or violation. That argument has sometimes led others to label me an ‘orthodox’ Bourdieusian, stubbornly unwilling to flout logical foundations for the sake of participating in the race to bestow the label ‘capital’, ‘habitus’ or ‘field’ onto all sorts of social phenomena (e.g. Burke et al., 2013). Yet, in the course of a decade of research on the experience of social class, I have, in fact, come across two troublesome limitations in Bourdieu's oeuvre: its inadequacy for making sense of the fullness of mundane, everyday, lived experience (Erlebnis) and its insufficiency for making sense of how we each come to be who we are as a whole (Erfahrung). For instance, when trying to analyse all the factors playing into people's decisions – to leave school or stay on in education, to undertake vocational courses or academic study, which university to attend and subject to study, which jobs to pursue and so on – as a means of assessing the salience and specific place of class, it quickly became clear to me that there was more going on than seemed to fit neatly into Bourdieu's model of the social space and fields (Atkinson, 2010a, 2010b). Other experiences given by the time-space location and movement in the world of not only individuals themselves but the things and people they find about them, for example, clearly contribute to making them who they are and informing their practice, even if locations and movements are, to be sure, shaped in complex ways by struggles within the social space and various fields. When trying to follow this up with a study into the full lived experience and reproduction of class in domestic practice, moreover, it became apparent that many of the routines, struggles, joys and suffering of everyday life and social becoming are, at least in contemporary Western societies, the products of not just one field – not even one as encompassing as the social space – but of relations, balances, tensions and harmon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgement
• Epigraph
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Lifeworld
• 3: The Field of Family Relations
• 4: Social Becoming
• 5: Gender
• Epilogue: Sketch of a Research Programme
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement