Understanding Bourdieu

Jen Webb, Tony Schirato, Geoff Danaher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Teoría social

Bourdieu's work is formidable-the journey is tough. Follow this French foreign legion-take an apple, take a hanky-but take this book. Peter Beilharz, Professor of Sociology, La Trobe University Pierre Bourdieu's work on the sociology of culture and language, on practical reason, on education, on citizenship and the cultures of poverty, and on a range of other topics is now coming to be seen as one of the 20th century's most important contributions to our thinking about the world. Understanding Bourdieu is a comprehensive and lucid introduction to his work. Measured and judicious, it's the best road map of this significant body of work currently available. John Frow, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh You name it, Pierre Bourdieu has written about it. Now considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, he has left his mark on most of the 'big' theoretical issues in the world of contemporary theory: gender, subjectivity, the body, culture, citizenship, and globalisation. His terms are now commonplace: 'social capital', 'cultural capital', 'field', and 'habitus'.Bourdieu examines how people conduct their lives in relation to one another and to major social institutions. He argues that culture and education aren't simply minor influences, but as important as economics in determining differences between groups of people. Unlike the other grand systematisers Marx and Foucault, Bourdieu has tested these arguments in detailed fieldwork. His range is eclectic, his vision is vast, and his writing is often dense and challenging. Understanding Bourdieu offers a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's work. It is essential reading for anyone tackling him for the first time.

1
Contexts and approaches

As well as being, in the words of Richard Shusterman, ‘France’s leading living social theorist’ (Shusterman 1999: 1), Pierre Bourdieu is, along with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential of those French thinkers ‘whose work succeeded structuralism’ (Calhoun et al. 1993: 7). There are few aspects of contemporary cultural theory (which crosses fields such as cultural studies, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, psychoanalysis and film and media studies) to which Bourdieu has not made a significant contribution. His concepts of habitus, field and capital, for instance, constitute what is arguably the most significant and successful attempt to make sense of the relationship between objective social structures (institutions, discourses, fields, ideologies) and everyday practices (what people do, and why they do it). Most of the ‘big’ theoretical issues being debated and explored in the world of contemporary theory—gender and subjectivity, the ‘production’ of the body, communicative ethics, the public sphere and citizenship, the politics of cultural literacy, the relationship between capitalism, culture and cultural consumption, ‘ways of seeing’, the transformation of society through the forces of globalisation—are to some extent explicable in terms of, and have benefited from, Bourdieu’s ‘technologies’ of habitus, field and capital.

And yet, 30 years after his books started becoming widely available in English translation, Bourdieu’s status is far more peripheral than that of Foucault, with whom he shares so many theoretical interests and inclinations; and his work ‘continues to befuddle many of his Anglo-American readers’ (Wacquant in Calhoun et al. 1993: 237). Loïc Wacquant has put forward a number of explanations for this phenomenon, ranging from the inability of critics to categorise satisfactorily Bourdieu’s body of work, to the ‘vociferous indignation’ (1993: 237) that has sometimes greeted his writing style.

The second explanation does not really hold water: as Wacquant himself writes, other ‘difficult’ writers such as Foucault and Habermas ‘do not elicit the same level of protestation as the author of Distinction’ (1993: 247). The first explanation, however, requires more attention. Calhoun et al. have noted that ‘In a series of research projects and publications starting in the 1950s, Bourdieu has addressed an astonishing range of empirical topics and theoretical themes’ in areas such as ‘education, labor, kinship, economic change, language, philosophy, literature, photography, museums, universities, law, religion, and science’ (1993: 1). One of the consequences of this eclecticism is that unlike, say, Foucault, there is no clear sense of theoretical ‘progression’, no easily identifiable ‘stages’ or paths, to Bourdieu’s career.

Bourdieu’s eclecticism

The narrative of Bourdieu’s theoretical and disciplinary interests and affiliations is certainly peripatetic. He started out as a philosopher influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but his interest in Algeria saw him forego philosophy for anthropology, which was then very much under the influence of structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, his dissatisfaction with the inability of structuralist anthropology to take into account or make sense of the practical (and strategic) dimensions of everyday life led to two of his most famous critiques of anthropology, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977a) and The Logic of Practice (1990b).

Bourdieu also turned his attention to two other areas of study: education and culture. His works on education focused on the role that secondary and tertiary education play in reproducing social and cultural classification and stratification; the ‘education’ books that have attracted most attention in the English-speaking world include Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977b) and Homo Academicus (1988). Perhaps the best known of his books in English, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), is an empirically based critique of Kantian aesthetics. More recently, Bourdieu has extended his interest in the field of cultural production by writing the strongly polemical On Television (1998c); and this more openly ‘interventionist’ approach has also resulted in books on the politicising of arts funding (Free Exchange (1995), with the German artist Hans Haacke), gender relations, in Masculine Domination (2001), the everyday pressures and predicaments of lower class groups in contemporary France in the multi-authored The Weight of the World (1999a) and globalisation and the withdrawal of the state from social life, in Acts of Resistance: against the New Myths of our Time (1998b). Finally, he has recently written three books—Practical Reason: on the Theory of Action (1998d), Pascalian Meditations (2000) and Masculine Domination (2001)—which clarify and elaborate upon, in a quite personal way, his work, methodologies, theories and relations to different fields such as philosophy, history and sociology.

Bourdieu can be categorised as a social scientist, but his work, in Loïc Wacquant’s words:

throws a manifold challenge at the current divisions and accepted modes of thinking of social science by virtue of its utter disregard for disciplinary boundaries, the unusually broad spectrum of domains of specialized inquiry it traverses… and its ability to blend a variety of sociological styles, from painstaking ethnographic accounts to statistical models, to abstract metatheoretical and philosophical arguments. (1992d: 3)

Bourdieu not only consistently makes use of both empirical and theoretical methodologies; he considers them inseparable. This has tended to set his work apart from much of the Anglo-American social sciences, which tend to be positivist and largely eschew theory; and the more philosophically-oriented fields (philosophy, literature, cultural studies), which are highly suspicious, if not downright disdainful, of empirical methodologies.

Throughout his academic career Bourdieu has usually found himself writing as a sociologist ‘in someone else’s field’; or at least writing on topics (education, art, philosophy, literature, language) that are claimed as the domain of specific fields, and are largely understood in terms of the discourses, debates, traditions, theories, methodologies and imperatives of those fields.

This eclecticism provides Bourdieu’s work with two distinctive virtues. The first is that as a ‘visiting’ non-specialist, he is relatively free to move across fields such as art history or linguistics without being directed by the ‘ways of seeing’ of that field. And, as a corollary, he is also free both to ignore issues or problems which practitioners might consider essential to their thinking or enquiries, and to ask questions, or pursue lines of enquiry, which might be unthinkable to those closely involved with the field and its ways of thinking.

The second advantage Bourdieu takes from his eclecticism is that he is able to use insights derived from different theorists to transform bodies of knowledge and give them a practical—that is to say, political—‘edge’, or dimension. The best example of this is probably his extension of the sociolinguist J.L. Austin’s work on speech act theory. Austin does a great deal to describe and analyse the conventions that inform practices of speaking but, more or less typically of his field, he pays very little attention to the institutional contexts that produce, govern and direct those conventions. In Language and Symbolic Power (1991a), Bourdieu builds on Austin’s work in order to investigate how speech act conventions are naturalised, and which groups benefit from them.

The politicising of theory

An example of the difference between the two approaches can be seen if we look at what is involved when a judge declares, say, that a group of people are guilty of terrorism. For Austin, what is important are the details (certain court rituals and procedures, the sort of language used, the judge’s title and robes, the arrangement of furniture in the courtroom) which determine whether the act is ‘felicitous’ (in other words, that it is a real judge in a real court, and the words ‘I find you guilty of terrorism’ have real consequences), or ‘infelicitous’ (that is, it is just someone acting out a part, and the consequences of the words cannot be enforced).

For Bourdieu, on the other hand, there are other, more important issues that need to be followed up, such as the fact that a representative of the government, the legal system and the upper classes is in a position to evaluate certain behaviour (say, opposition to the government, the legal system and the upper classes) as ‘terrorism’, and to treat the ‘terrorists’ accordingly. Terrorism is not an unequivocal or unchanging state, regardless of what ‘legitimate authorities’ say. There is a joke in the British comedy series Yes Minister where Sir Humphrey points out that one thing that many of the great world leaders have in common is that they were all imprisoned, at one time, by the British. Nelson Mandela is another example of this process: he was convicted (by legitimate institutions) of terrorism, but his activities are now understood as a struggle for freedom.

Marx, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Pascal

This development of Austin’s speech act theory is quite typical of Bourdieu’s work. Austin’s formalist analysis is ‘taken somewhere else’ by Bourdieu—in short, it is politicised. In this section we will provide a brief, introductory description of the theories and approaches—pre-eminently taken from Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Blaise Pascal and Ludwig Wittgenstein—which we argue have provided Bourdieu with this ‘politicising disposition’.

We pointed out that Bourdieu is one of the most eclectic of contemporary cultural theorists, drawing on important scholars from a number of historical periods and geographical locations, and from various academic disciplines. As well as his obvious links with, and debts to, sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Marcel Mauss, Bourdieu also borrows from, and crosses into, other fields—so much so that his bibliographies read like libraries in themselves. He draws, for instance, from anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Claude Lévi-Strauss), art history (Erwin Panofsky), the history of science (Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem), linguistics (J.L. Austin, Emile Benveniste), phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), philosophy (Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant), political economy (M. Polanyi), psychology (Sigmund Freud) and social anthropology (Harold Garfinkle, Erving Goffman). All these influences have, at different times, ‘surfaced’ in Bourdieu’s writing, but the four theorists we referred to above ‘stand behind’ and inform both the content of his work and, even more importantly, his purposes in producing it.

While there is widespread acceptance of the importance of Marx, Wittgenstein and Pascal to Bourdieu’s work, the same is not true of the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He is usually considered less influential than the sociologists Durkheim, Weber and Mauss, the philosopher Heidegger, or the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty. Books about Bourdieu’s work and theories (such as Harker, Mahar & Wilkes 1990; Calhoun et al. 1993; or Shusterman 1999), allocate considerable space, for instance, to Bourdieu’s relation to Marx, but rarely mention Nietzsche.

To a certain extent, Bourdieu has contributed to this impression: in the various collections of essays and interviews where he discusses his theoretical influences most openly (such as In Other Words, Sociology in Question, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology and Practical Reason) he rarely enters into any detailed discussion or analysis of Nietzsche’s work, usually confining himself to a combination of brief dismissals or qualifications of his worth, or quoting from, or referring to, him in an understated way.

An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology typifies this—it contains only five references to Nietzsche. One reference is in a section of the book written by Loïc Wacquant, and distances Bourdieu from any significant relation to Nietzsche. Wacquant writes, ‘His is not a Nietzschean vision of “a universe of absolute functionality”’ (1992d: 52). Bourdieu himself only refers to Nietzsche on two occasions in the book: once to ‘put him in his place’, writing (disapprovingly) of ‘the exaltation of the works of Nietzsche or Heidegger’ which ‘leads to an aestheticism of transgression’ (1992d: 154); and once to invoke him, fleetingly, as an authority with regard to a definition of the concept of ressentiment—that is, what Bourdieu refers to as ‘the sentiment of the person who transforms a sociologically mutilated being… into a model of human excellence… built upon an unconscious fascination with the dominant’ (1992d: 212). And this in a book which is heavily indebted to the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment.

The example he gives of ressentiment, appropriately enough, is concerned with the need to question why a person is writing from, or taking, a particular position, as when Bourdieu asks of himself, ‘Isn’t the root of my revolt… of the rhetorical vibration of my adjectives when I describe Giscard d’Estaing playing tennis… the fact that, deep down, I envy what he is?’ (1992d: 212). That he extrapolates from the notion of ressentiment in order to negotiate and rethink the imperatives and values of the field of sociology clearly demonstrates the importance of Nietzsche to Bourdieu’s thinking—but it is an importance which is almost deliberately covered over by Bourdieu, and his associates such as Loïc Wacquant. This ‘overlooking’ of Nietzsche is in contrast to the very central role accorded to Marx, Wittgenstein and Pascal by commentators, particularly with regard to Bourdieu’s borrowing and reworking of the Marxist concepts of capital and class; Pascal’s emphasis on the relation between bodily rituals and the inculcation of belief; and Wittgenstein’s questioning of the ‘intellectualising’ of practical experience.

Marx and Wittgenstein

What are the main insights and approaches that Bourdieu takes from these four theorists? Let us consider Marx and Wittgenstein first. We pointed out earlier that one of Bourdieu’s main virtues as a theorist is his ability to take bodies of theory and give them a ‘practical’ or political edge. He more or less refuses the idea of writing or theorising as a form of ‘disinterested reflection’—a position traditionally associated with philosophy. Rather, he sees his scholarly work as a means to an end—as changing or ‘doing’ things.

To a large extent this is something that Bourdieu takes from both Marx and Wittgenstein. Bourdieu ends the strongly person-alised first chapter of Pascalian Meditations with the following quote—inserted more or less as a coda for the rest of the book—from Wittgenstein:

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic… and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any… journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends? (Wittgenstein quoted in Bourdieu 2000: 42)

In his discussion of Bourdieu’s reading and use of Austin’s work, James Bohman describes Bourdieu as ‘a constructivist wh...