The Routledge Companion to Bourdieu's 'Distinction'

Philippe Coulangeon, Julien Duval, Philippe Coulangeon, Julien Duval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415727273
• eBook ISBN: 9781317918974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection explores the genesis of Bourdieu's classical book Distinction and its international career in contemporary Social Sciences. It includes contributions from contemporary sociologists from diverse countries who question the theoretical legacy of this book in various fields and national contexts. Invited authors review and exemplify current controversies concerning the theses promoted in Distinction in the sociology of culture, lifestyles, social classes and stratification, with a specific attention dedicated to the emerging forms of cultural capital and the logics of distinction that occur in relation to material consumption or bodily practices. They also empirically illustrate the theoretical contribution of Distinction in relation with such notions as field or habitus, which fruitfulness is emphasized in relation with some methodological innovations of the book. In this respect, a special focus is put on the emerging stream of "distinction studies" and on the opportunities offered by the geometrical data analysis of social spaces.

1

Introduction

Philippe Coulangeon and Julien Duval

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Of all Pierre Bourdieu’s books, Distinction, first published in French in 1979 and translated into English in 1984, remains the most frequently cited work to date.¹ In 1998, Distinction ranked sixth in the top 10 most influential sociology books according to International Sociological Association members, alongside books by Max Weber, Robert K. Merton, C. Wright Mills, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, among others. Conceived as a synthesis of earlier research on cultural consumption and social classes, Distinction holds a special place in Bourdieu’s work: ‘[it] is to Pierre Bourdieu what Suicide was to Emile Durkheim: what Francis Bacon calls an experimentum crisis, a “critical experiment” designed to demonstrate, first, the generic potency of the sociological method […] and, second, the fecundity of a distinctive theoretical schema’ (Wacquant, 2001: 114).

Nevertheless, the international fate of the book is surprising, if not paradoxical. Although it is indeed ‘very French’, as Bourdieu himself noted in the preface of the English-language edition of the book, Distinction rapidly reached an international audience. While it relied on a very detailed investigation of cultural taste and lifestyles in France in the 1960s and 1970s, the book is also very complex in its writing and composition, mixing sophisticated analyses, both quantitative and qualitative, with intricate and demanding theoretical considerations. As pointed out in its subtitle (‘A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’), the book promotes a sociological alternative to Kantian aesthetics. But the book cannot be reduced to its contribution to cultural sociology alone. Rather, Distinction is today seen as a magnum opus of sociology as a whole that also notably deals with politics and philosophy, challenging traditional conceptions of class and social stratification and promoting innovative concepts, such as social space, fields and distinction.

The aim of the present volume is twofold. First, to provide today’s readers of Distinction with some contextual elements about the book’s genesis and trajectory. Second, to give an overview of the very active and diverse research areas that still draw on Distinction’s legacy, both in France and abroad.

The French career of Distinction

The genesis of Distinction and its reception in France cannot be understood without a brief overview of Bourdieu’s trajectory. During the postwar period, the main cleavage between French sociologists was between Marxists and those who imported the empirical sociology theories developed in the United States by Paul Lazarsfeld’s entourage. Bourdieu was never a Marxist, nor was he a truly empirical sociologist like Lazarsfeld’s followers, partly because he initially trained as a philosopher.² He came to sociology via anthropology. His first empirical studies were conducted in Algeria between 1958 and 1960, and were more influenced by Lévi-Strauss than by the French sociologists of the time. He actually turned to sociology when he came back to France. Then he was recruited by Raymond Aron, who was very influential in French academia. In 1960, Aron founded the Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE) and Bourdieu became his assistant. Although their political views varied greatly, since Aron was a quite conservative intellectual, their collaboration played an important role in Bourdieu’s career. Aron really valued the surveys Bourdieu conducted in Algeria, and was confident in Bourdieu’s ability to successfully implement his project of an empirically grounded and theoretically guided sociology. Bourdieu rapidly became a prominent member of the CSE, and in 1964 Aron supported him when he was recruited by the École pratique des hautes etudes (EPHE), which subsequently became EHESS in 1975.

EPHE was a peculiar institution within the French higher education system. Much more research-oriented than other French universities, EPHE welcomed the most innovative and also atypical social scientists of that time. Some of them, like Bourdieu, did not hold a PhD. Based on a true multidisciplinary conception of social sciences, EPHE, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, was not strictly an academic institution, since most of its members often took part in public debate. Bourdieu’s sociology, which has never been restricted to the academic sphere, is certainly in part a product of this institutional context. Most of his books, including Distinction, were published by Les Éditions de Minuit, a non-academic and politically committed publisher that was quite influential in literary and intellectual fields in the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition, at the time when he wrote Distinction, Bourdieu had already created his own research team at the CSE, similar (at least in some respects) to the group that Durkheim formed around L’Année sociologique, or the various research teams that Lazarsfeld created at his different institutes for applied research. This research team included people such as Jean-Claude Chamboredon, Luc Boltanski, Yvette Delsaut, Claude Grignon, Jean-Claude Passeron and Monique de Saint Martin. Some of them were former students of the École normale supérieure, where Bourdieu held a seminar for many years. Bourdieu had always worked with a diversified group of people with very different profiles and skills. In the 1960s, the group worked on accumulating data and conducting a great number of surveys. By the 1970s, however, the number of surveys declined and the team spent more time working on publication, primarily in French academic journals (such as Revue française de sociologie) and, from 1975, mainly in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. This journal, founded by Bourdieu and directed by him until his death, played a central role in his work and in its diffusion, and published papers focusing on issues seldom investigated at that time. The journal included contributions by sociologists, anthropologists and historians, and experimented with innovative uses of non-conventional material, such as photographs, newspaper cuttings and even comic strips, which strayed far from the model of more conventional academic journals. Thus Distinction benefited from the formal experimentations seen in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Moreover, the first drafts of parts of the book were published in the journal in 1976.

All these elements explain the context in which Distinction was received in France, especially the fact that the book was not originally read only in academic circles. A few weeks after its publication, Bourdieu was invited to present Distinction on TV, and the book was extensively reviewed in several more mainstream magazines and newspapers such as Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde. In the academic field, Distinction was generally considered to be a significant book, but it was nonetheless ‘the target of fierce criticism’ (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2010: 8). Two reviews were published in 1980 in Revue française de sociologie (Gehin and Herpin, 1980). These reviews emphasized the book’s importance, but minimized its originality and criticized some aspects of its empirical analyses. These reviews also blamed Bourdieu for not complying with academic standards. In particular, as has often been noted since, they pointed to the fact that some authors, such as Thorstein Veblen, Edmond Goblot and Maurice Halbwachs, who probably, although indirectly, had influenced Bourdieu when he was writing Distinction, were not mentioned in the book’s index.³ Finally, they also called into question the alleged sociological reductionism of a book in which artworks seemed to be exclusively considered from the socio-genetic point of view of their production and reception. This kind of criticism echoes the comments voiced regarding Distinction in public debate and the mainstream media, where Distinction has often been associated with a socially reductionist and relativist conception of art and culture, if not ‘a distinguished form of crude Marxism’ (Raynaud, 1980).⁴

More elaborate criticism, which often took the form of a partial refutation or recasting of some of the book’s core hypotheses, appeared a few years later. In 1989, two former close associates of Bourdieu, Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron, published their book Le savant et le populaire, in which they explored what they considered to be bias toward legitimate culture in Bourdieu’s approach to popular culture. In their view, Distinction was too exclusive in considering popular culture only in terms of its distance from dominant culture, and failed to properly appreciate its relative autonomy. This critique echoes some methodological comments made by Monique de Saint Martin in this volume regarding the empirical basis of Bourdieu’s views on popular culture (see Chapter 2). But the acknowledgement of the popular culture autonomy does not mean that Grignon and Passeron deny the symbolic domination of popular culture. In the end, their book can be viewed as an attempt to combine Bourdieu’s approach with the theoretical contribution of cultural studies. In fact, Passeron and Bourdieu himself contributed heavily in the 1970s to the introduction in France of authors such as Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Paul Willis.

In another vein, the cultural studies tradition inspired in France a more radical criticism of Distinction, mainly anchored in the field of media studies. During recent years, several French scholars (Macé and Maigret, 2005; Glévarec and Pinet, 2012) have called into question the very notion of cultural legitimacy at a time when mass culture and media culture are muddying the boundaries between popular culture and high arts. The blurring of symbolic boundaries at work is strengthened, they argue, by the fact that these industries structurally stimulate diversity—no matter how fake this diversity may be—and continuously support the renewal of cultural norms and fashions. Finally, these authors claim that this process goes hand in hand with the declining power of the school, in which cultural norms increasingly compete with prescriptions of mass culture and the creative industries (Pasquier, 2005). However, the emergence of competing cultural norms is synonymous with neither their equal symbolic power nor the weakening of cultural domination. Those endorsing this critique do not therefore necessarily refute that social inequalities might encompass a cultural dimension, or even that class antagonism might to some extent be a matter of cultural dissymmetry. Their contention is rather that cultural domination, if it exists, is much more difficult to exert in a society where the prescribers of cultural norms are more plentiful than in a society where the dominant classes can quietly rely upon the cultural monopoly of the school, as was the case in France in the 1960s, when the raw empirical data for Distinction were collected.

In more recent years, Bernard Lahire’s considerations on plural socialization have explored another important facet of Distinction’s legacy in France (Lahire, 2004, 2008, 2011 [1998]). Lahire questioned the concept of the habitus and its uses (see also Lahire’s contribution in Chapter 8 of this volume). What Lahire particularly questioned was the postulated unity of habitus: during their life course, people generally experience a plurality of social and cultural environments that most often result in a set of heterogeneous dispositions. As a result, Lahire argued that people’s practices, when considered across a wide variety of fields, are seldom as coherent as the concept of habitus suggests.

The plurality of dispositions as well as the fragmentation of habitus were acknowledged in some of Bourdieu’s later works (see also Bennett, 2007). The plurality—and plasticity—of habitus can thus be viewed as a promising extension of Bourdieu’s theses, rather than a refutation.

It should be noted that Bourdieu, and his closest fellow scholars at the CSE, took very little part in these debates. Since 1982, Bourdieu held a different position (he became a professor at the Collège de France) and his main writings dealt with a variety of topics such as academics, higher education, the State, the literary field, journalism and economics. He...

Table of contents

• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The genesis and career of Distinction
• 2 From ‘Anatomie du goÛt' to La Distinction* Attempting to construct the social space. Some markers for the history of the research
• 3 The international career of Distinction
• 4 The intellectual reception of Bourdieu in Australian social sciences and humanities
• PART II The legacy of Distinction in France
• 5 From the ‘petite bourgeoisie' to the ‘little-middles'* An invitation to question small-scale social mobility
• 6 What has become of the ‘new petite bourgeoisie'?The case of cultural managers in late 2000s France
• 7 Evolution of tastes in films and changes in field theory*
• 8 Culture at the level of the individual* Challenging transferability
• 9 Cultural distinction and material consumption The case of cars in contemporary France
• PART III International variations on Distinction
• 10 Charting the social space The case of Sweden in 1990
• 11 Working with Distinction Scandinavian experiences
• 12 Cultural distinctions in an ‘egalitarian' society
• 13 Bourdieu's space revisited The social structuring of lifestyles in Flanders (Belgium)
• 14 Classifying bodies, classified bodies, class bodies A carnal critique of the judgment of taste
• 15 The Australian space of lifestyles in comparative perspective
• 16 Distinction's framework* A tool to understand the space of cultural practices in Mexico
• 17 On ‘knowingness', cosmopolitanism and busyness as emerging forms of cultural capital
• Index