Cultural Consumption, Classification and Power

Alan Warde, Alan Warde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317982210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

When social scientists in the 1970s began to identify the positive and constructive role of cultural practices in the operation of power, Pierre Bourdieu advanced a highly influential and subsequently controversial account. Most notably in Distinction, he charted the connections between cultural taste and practice and social classification. This book seeks to evaluate, develop and transcend the ideas that Bourdieu explored in Distinction.. Taken together the papers compare and contrast different theoretical and conceptual approaches, bring empirical investigations to bear on relevant theoretical issues, drawing on different national experiences (France, UK, Canada, Central Africa), and attend to aspects of the relationship between culture and power with reference to gender and ethnicity as well as class. Thus the book contributes to the on-going international debates across the social sciences about Bourdieu's legacy and the current role of cultural practice in social reproduction.

INTRODUCTION

Cultural consumption, classification and power

Alan Warde

 

 

In the wake of economism, social scientists in the 1970s began to identify the complicit role of cultural practices in the operation of power. Cultural cognition, competence and commitment, captured by concepts like hegemony, discourse and cultural capital, were pulled to the centre of explanations of social domination. Bourdieu, unique in the breadth of his appeal across disciplinary boundaries, supplied a highly influential model of the relationship between culture and power. He charted the connections between cultural taste and practice and social classification. He proposed that since dominant classes regularly succeed in establishing that their own cultural practice is intrinsically of superior quality, and is a marker of social superiority, taste comes to play a central role in not only representing but also reproducing social divisions.

Bourdieu’s legacy remains enormously controversial. The articles in this issue arise from a symposium devoted to assessing ways to move the theory of taste forward.¹ Their shared focus is how to evaluate and develop, or to transcend, the ideas and subject matter that Bourdieu explored in Distinction. They rehearse some of the criticisms of the work of Bourdieu and review available alternative theoretical standpoints. Taken together, the papers compare and contrast different theoretical and conceptual approaches, bringing empirical investigations to bear on relevant theoretical issues, drawing on different national experiences, and attending to aspects of the relationship between culture and power with reference to gender and generation as well as class. Some contributors think that there is no future at all in the approach of Bourdieu; others think that there is reason to work with him. But all are inspired. Bourdieu’s work proves enormously fruitful, for he seems as good to argue against as he is to agree with.

The principal point of departure, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, is probably the most widely cited empirical sociological monograph ever published. It is too well known, and also so complex, that I make no attempt to summarize its content or impose a definitive reading among the many competing exegeses. The influence and reputation of Distinction was built on its having made, at once, theoretical, methodological and substantive impact.

Methodologically, one must, in retrospect, compliment Bourdieu for his imaginative use of multiple methods. Though some of the analysis in Distinction appears somewhat haphazard and anecdotal at times, the use of observation, interviews, vignettes, photographs, individual profiles, newspaper articles and market research reports creates a depth of texture which permits interpretation of a difficult to capture picture of the modern cultural mosaic. Foremost among his methodological contributions is the power of Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Its capacity to capture visually patterns of empirical association between tastes, and to superimpose upon those patterns features characteristics of a population sample, constructs an object for interpretation (and for others to check that interpretation) that more widely favoured techniques like multiple regression analysis never will.

Substantively, the great achievement of Distinction was its demonstration of a plausible, general, and structural relationship between class and culture. Its importance is marked by the fact that so many social scientists have invested so much ink in trying to replicate its results or prove it wrong. Bourdieu’s account of the system of cultural domination in France hung first and foremost on the combination of command of legitimate culture and the operation of a Kantian disposition of disinterestedness. It was shown how command of legitimate culture supplied advantage, maintained over generations, to a dominant class. Cultural capital was the key conduit, emphasizing the role of cultural competence in the establishment and maintenance of social position through a form of symbolic authority.

Theoretically, probably the most compelling reason to continue to deal with Bourdieu is that he provides a complex set of concepts which capture many dimensions of the relationship between the social and the cultural. The setting of the metaphorical concepts of capital within a comprehensive social theory of practice, habitus and field provides a unique and potentially hugely powerful social scientific apparatus for a sociological account of culture. However, as it stood at the time of his death, despite attempts in the previous decade to systematize concepts which earlier he only defended in an ad hoc way, the conceptual armoury seems insufficient though there are competing views of the appropriate response.

However, what was most remarkable about Bourdieu is his integration of his theoretical and conceptual tools with substantive analysis. Robbins (2000, 25ff) perhaps is right when commenting that Bourdieu, at least in his earlier career, intentionally invented concepts for use, and almost in use, to deal with particular substantive analyses, rather than constructing an architecture of concepts in the manner of the pure theorist. Distinction is a paragon of theoretically informed empirical analysis.

The reception of Distinction is something of a paradox. The very features that some consider as major achievements are said by others to be its weaknesses. Empirically grounded theory, versatile concepts, methodological flexibility and variety, and detailed portrayals of French cultural practice may seem to be virtues, but they are also read as theoretical vacillation, conceptual imprecision, inadequate operationalization of concepts, methodological indecision and limited applicability. Consequently evaluations are diverse. In the papers that follow, issues of theory and substance are vigorously discussed. First, Stephanie Lawler uses a recent case study of media representations of the aristocracy and middle class to give a vivid and compelling account precisely of class distinction in the UK. Building on Bourdieu’s relational understanding of class, she emphasizes how a normalized middle class identity, owing more to manners and morals than aesthetic capacities, operates as the standard of good taste. Next, Michèle Ollivier, setting out from the debate about eclecticism and the cultural omnivore, speculates about the connection between class and cultural orientations seeking to determine whether there can be distinction if class awareness attenuates. Exploring processes of codification and categorization of social groups, she argues for an understanding of class which is still relevant to social distinction despite the spread of individualization, reflexivity and popular disavowal of class belonging. Then, Philippe Coulangeon examines secular trends in widening access to advanced education, school curricula and cultural policy since 1980 which has affected the relationship between class and culture in France. Fourth, Jean-Pascal Daloz, on the strength of references to many fascinating comparative case studies of consumption norms and social prestige, advances a great deal of contrary evidence against the core theoretical position espoused by Bourdieu. Arguing for the superiority of an inductive and interpretive analysis of distinction, he identifies and illustrates several important mechanisms which contingently generate different effects in different social contexts. Finally, I attempt to show how the insights from the preceding contributions can be harnessed for further progress towards a social theory of distinction and taste.

NOTE

1. The papers were initially delivered at a symposium, held at the ESRC Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), at the University of Manchester, in October 2007.

REFERENCES

BOURDIEU, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Routledge, London.

ROBBINS, D. (2000) Bourdieu and Culture, Sage, London.

THE MIDDLE CLASSES AND THEIR ARISTOCRATIC OTHERS

Culture as nature in classification struggles

Steph Lawler

This article considers English middle-classness in terms of identity, dispositions and manners, in the context of a project of middle-class self-distinction from the aristocracy. Taking as a case study broadsheet press coverage of the break-up of the relationship between Prince William and Kate Middleton, it examines the ways in which such coverage uses the concept of ‘class’ in two senses: as an artificial system, and as a (naturalized) property of the person. These two meanings of class slide into each other, so that class contempt can be used against persons who are seen to lack the appropriate, ‘natural’ qualities. Using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and its related notion of ‘generative forgetting’, I argue that the naturalization of middle-classed dispositions is an important means through which class is deployed in contemporary England. When (as in this case study) some challenge is seen to be mounted to this naturalization, a whole symbolic economy of taste and manners is seen as being undermined and the anxieties around middle-class existence are revealed.

[T]he ‘middle class’ in England can be seen as a pre-eminently historical category, the result of accumulated ‘middles’ or spaces between – between aristocracy and working class, land and labour, highbrow and lowbrow, provincial marginality and metropolitan power – the balance of which has altered over time. The categories through which classes have been classified in England are political and economic, yet also profoundly cultural. (Simon Gunn 2005, pp. 61–62)

[M]embers of the privileged classes are naturally inclined to regard as a gift of nature a cultural heritage which is transmitted by a process of unconscious training. But, in addition, the contradictions and ambiguities of the relationship which the most cultured among them maintain with their culture are both permitted and encouraged by the paradox which defines the ‘realization’ of culture as becoming natural. (Bourdieu 1993, p. 234, original emphasis)

Introduction

This article is an attempt to consider English middle-class identities and their relationship to ‘the right ways of being and doing’ (Bourdieu 1986). In it, I consider such identities and dispositions as part of the stakes in classed struggles. Their claims to normality and ‘natural-ness’, I argue, are an important element in the operation of class. Certainly, those classed struggles may not be conducted in conventional ‘class for itself’ terms, but, taken in the historical context of the emergence of a middle class with a distinctive hold on normality, morality and taste, they can be seen, nevertheless, as ways of distinguishing the worth of the middle classes qua middle classes. In this respect, I suggest, middle classness cannot be seen in isolation but has to be considered in the context of other groups which constitute its ‘outside’. Class, in this context, has to be seen as both dynamic and relational: dynamic, because it is, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘not… something given but as something to be done’ (Bourdieu 1998, p. 12, original emphasis); and relational because part of the logic of class relies on the making of distinctions between classes and class fractions.

Historically, the ‘middle class’ as a distinct grouping had to differentiate itself from both the ‘lower orders’ and the aristocracy (Bourdieu 1986; Gunn 2005). I have written elsewhere (Lawler 2005) about the ways in which working-class existence continues to figure, within a middle-class imaginary, as the ‘constitutive outside’ of middle-classness. Here my focus is on the aristocracy; or, more accurately, on how the aristocracy is imagined within English middle-class self-formulation.

At this point, it is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of all class classifications and to note the difficulty of definition. ‘The aristocracy’, especially, is difficult to straightforwardly categorize. Historically, and together with royalty, they have constituted a landowning class that has held power in feudal societies. With the rise of capitalism, the power of these groups has undoubtedly diminished, and indeed they can be seen as representing a ‘problem’ within the modernist project, since their existence relies on ties of birth. Their basis in hereditary ties and hereditary privilege undercuts a modernist rhetoric of ‘self-making’.¹ This is not the place to explore the composition or power of this group in its own right, however, and indeed, the focus of my argument here is not aristocracy/royalty itself. It is, rather, on the ways in which they matter within the cultural imaginary of English middle-class groups – as an ‘other’ to middle-class existence. Working-class people also form an other to this existence, of course, and seem to be a more immediate reference point (at least judging by the class hatred exhibited against them in public discourse). The aristocracy, together with royalty, however, appear to engender a different set of criteria against which middle-class existence is imagined, and it is this that I will explore here.

Middle-classness, similarly, can prove di...