Culture, Class, Distinction

Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Bortolaia Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, David Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415422420
• eBook ISBN: 9781134101047
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Choice Recommended Title, February 2010

Culture, Class, Distinction is major contribution to international debates regarding the role of cultural capital in relation to modern forms of inequality. Drawing on a national study of the organisation of cultural practices in contemporary Britain, the authors review Bourdieu's classic study of the relationships between culture and class in the light of subsequent debates.

In doing so they re-appraise the relationships between class, gender and ethnicity, music, film, television, literary, and arts consumption, the organisation of sporting and culinary practices, and practices of bodily and self maintenance. As the most comprehensive account to date of the varied interpretations of cultural capital that have been developed in the wake of Bourdieu's work, Culture, Class, Distinction offers the first systematic assessment of the relationships between cultural practice and the social divisions of class, gender and ethnicity in contemporary Britain.

It is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationships between culture and society.

Part I
Situating the analysis

1 Culture after Distinction

1.1 Introduction

In the early 1960s, a French anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu, gained a reputation as one of the most important social scientists emerging in the wake of the structuralist turn associated with Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He made his name with studies on decolonising Algerian society (Bourdieu, 1962), including an influential account of how one could read gender relations from the layout of the Kabyle house (Bourdieu, 1992). He then became one of the first anthropologists to turn attention to his own society, where he became interested in the way that its prized cultural practices sustained forms of privilege. From the mid-1960s he focused on what he called ‘cultural capital’, the ability of privileged groups to define their culture as superior to that of lower classes (Robbins, 2005). Studies of photography (1965) and art galleries (1966) followed. He also conducted a survey and interviews, which probed French people’s cultural tastes, participation and everyday life. The research took a long time to write up, and was put on hold whilst he wrote his theoretical treatise Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977). Working with a large interdisciplinary team, he initially produced a famous article, ‘L’anatomie de gout’ (The anatomy of taste), for the new journal he had launched, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. Then, in 1979, a long, meandering, 600-page book, Distinction, was published and translated into English in 1984. This book can fairly claim to be the single most important monograph of post-war sociology published anywhere in the world.

The reader who casually picks up Distinction today may be surprised that it has been so important. In a decade, the 1960s, which saw a remarkable increase of cultural and social mobilisation around issues of gender, ethnicity and youth—interests which have only gathered pace in later years—Bourdieu had little to say regarding these issues. He even appeared dismissive of them. Long sprawling tracts of prose uncertainly combine philosophical reflection, historical observation and comments on long-forgotten aspects of French culture in the 1960s. Who now remembers the songs of Petula Clark, or the Visconti film Rocco and his Brothers, which was all the rage with Parisian secondary school teachers in 1968? How many people have heard of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which Bourdieu claimed was the hallmark of intellectual taste? And what of the famous diagrams that plot an astonishing range of cultural practices and whose labels—in the English edition—are nearly impossible to decipher?¹ Or what of his notorious tendency to distinguish the social trajectories of different class fractions on the basis of the slimmest of percentage differences in their cultural practices? It is unusual for a book with this kind of dated empirical ‘clutter’ to retain its importance over succeeding decades: the only other sociological works to rival the impact of Distinction in indices such as the Social Science Citation Index are either purely theoretical treatises (those of Anthony Giddens, for instance) or present their empirical material in highly stylised narrative form (Michel Foucault).

Nevertheless, the appeal of Bourdieu’s book is readily apparent. In a period when interests in culture, the media and leisure consumption began to expand dramatically, and when extravagant claims were being made about the declining importance of class in these areas, Bourdieu offered the most comprehensive sociological riposte. At the heart of his analysis is a critique of transcendental claims for culture. Rather than treat the worlds of art, music, or literature as ‘outside’ history, Bourdieu regarded them as social agents. Claims about the quality of cultural forms, their greatness, universality, or timelessness were not to be taken at face value, but to be analysed to show how they are bound up with demands for social entitlement by those who prize them. With this move, Bourdieu rewrote the stakes of cultural analysis both inside and outside academic life. Within academic circles, it upset traditional conceptions, which demarcated the ‘humanities’, with their disinterested concern for ‘enlightenment’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ from the sciences, with their instrumental and practical orientation. He thereby challenged the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ by which social scientists deferred to the humanities on questions of ultimate value, whilst cultural critics largely left them alone to pursue scientific endeavours. Outside the academy, Bourdieu’s claim that culture is not an ‘innocent’ and private leisure activity has been of great importance in emphasising the political dimensions of culture.

Forty years after his fieldwork was conducted, and thirty years after the work began to appear in French, our book comprises a detailed and elaborate engagement with Bourdieu’s work. Like his, it is based on extensive fieldwork, in our case conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) between 2003 and 2005, and it seeks to make general arguments about the contemporary relationship between cultural and social practices.² We show how Bourdieu’s general approach still offers a powerful and incisive account of the relationship between cultural tastes and activities, and contemporary social inequalities. While Bourdieu himself focused mainly on class, we enrich and elaborate his analysis through greater attention to the intersections of class with gender, age and ethnicity.

This chapter begins with a resumé of three of Bourdieu’s key arguments with which we engage: (a) the importance of cultural capital, (b) the homology between cultural fields, and (c) the role of culture in reproducing advantage. We then turn to consider how these axioms have been taken up within discrete bodies of scholarship, showing how critics have generally narrowed their interests to focus only on specific features of each of these three axioms. In this process, although these critics have made telling criticisms, they have also often obscured Bourdieu’s major achievement, his concern to think in relational terms, by linking cultural capital to an account of the cultural field and the formation of social groups. In the second part of this chapter, we consider Bourdieu’s legacy in France. In the third part we show how Bourdieu’s arguments have been influential within the Anglo-American sociology of education and stratification, but argue that work in this area has not engaged adequately with his research on cultural practices and tastes. We then examine his influence within (predominantly) American cultural sociology, which has explored cultural capital empirically in unusual depth, but has neglected his concept of field. In the final section, we examine Bourdieu’s influence on cultural studies, which has emphasised his importance for theories of cultural change, but has been critical of the aesthetic and epistemological underpinnings of his work.

1.2 Bourdieu’s three axioms

We explore the contemporary relevance of what we take to be the three major, inter-related claims in Distinction. These are, first, the significance of cultural capital. Bourdieu claimed that French society was characterised by a systematic process whereby those schooled in forms of ‘legitimate’ culture enjoyed advantages over the working and popular classes who stood outside of, or tangential to it. In its most simple form, this is a claim that there is a powerful divide between ‘high’ (or alternatively, ‘elite’ or ‘establishment’) culture and ‘popular’ culture. While it is not unusual to define culture in such terms (the use of ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ to distinguish different class cultures has been familiar in the United States (US) and UK for much of the twentieth century), Bourdieu brought out their centrality to social relationships. Cultural capital works rather like property: those with it can gain at the expense of those without. As with financial capital, Bourdieu also detected a process of circulation and accumulation. Cultural capital is embodied, and the educated middle classes are physically as well as intellectually socialised into appreciating ‘legitimate’ culture, that which is institutionalised through being venerated in the educational system and the cultural apparatuses associated with museums and art galleries. Yet, cultural capital is also different from property: since it is embodied, and does not exist independently of people’s dispositions and perceptions, its role is systematically and necessarily misunderstood by social combatants. We cannot easily ‘stand back’ from our cultural frames to allow a dispassionate evaluation of them. Hence, alongside the power of cultural capital to act as a systematic form of inequality, comes the fact that its importance is routinely misunderstood.

Much of Bourdieu’s analysis was concerned to unravel the nature of cultural capital as manifested in France during the 1960s. He argued that cultural capital, in its most valorized forms, comprised a distinct ‘aesthetic disposition’, defined as:

A generalised capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function (which) can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practise of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art.

(Bourdieu, 1984: 55)

Yet Bourdieu resisted a simple unitary definition of cultural capital, recognising that it can take on different forms, and more particularly that two rather varying visions compete with each other. On the one hand lies what he called the ‘pure’ aesthetic, characterised by the modernist concern with the dominance of form over function, and a highly abstract orientation:

An art, which, like all Post-Impressionist painting, for example, is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the absolute primacy of form over function, of the mode of representation over the object represented, categorically demands a purely aesthetic disposition which earlier art demanded only conditionally.

(Bourdieu, 1984: 30)

This leads to an aesthetic of the modernist avant-garde, championed by intellectuals and artists, seeking the purity of abstraction. By contrast, wealthy ‘industrialists’ still repudiate routine everyday experience, but through indulgence in the leisurely and luxurious, whereby they ‘incline towards a hedonistic aesthetic of ease and facility, symbolised by boulevard theatre or Impressionist painting’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 176). This is the aesthetic of ‘conspicuous consumption’, of lavish display. Since it is sometimes argued that Bourdieu believed that cultural capital is a form of ‘snob’ culture, it is important to note that he did not use this term and was highly sensitive to variations in the form that a rejection of the exigency of practicality can take.

Our first question, therefore, is to assess whether we can detect cultural capital in contemporary Britain, and if so, to delineate what form it takes.

Bourdieu’s second claim was that of homology across fields. Bourdieu argued that each cultural field (literature, visual arts, journalism and so on) has its own autonomy, and can only be understood in terms of the relationships that are internal to it. It is important to know how an artist, for example, situates herself, and is positioned against, other artists. Obtaining a distinctive reputation involves marking out a particular space within a field. This insistence on recognising the autonomy of fields is important given that Bourdieu is sometimes accused of being a class determinist. However, he also took issue with those modernist aesthetes who claim that each artistic world has its own form immanent to itself which is irreducible to any other. He argued that there are homologies across fields, so that similar principles can be detected across different worlds and thereby general principles of classification and distinction unravelled. Fields are generally characterised by a polarisation between those who are positively endowed with honour within them and those who are not, and then, at a secondary level, between those who are advantaged through taking ‘autonomous’ positions, and those who import advantages derived from other fields, most importantly those who import ‘economic’ and political considerations into the field in question (Benson and Neveu, 2005).

These principles were most fully elaborated in later work in which Bourdieu focused on the historical development of different fields of cultural and intellectual production in France and on their contemporary organisation. However, the same principles informed his analysis, in Distinction, of the social space of lifestyles. This was made up of the relations between a large number of different fields—ranging across fashion, interior design, sport, culinary pursuits, holiday choices, as well as literature, music, the arts and the media—each of which had its own dynamics and its own distinctive ways of organising and marking differences. Nonetheless, Bourdieu’s central analytical wager was that the operation of these varied systems for producing and registering social distinctions interacted with one another to yield homologous sets of distinctions across them. The fact that he was able to show that diverse cultural fields had similar properties, and that they also overlaid each other, so that those who aspired to ‘intellectual’ positions with respect to (say) music might take up similar positions with respect to (say) the visual arts, sporting preferences and home decor, is central to his argument that advantage and privilege accumulate in the overlaps and homologies between differentiated fields.

Our second question, therefore, is whether different cultural fields, namely in the worlds of music, reading, art, television and film viewing, and sport are structured along similar principles, and if so, what is the nature of the similarities between them?

Bourdieu’s third claim was about the importance of reproduction and inheritance. His celebrated and controversial theory of habitus drew attention to how we come to habituate ourselves to certain routines and thereby reproduce practices. This takes place within our own lives, and also across generations. Whereas in pre-modern societies the inheritance of property is the most important way of passing on advantage, in modern societies a secondary mechanism competes with and even surpasses it. This is the reproduction circuit associated with schooling and formal education. Those parents equipped with cultural capital are able to drill their children in the cultural forms that predispose them to perform well in the educational system through their ability to handle ‘abstract’ and ‘formal’ categories. These children are able to turn their cultural capital into credentials, which can then be used to acquire advantaged positions themselves. In this way, a circuit of cultural reproduction, which is also social reproduction, exists. Bourdieu’s claim is that even within apparently dynamic, fast-moving cultural fields, one can detect what Walter Benjamin (1973) would see as the reproduction of the ‘ever-same’. The same kind of dominant classes are able to remake themselves, and their children, in remarkably persistent ways. However, if this is true for classes, then, as Bourdieu acknowledged in much of his later work, we need to broaden this perspective so as to identify how similar processes operate in relation to gendered and ethnic social divisions, and to investigate the relations between these and the mechanisms reproducing class divisions.

Our third question is to what extent we can see a process whereby established middle-class groups are advantaged by the organisation of cultural forms, and how similar processes inform the ordering and reproduction of the relations between genders and ethnic groups.

These three claims are each linked to one of Bourdieu’s central concepts: capital, field and habitus. The aim of our study is to consider whether these stand up to detailed theoretical, methodological and empirical scrutiny, drawing on the most extensive inquiry into these issues since Bourdieu’s own in the 1960s. At the outset, however, we demonstrate that subsequent scholarship has usually focused on one or other of these issues, so failing to do justice to Bourdieu’s overall framework. We seek to reconnect studies of cultural tastes and practices to that of social inequalities more generally.

1.3 Contestations over Bourdieu in French sociology

In personal terms, Distinction proved the key work in establishing Bourdieu as the most prominent sociologist in France since Durkheim, and in 1981 he was elected to the prestigious chair in sociology at the Collège de France. Here Bourdieu sought to mark out himself and his followers (organised as the Centre de Sociologie Européenne) as part of a distinctive sociological avant-garde, championing ‘craft’ methods of sociological work, where inter-disciplinary research teams analysed data on a wide variety of social issues. In a form consistent with his own field analysis, and which drew on his understanding of how Durkheim established his influence within French sociology in the early twentieth century (Robbins, 2006), Bourdieu sought to occupy a position in French sociological space akin to that of the modernist avant-garde within other cultural fields. He sought to defend the autonomy of sociological reasoning against any interference from outside. In his later work, he thus identifies himself with a range of avant-garde writers, such as Faulkner, Woolf, or Joyce (Robbins, 2006: 2, and more generally Fowler, 2006). He took a ‘hard-line’ position in opposition to more traditional and orthodox forms of French sociology, which were more closely allied to the other social sciences, notably political science and economics. He showed little interest in the ‘cultural turn’, which was proving highly influential in English language scholarship, and increasingly distanced himself from Foucault, with whom he had been personally allied until the early 1980s through a shared consciousness of each other as part of a ‘new generation’. This was part of his concern to differentiate the position of the social sciences within the intellectual field from that of philosophy (Callewaert, 2006).

This iconoclastic approach has had long-term consequences in isolating Bourdieu and his followers from subsequent generations of French sociologists, increasingly defining him as part of an aloof ‘establishment’ against which those outside his research group railed. The Centre de Sociologie Européenne certainly generated an active research culture amongst its adherents, but these focused largely on their own concerns and did not engage with opposing viewpoints. From the 1970s he became involved in a series of rifts with other influential French sociologists with whom he had at one time been allied, notably Jean-Luc Passeron, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, all of whom (along with Bourdieu’s long-term rival, Alain Touraine) elaborated a more fluid account of cultural values, which related them to forms of social mobilisation and political action. Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) account of competing economies of worth constitutes a challenge to the emphasis Bourdieu’s sociology places on the distribution of honour at the price of other estimations of worth.

Bernard Lahire (2004) used empirical survey material to dispute Bourdieu’s interpretation of the unitary nature of the habitus, showing that most people have ‘dissonant’ cultural tastes straddling the cultural boundaries that Bourdieu emphasised. Lahire’s broader project of a ‘sociology of individuals’ also raised awkward questions regarding the principles informing both Bourdieu’s interpretation of statistical data and the manner in which he relates the interpretation of qualitative interview data to statistical data. In suggesting the need to take fuller account of the significance of intra-individual variations of taste, and particularly of their ‘impurity’, Lahire challenged social determinisms and emphasised the need to recognise more heterogeneous forms of both individual and collective personhood.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note to the reader
• Introduction
• PART I Situating the analysis
• PART II Mapping tastes, practices and individuals
• PART III Cultural fields and the organisation of cultural capital
• PART IV The social dimensions of distinction
• Methodological appendices
• Cast of characters
• Notes
• References