Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory

Critical Investigations

Bridget Fowler

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN:
  9780803976269
  9780803976252
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781446234174
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first comprehensive description of Pierre Bourdieu?s theory of culture and habitus. Within the wider intellectual context of Bourdieu?s work, this book provides a systematic reading of his assessment of the role of `cultural capital? in the production and consumption of symbolic goods.

Bridget Fowler outlines the key critical debates that inform Bourdieu?s work. She introduces his recent treatment of the rules of art, explains the importance of his concept of capital - economic and social, symbolic and cultural - and defines such key terms as habitus, practice and strategy, legitimate culture, popular art and distinction.

The book focuses particularly on Bourdieu?s account of the nature of capitalist modernity, on the emergence of bohemia and, with the growth of the market, the invention of the artist as the main historical response to the changed place of art.

PART I

INTERPRETATIVE STUDIES

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1

SITUATING BOURDIEU: CULTURAL THEORY AND SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

It is only possible to grasp Bourdieu’s work on art and cultural reception if we understand the comparative analysis on which his whole work pivots. His childhood in the peasant area of Béam and his time as an anthropologist in Kabylia (Algeria) shaped his analysis of the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist forms and of the distinctive patterns of domination associated with modernity. My aim here is to start with Bourdieu’s early studies in Algeria to show what historical preconditions are necessary for specialised and autonomous cultural fields to emerge. I shall then introduce, via his major works, the theoretical areas in which he has made decisive interventions. My main claim is that he has superseded various problems that have perennially plagued sociology as a critical social theory and that, at the present moment, this is the most original and cogent modelling of the social world that we have.

The Kabylian World

Bourdieu’s early work on ethnography already shows unusual scope and an innovative departure from the authorised and mechanistic materialism of ‘Histmat’ or Stalinist historical materialism (1961, 1963, 1964 (Bourdieu and Sayad), 1966a). These books explore the breakdown of the equilibrium between artisan towns and the peasant countryside, following on the emergence of both the class society and the ideology of race instituted by colonialism. Although Bourdieu is not listed as one of the intellectuals who signed the Manifesto of the 121, he wrote in the midst of the Algerian War and may well have contributed to the events which led to resistance to service in the French Army (Alverman, 1960: 46; Anon., 1960: 196–7). In drawing on traditions normally insulated from each other, Bourdieu’s approach bears the traces of the profound influence not just of Durkheim but also of Weber. Even more decisive are the marks of the famous Vol. I, Part 8 of Capital, especially where Marx deals with the importance of colonialism for increasing proletarianisation.

Bourdieu points out that traditional tribal Algerian societies such as the peasant Kabylia compensated for their weak mastery of nature by elaborate and detailed social organisation:

By a sort of phenomenon of compensation, to the imperfection of techniques there is a corresponding exaggerated perfection of the social order – as if the precariousness of its adjustment to the natural environment was counterbalanced by the excellence of the social organisation. (1961: 6)

This is also evident in the artisan and merchant towns, where a leisurely daily period within the public sphere developed – at least for men – ‘ the art and culture of social relations’ (1961: 62). By such statements, Bourdieu reveals that the colonialist or Orientalist discourse is subverted within his writing. Thus he stresses the democracy of Kabylian tribal organisation and the logic of social honour or symbolic capital which takes the place of the accumulation of economic capital in the Kabylian life-cycle. In general, his ethnographic analysis effectively undercuts any facile belief in the ‘barbarism’ of the Islamicised Algerians.

However, Bourdieu sometimes verges on the undiscriminating nostalgia that is implicit in some representatives of négritude. I refer in this context to his discussion of gender divisions, where he seems to me to ‘bend the stick too far in the other direction’ by stressing the multiple forms of de facto power available traditionally to women, despite their condition of male tutelage (1964: 187). He claims, for example, that although the position of the women of the Shawia tribe was one of extreme subordination, they possessed countervailing influence deriving from their extraordinary gender solidarity. Those who had been widowed or repudiated by their husbands could resist extreme patriarchal controls by judicious resort to the magical rhetoric of the evil eye. Less contentiously, he states that it is not traditional custom but recent urbanisation and rural displacement that has led to the imposition of the veil and the segregation of women within the house (1964: 131–2). Yet he also acknowledges the ceaseless labour of the Kabylian women he lived amongst and their disappearance from all public life as soon as they marry. Even if the effects of uprooting have massively constrained such women’s everyday lives, Bourdieu’s conclusions suggest a fraught and uneasy stance towards the traditional division of labour at this point. His perspective is better grounded in the evidence of a marked level of legally monopolised male power rather than of the existence of extensive freedoms for women.

Algerian traditional society did not lack endogenous change.The Mozabite tribe in the desert cities, whose predestination beliefs and ascetic rigour Bourdieu compares to Weber’s Puritan dissenters, are the main protagonists of this drama of capitalist entrepreneurial activity and industry. However, Mozabite modernity did not serve – like the icy waters of egoism in the West – to drown the heavenly chorus. Rather, the profane centre of the market is viewed by Bourdieu as having supported the sacred centre of the mosque, while the success of the entrepreneurial action of male migrants to the cities fostered the family and communal life of the countryside.¹ Bourdieu’s writing thus stands in the anti-Orientalist tradition of Maxime Rodinson (1974) in explaining the lack of internal development of capitalism through the strength of a dominant military stratum which has been committed to the resilience of non-capitalist forms, rather than the influence of Islam itself.

However, the main emphasis of the ethnographic studies is on the end of the old paternalist order of the great families and of its stable balance between city and country. Instead, the dialectic of colonialism leads remorselessly from the appropriation of the most fertile soil by the French to the subsequent dispersal of the Algerians on to marginal land, followed by rapid urban proletarianisation, the re-groupments of the War and the explosive growth of the unemployed (1964). The city is now stripped of its public sphere, with its daily routine of rational communication. Only its worst conditions are shown to its new inhabitants, whose lives (outside the new bourgeoisie) become ones of utter privation: ‘the art and culture of social relations’ cannot survive the epidemics, absolute want and overcrowding of the distended urban centres (1961: 62).

In the country the concentration of property and consequent sharecropping had preceded colonialism, but was greatly strengthened by it, particularly since European law legitimated individual ownership of land. This not only facilitated European takeover, it also led to an accelerated decline in tribal-owned land (one-fifth in 1961). ‘[T]his means the death sentence of the tribe’, Bourdieu comments, noting the atomisation or ‘social vivisection’ it produced. More profoundly, it provoked a shift from the ‘gift and counter-gift economy’ to the money economy (1961: 84). It is necessary to understand this clearly for Bourdieu views the gift economy as sustaining solidarity. Its abandonment was partly due to a forced modernisation, partly a response to the hegemony of French culture. Rural Algerians (fellahs) had a long time-perspective in which the future was perceived as close to the present. Thus the fellah has almost a ‘mystical’ attachment to the soil:

[L]and is an end in itself not a mere means of existence and work is not a way of living but a way of life. (1961: 103)

Money was a unit of value before colonisation, but it was not used as an abstract value. Specifically, it did not serve as speculative credit for the purpose of capital accumulation, because the future was not conceived as new or different. Only with the impoverishment of the fellah was there the rise of the ‘new men’ of the cities, stripped of their families and dispossessed of that temporal sense and ‘art of life’ founded in the land. From now on, even the peasants will express the contradiction between the old and the new. Agriculture has lost its dignity – its capacity to inspire a ‘sacred terror’ (1964: 95). Even on the land, a crisis has affected the ‘peasant spirit’:

What separates the ‘unemployed’ from the ‘peasant’ [is not the actual time spent working, it] is the refusal to consider as work what is not paid for by a wage . . . . (1964: 68)

Thus the French had precipitated ‘a transmutation of values’ (1961: 118).

It is crucial to understand Bourdieu’s view of this representative non-Western pre-capitalist culture in order to grasp his view of the place of the aesthetic in modern Western life. Self-expression in the West has spawned constant vigilance to a ‘dialectic of distinction’. Such individualism is absent in Kabylia, as is evident in the demarcation of tents by red and black colour within a social classification. Moreover in Kabylia, the cliché is desirable as part of a culture of politeness (set against the normal logic of practice) in which the cultural apprenticeship is ‘to guard against . . . any improvisation . . . in behaviour’ (1961: 96). Typical in this respect is oral poetry which annuls the passage of time so as to make the young aware of the noble actions of their ancestors. It thus allows the perpetual re-experience of the past within a present only weakly opposed to it. Yet more striking, in Kabylia, craft has not become degraded by contrast with high art.

The Algerians ends with a recent collective development of poetry: the songs of resistance composed anonymously during the war against the French. From this society ‘sliding into the dizzy abyss’, then, there was also salvaged a small compensation, a new culture. Within this, there was not only a popular culture of poems registering the common experience of loss but a new French-language novel, expressing the ‘sense of anguish’ of the educated Algerian class ‘between two worlds’. Bourdieu frequently returns to these linked themes, the erosion of all the old communal forms through both capitalism and colonialism and the compensatory dream of setting apart a sacred aesthetic sphere.

In his subsequent studies of Kabylia (1977, 1990a), Bourdieu first introduces the ideas that have had an extraordinary impact on later sociology. I shall discuss first the concept of practice, which for him means an agent makes decisions and moves his or her body in a ‘regularised improvisation’ like jazz (1977: 11).

The idea of practice has been developed extensively in Bourdieu’s later work. To what extent does this concept, associated as it is with his conversion to structuralism, successfully withstand the criticisms levelled against this approach? Remarkably well. Bourdieu manages to abandon the unacceptable Enlightenment conception of native thought as irrational (like that of the mad and children) (Ferguson, 1990: 16–21). But he saves the equally important notion of the submission of ideas to a rational procedure of truth-claims as the distinguishing feature of scentific rationality, or ‘theoretical practice’. It has certainly been argued that Bourdieu’s conception of scientific habitus embeds scientific thought in the same concern for the ‘game’ and in the same aesthetic sense of adequacy which governs practice in everyday life more broadly (Brubaker, 1993: 230–1). But this is hardly faithful to the complexity of Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice. For while in this work he compares practice with the aesthetic and especially with taste, he locates practice as a feature of the everyday life of modernity. When he comes to use the term in relation to specialised fields, for example law or science (1987c; 1994b: 91–7), he assumes that the ‘intuitive’ ‘feel for the game’ takes place within the procedural principles that constitute the field itself, as part of its professional modes of operation.²

Despite his acknowledgement of conflict and its socio-genesis, Bourdieu has repudiated the irrationalist position that lurks in Brubaker’s argument. Indeed, for him, sociology is in itself a prophylactic against irrationalism. His most recent study of sociological method explicitly uses the term ‘realism’ (1993b: 903), thus associating himself with a tradition of thought about social science which rejects the relativist perspectivism of Kuhnian or Lyotardian paradigm theory (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 155).³

It is one of the most attractive features of Bourdieu’s sociology that he has transcended the sterility of the objectivist versus subjectivist debate within social theory, along with the one-sided alternatives of both structuralism and existentialism, of mechanical materialism and rational action theory. Bourdieu roots his theory of ‘structural constructivism’ in the materialism of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (see Colletti, 1977: 23; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 11). He locates the role of objective structures in setting limits to agents’ choice of goals as well as blinkering their perceptions of reality. A theme constantly reiterated in relation to Sartre’s existentialism and to Schutz’s and Garfinkel’s phenomenological ‘accounts of accounts’ is that these lack a sufficient grasp of historically developing objective conditions within which humans’ social constructions can occur. Sartre, for example, neglects any analysis of revolution in terms of a response to objective conditions and constraints, making it instead a feature of a willed act of the imagination alone. But most strikingly, Bourdieu has understood social structures as operating not just via intemalisation but through incorporation. Thus the submissiveness of Kabylian women is embodied in the curvature of their spines towards the ground. It is not just that social learning is ingrained on the body, like the scars sometimes signifying transition to adulthood, rather it is imitated unconsciously through specific bodily actions. This stress on the unconscious and bodily expressions of the social (‘hexis’) (1990a: 74) does not deny the emergence of complex forms of resistance but it does stress the durability of the earliest actions learnt through example or apprenticeship, that is, through the mastery of practice. In this respect it parallels the beautifully demonstrated idea of Elias (1978) that the repressive controls over the body must be understood not just psychogenetically, but historically, that is, as internalised forms of compliance to the influential classes or nations which are the bearers of social rules. Thus Bourdieu proposes a similar socio-genesis of bodily hexis in the context of a precapitalist society, while Elias had merely argued that there is a ‘civilisation curve’ in Europe, in which bodily controls become more intense from the period of the courtly aristocracy onwards. But to grasp his thinking on this point properly, it is necessary to understand the concept now virtually synonymous with Bourdieu for some: that of the habitus.

Habitus has been variously defined in Bourdieu’s theory but it is put most simply in Reproduction as ‘[the] system of schemes of . . . perception, thought, appreciation and action which are durable and transposable’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990: 35). Given that this implies that the subjective world is constituted in a stable pattern, Bourdieu then goes on to link habitus to a material or structural position, not unlike the Lukácsian notion of worldview. Yet whereas the Western Marxist position has identified existence within the dominated class with a Utopian or revolutionary world-vision, Bourdieu has stressed also the modes of ressentiment and especially resignation associated with deprivation. The habitus of the dominated frequently leads them to choose actively what they are objectively constrained to do. Thus they ‘make a virtue out of necessity’, as in the case of women who adopt high standards for the housework that they are constrained to undergo alone. Aspirations are therefore limited, as revealed in the phrase ‘That’s not for the likes of us’.⁴

What are the schemes of perception that order the Kabylian habitus? Bourdieu has portrayed some of the crucial principles in the diagrammatic descriptions of the Kabylian house and agricultural calendar. These guide how things should be done. In terms of strict logic, they are based on principles that flout the rules of contradiction. However, in a key passage, Bourdieu stresses that the ‘polythetic’ rationality of the Kabylians inheres in their conception of a logic of practice regulated by a longer and more episodic conception of time (1990a: 12–13, 261). Polythetic logic is based on strategic consideration of interests in the broadest sense and exists in all societies. In contrast, the more ‘monothelic’ rationality, characteristic of a tiny minority, particularly of scientists and philosophers in late capitalism, derives from the typical capacity to view things abstractly, stripped of all temporal embeddedness in events and presented in the written form which makes for theoretical understanding.

Successful practice requires the actor both to operate within a specific habitus and to act creatively beyond the specific injunctions of its rules. Put another way, the habitus supplies a regulated set of perceptions and actions, within which improvisation typically occurs. Bourdieu himself likes to use the examples of football or tennis to explain this: the player has literally a ‘feel for the game’ such that ‘in the heat of the moment’ he or she will make the right moves or calculations. This loose linkage with the rules and what has been done before is also pointed to in the field of painting: thus the painter not only acquires a sense of how other artists fit together in the chain of producers, but also masters the medium practically by solving the problematic issues present at any given moment (1990a: 55). This often distinguishes him from the art critic, who frequently lacks awareness of such difficult practical skills.

It seems to me that – like Giddens – Bourdieu has been struck by the sheer level of expertise involved in run-of-the-mill human accomplishments. Despite the existence of doxic or taken-for-granted knowledge (that which cannot be spoken), this complexity of calculation is what he sees as an endemic feature of action. It is this rejection of the mechanistic model of humans as mere bearers of structures that led Bourdieu to break with the ‘happy structuralism’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Interpretative Studies
• Part II Critical Investigations
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index