Table of Contents
Introduction:
In the words
of 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.
Works:
Being heavily
influenced by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and the phenomenologist Ponty,
Bourdieu became interested in structuralist anthropology by Claude
Levi-Strauss.
Anthropology
and allied: 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).
On
education: 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)
On
culture and gender: 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).
More
recent works: 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.
Principal concepts developed by Bourdieu:
Anthropology and Structuralism:
To understand
Bourdieu’s version of structuralism we need to look upon two aspects of
Saussure’s work are important. First, his distinction between the grammatical
or logical structure of language (langue) and the everyday, improvisational
hurly-burly of speech (parole), together with his insistence that the former is
the appropriate domain for the location and analysis of meaning, laid the
foundation for the structuralist method: the true nature of social phenomena as
relational systems of meaning is to be sought in structure, which lies somehow
behind or beneath the phenomenal world of appearances. Second, he argued that
aspects of culture or social life other than language could also be treated as
systems for the signification of meaning, each with an appropriate structure or
structures to be revealed or deciphered.
Cultural field and the habitus:
Bourdieu has
tried to understand and explain the relationship between people’s practices and
the contexts in which those practices occur.
Cultural field:
Bourdieu refers
to the contexts—discourses, institutions, values, rules and regulations—which
produce and transform attitudes and practices as ‘cultural fields’. For him the
cultural field operates through cultural
capital, illusion, universalisation, symbolic violence and misrecognition.
A cultural field
can be defined as a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions,
categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective
hierarchy, and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities.
But it is also constituted by, or out of, the conflict which is involved when
groups or individuals attempt to determine what constitutes capital within that
field, and how that capital is to be distributed. Bourdieu understands the
concept of cultural field to refer to fluid and dynamic, rather than static,
entities. Cultural fields, that is, are made up not simply of institutions and
rules, but of the interactions between institutions, rules and practices.
The definition
of capital is very wide for Bourdieu and includes material things (which can
have symbolic value), as well as ‘untouchable’ but culturally significant
attributes such as prestige, status and authority (referred to as symbolic
capital), along with cultural capital (defined as culturallyvalued taste and
consumption patterns)...For Bourdieu, capital acts as a social relation within
a system of exchange, and the term is extended ‘to all the goods, material and
symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of
being sought after in a particular social formation’. (Harker et al. 1990: 1)
Reproduction and transformation:
Bourdieu
explains the competition for capital within fields with reference to two terms,
reproduction and transformation. By and large, agents adjust their expectations
with regard to the capital they are likely to attain in terms of the
‘practical’ limitations imposed upon them by their place in the field, their
educational background, social connections, class position and so forth.
Consequently—and to a certain extent, paradoxically—those with the least amount
of capital tend to be less ambitious, and more ‘satisfied’ with their lot; in
Bourdieu’s terms, ‘the subjective hope of profit tends to be adjusted to the
objective probability of profit’ (2000: 216). What this leads to is a
reproduction of symbolic domination:
What Bourdieu describes as: the realistic, even resigned or fatalistic,
dispositions which lead members of the dominated classes to put up with
objective conditions that would be judged intolerable or revolting by agents
otherwise disposed...help to reproduce the conditions of oppression. (2000:
217)
This feature however, does not stop agencies
from gambling for capital in order to improve their position within a field.
For example a lowly academic can become famous if s/he has a chance to write a
column in a reputed news paper. This might encourage many underclasses to join
academia, however according to Bourdieu, this kind of gambling is doomed to
failure. Although a lower class migrant family may strive to get its children
educated, the habitus of the children will, in advance, disqualify them from
success, both in the sense that the children will signal, in everything they do
and say, their unsuitability for higher education, and as a corollary, the
children will themselves recognise this, and more or less expect failure. As
Bourdieu writes: ‘Those who talk of equality of opportunity forget that social
games...are not “fair games”. Without being, strictly speaking, rigged, the
competition resembles a handicap race that has lasted for generations’ (2000:
214–15).
Misrecognition and symbolic violence:
Bourdieu understands misrecognition as a
‘form of forgetting’ that agents are caught up in, and produced by. He writes:
The agent
engaged in practice knows the world...too well, without objectifying distance,
takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound up with it;
he inhabits it like a garment...he feels at home in the world because the world
is also in him, in the form of the habitus (2000: 142–3)
Misrecognition is the key to what Bourdieu calls the function of
‘symbolic violence’, which he defines as ‘the violence which is exercised upon
a social agent with his or her complicity’ (1992d: 167). In other words, agents
are subjected to forms of violence (treated as inferior, denied resources,
limited in their social mobility and aspirations), but they do not perceive it
that way; rather, their situation seems to them to be ‘the natural order of
things’. One of the more obvious examples of the relation between
misrecognition and symbolic violence can be seen in the way gender relations
have, historically, been defined in terms of male domination. Every aspect of
women’s bodies and activities was ‘imprisoned’, to some extent, by the workings
of the habitus. Female bodies were both read as having significance which
demonstrated their inferiority (they were weak, soft, unfit for hard work,
unable to take pressure), and were inculcated (at home, school, church) with a
‘bodily hexis that constitutes a veritable embodied politics’ (1992d: 172).
Patriarchy, in this account, cannot be understood simply in terms of
coercion by one group (men) of another (women). Rather, we can say that gender
domination took (and takes) place precisely because women misrecognised the
symbolic violence to which they were subjected as something that was natural,
simply ‘the way of the world’. Consequently they were complicit in the
production of those things (bodily performances, for instance) which worked to
reinscribe their domination. Of course, as cultures change, there is always the
prospect that men can be caught up in the same form of imprisonment; that is,
maintain an attachment to certain performances of masculinity which are no
longer acceptable or functional, and thus counterproductive.
Illusio and universalisation:
This more or less unthinking commitment to the logic, values and
capital of a field corresponds to what Bourdieu calls ‘illusio’, which is:
The fact of
being caught up in and by the game, of believing . . . that playing is worth
the effort …, to participate, to admit that the game is worth playing and that
the stakes created in and through the fact of playing are worth pursuing; it is
to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes. When you read, in
Saint-Simon, about the quarrel of hats (who should bow first), if you were not
born in a court society, if you do not possess the habitus of a person of the
court, if the structures of the game are not also in your mind, the quarrel will
seem ridiculous and futile to you. (1998d: 76–7)
Thus, for example the rule in atheletics, which forbids
sports personnel to take any money in exchange of their sporting activities in
Olympics, however, there is nothing to stop them to take travelling expenses
and other facilities including high paid government or corporate jobs. When the
Spanish amateur champion Manuel Santana was asked, privately, why he did not
turn professional, he replied that he couldn’t afford the drop in salary.
Brundage, being international president of Olympic Games, initiated Olympic
movement – to universalise itself so that its values would become synonymous
with the field as a whole. The so-called ‘Olympic ideals’, which emphasise
disinterested values (‘sport for sport’s sake’), were reproduced by
governments, the media, bureaucrats, sports administrators and teachers as
criteria (capital) for differentiating ‘true’ sportspeople. This had a number
of manifestations. In the United States in the first half of the twentieth
century, professional American football received very little media coverage or
public attention compared to (supposedly) amateur college football. And amateur
tennis players who won tournaments like Wimbledon became national heroes, while
the professional circuit, dubbed ‘a circus’, was more or less ignored by the
media. In both cases the professionals were much better sportspeople than those
in the amateur ranks, but this did not translate into cultural (or even
economic) capital. The Olympic movement’s attempts to universalise its values
and capital were not, of course, universally successful. In some sub-fields
(such as golf, soccer and boxing), professionals were generally accorded a
higher status, and received more media and public attention, than amateurs. And
in rugby league (a sport played predominantly in the north of Britain and
eastern Australia), professionalism became the means by which the sport and its
working class fans distinguished themselves from a rival code (rugby union) and
its supporters (the upper classes). But even where a sport was clearly
professional (golf, soccer, boxing, rugby league), its core values and
discourses—what Bourdieu would call its ‘doxa’—were usually articulated (by the
media, officials, and by sportspersons giving interviews) as being tied to the
notion of ‘sport for sport’s sake’. This is another example of illusio:
although by the middle of the last century many sports were operating on a
professional basis (soccer in Europe and South America, golf and tennis in the
United States and Europe), most members of the field were still ‘spoken’ by the
discourses of what we might call ‘inalienable sport’.
Inalienable
culture and market:
When we refer to sport as ‘inalienable’, we mean that
it was supposedly above the values of the marketplace. Soccer players earned
high salaries, and were treated—and sold—by clubs as a form of commodity. But
if an English soccer star in the 1950s were interviewed about his reasons for
playing the game, he would invariably cite a number of motivations—glory,
representing his country, helping his teammates, pleasing the local supporters,
even just having fun, all of which might be true. What he could not say,
however, was that he was doing it for the money; that would have automatically
earned him the contempt and anger of the fans and everyone else in the field.
The only capital that a soccer player could legitimately refer to was inalienable
cultural capital such as international honour, longevity, skill, loyalty to a
team or town, toughness or a sense of fair play.
Habitus and objectivism/subjectivism
Most of the
fields in which Bourdieu has worked, such as sociology, anthropology, ethnography
and linguistics, have been split between objectivist and subjectivist
explanations of human practice. In his introduction to The Logic of practice, Bourdieu writes that ‘Of all the oppositions
that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most
ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism’
(1990b: 25). The notions of cultural field and the habitus were created’ by
Bourdieu primarily as a means of thinking beyond this subjectivist–objectivist
split. What do the terms ‘subjectivist’ and ‘objectivist’ actually mean? Loïc
Wacquant describes subjectivism, or the subjectivist point of view, as that
which:
Asserts that
social reality is a ‘contingent ongoing accomplishment’ of competent social
actors who continually construct their social world via ‘the organized artful
practices of everyday life’...Through the lens of this social phenomenology,
society appears as the emergent product of the decisions, actions, and
cognitions of conscious, alert individuals to whom the world is given as
immediately familiar and meaningful. (1992d: 9)
The most common example of this way of thinking is Hollywood action
movies starring Arnold Scwarzeneggar where, they are usually in control of
their ideas, thoughts and behaviours, and they determine their environment through
the strength of their will and their physical ability. In fact in most of
Schwarzenegger’s films (and in action films starring actors such as Sylvester
Stallone and Bruce Willis) the story is really about the battle between the
individual hero who is courageous, strong, principled and free thinking, and
his environment which is invariably bureaucratic, deterministic, dehumanised,
corrupted and narrow minded. Bourdieu accepts that subjectivism is useful in
that it draws attention to the ways in which agents, at a practical, everyday
level, negotiate various attempts (by governments, bureaucracies, institutions,
capitalism) to tell them what to do, how to behave, and how to think. In other
words it serves as an antidote to those Marxist theories (associated with the
Frankfurt School) which presume that people are ‘cultural dupes’ mindlessly
consuming the ideologies of government and capitalism.
Bourdieu, however, rejects the subjectivist approach because it
fails to take in to account the close connection between the objective
structure of culture and which include the values, ideas, desires and
narratives produced by, and characteristic of, cultural institutions such as
the family, religious groups, education systems and government bodies, on the
one hand, and the specific tendencies, activities, values and dispositions of
individuals, on the other.
Objectivism is useful for Bourdieu because it allows him to decode
‘the unwritten musical score according to which the actions of agents, each of
whom believes she is improvising her own melody, are organized’ (1992d: 8). The
best known body of objectivist theory is structuralism, which was practiced in,
and influenced, just about every major humanities and social sciences discipline,
including linguistics (Saussure and Jakobson), anthropology (Lévi-Strauss),
literature (the Russian Formalists), cultural studies (Barthes), Marxism
(Althusser) and psychoanalysis (Lacan).
Structuralism as Bourdieu sees it:
There are three main insights which Bourdieu takes from
structuralism, and which clearly influenced his notions of cultural field and
the habitus.
First, structuralist
accounts of practice start from the premise that people more or less reproduce
the objective structures of the society, culture or community they live in, and
which are articulated in terms of ideas, values, documents, policies, rituals,
discourses, relations, myths and dispositions. The catch cry of structuralism
was Lévi-Strauss’ observation that ‘myths think in men, unbeknown to them’
(Hawkes 1997: 41). In other words, while people think that they are employing
various modes of communication (‘sign systems’ such as written and spoken
language, or bodily gestures), in fact those sign systems produce them, and their
activities, thoughts and desires.
Second, sign systems not
only ‘think’ people into existence; they also determine how they perceive the
world. What this means is that ‘reality’ is both produced and delimited by
whatever sign systems we have at our disposal. In contemporary society we
perceive and understand people aged, say thirteen years and under, in terms of
the word ‘child’. This connotes a number of things, including distinguishing
that person from an adult. But as the French historian Philippe Aries has
pointed out, what we understand by that word did not exist in the sixteenth
century; up to then twelve-year-olds would have been viewed and treated as
miniature adults.
The third point Bourdieu takes from
structuralism is the notion of relational thinking. Reality and people are
‘processed’ through the meaning machines that constitute our sign systems; but
the signs in those systems mean nothing in themselves; they only ‘mean’ insofar
as they are part of a sign system, and can be related to other signs in that
system. For instance, the term ‘Coca Cola’ does not derive its meaning from any
real thing that is out there in the world. Rather, we understand ‘Coca Cola’ in
relation to other terms, called ‘binaries’ (‘Coca Cola’ means, among other things,
not ‘Pepsi’, not ‘Perrier’, not ‘yak juice’).
These three points can be summed up as
follows:
·
objective structures produce
people, their subjectivities, their
worldview; and,
as a consequence
·
they also produce what people
come to know as the ‘reality’
of the world;
and
·
every thing, object and idea
within a culture only has meaning
in relation to
other elements in that culture.
Structuralism
therefore, can be understood as a form of objectivism, where it sets out to
establish objective regularities independent of individual consciousness and
will. It raises objectively at least the forgotten question of the particular
conditions which makes doxic experience of the social world possible.
The strength and weakness of structuralism/objectivism:
The deterministic
aspect of human practice as Bourdieu sees has the ability to see practice as
only the reproduction of structures and no more. The most prominent short
coming as he sees it is in what stereotypic anthropologists does. Anthropologists
seeking out primitive culture objectivise “other” in terms of their own
cultural notions. In sum, anthropologists objectifying other culture fail to
objectify their own practices.
The second and
even more acute problem that Bourdieu sees is that failing to understand that descriptions
of objective regularities (That is, structures, laws, systems) do not tell us
how people use—inhabit, negotiate, or elude—those objective regularities.
Subjectivism and
objectivism remain useful notions in attempting to account for practice, mainly
because they point to the shortcomings of their ‘other’. Subjectivism draws
attention to the point that objectivist maps of a culture (such as laws, rules,
and systems) edit out intentionality and individuality (or what is referred to
as ‘agency’). Objectivism points out that individuality and intentionality are
regulated by cultural contexts—that is, we can only ‘intend’ what is available
to us within a culture.
Habitus and bodily hexis:
Bourdieu refers
to the partly unconscious ‘taking in’ of rules, values and dispositions as ‘the
habitus’, which he defines as ‘the durably installed generative principle of
regulated improvisations . . . [which produces] practices’ (1977a: 78). In
other words, habitus can be understood as the values and dispositions gained
from our cultural history that generally stay with us across contexts (they are
durable and transposable). These values and dispositions allow us to respond to
cultural rules and contexts in a variety of ways (because they allow for
improvisations), but the responses are always largely determined—regulated—by
where (and who) we have been in a culture.
As agents move
through and across different fields, they tend to incorporate into their
habitus the values and imperatives of those fields. And this is most clearly
demonstrated in the way the relationship between field and habitus functions to
‘produce’ agent’s bodies and bodily dispositions: what Bourdieu refers to as
the ‘bodily hexis’. We may think of the body as something individual, as
subject to, belonging to, and characteristic of, the self. But, as Bourdieu
points out, this notion of the ‘individual, self-contained body’ is also a
product of the habitus:
this body which
indisputably functions as the principle of individuation . . ., ratified and reinforced
by the legal definition of the individual as an abstract, interchangeable being
. . . [is] open to the world, and therefore exposed to the world, and so
capable of being conditioned by the world, shaped by the material and cultural
conditions of existence in which it is placed from the beginning...(2000:
133–4)
There are a number of further points that Bourdieu associates with
habitus
First, knowledge (the way
we understand the world, our beliefs and values) is always constructed through
the habitus, rather than being passively recorded.
Second, we are disposed
towards certain attitudes, values or ways of behaving because of the influence
exerted by our cultural trajectories. These dispositions are transposable
across fields.
Third, the habitus is always
constituted in moments of practice. It is always ‘of the moment’, brought out
when a set of dispositions meets a particular problem, choice or context. In
other words, it can be understood as a ‘feel for the game’ that is everyday
life.
Finally, habitus operates
at a level that is at least partly unconscious. Why? Because habitus is, in a
sense, entirely arbitrary; there is nothing natural or essential about the
values we hold, the desires we pursue, or the practices in which we engage.
