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Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002)

Bourdieu agrees with Bachelard: every science worthy of the name is concerned with

what remains hidden from ordinary view. The task of a science that takes society as its

object is to expose the normally repressed mechanisms that perpetuate and disguise asnatural or spontaneous those relations of domination and privilege that underlie any

given social order. In each of his varied fields of enquiry, from his studies undertaken in

the late 1950s of ritual tradition and colonial rule in Algeria through to his analyses of

education and cultural consumption in the 1960s and 70s, of art and philosophy in the

1980s, and of economic and political issues in the 1990s, Bourdieus guiding concern

has been to reveal the forms of symbolic violence through which social actors are

differentiated and regulated in such a way as to ensure the dominance of the ruling

class.

What distinguishes Bourdieus approach from more conventional Marxist

alternatives is, negatively, his relative lack of interest in the precise economic basis of

class struggle, and positively, the care with which he strives to avoid the dualisms thatoften beset militant social analysis between theory and practice, context and

individual, structure and agency, and so on. All of these dualisms refer back to the

most fundamental and most ruinous of the oppositions dividing social science, the

opposition between subjectivism and objectivism. The subjectivism that Bourdieu

associates with Sartre and existentialism isolates individual freedom from its enabling

conditions; the objectivism he associates with Althusser and structuralism almost

ignores the individual altogether. It was to avoid this dichotomy that Bourdieu

developed his two most distinctive concepts, those of habitus and field.

Habitus refers to the set of dispositions that individuals internalise over the

course of their upbringing and which then serve to orient their interests, tastes and

expectations. Habitus varies mainly according to the urgency of immediate material

necessity: the more privileged or leisured the individuals, the more their habitus will

encourage them to take an interest in impractical practices like intellectual abstraction,

aesthetic distance, scientific detachment, formal refinement, theoretical speculation,

etc. Bourdieus work on the French education system (The Inheritors [1966];

Reproduction [1970]) demonstrates how it is systematically skewed to favour those

with privileged dispositions of this kind, just asDistinction [1979] explores the myriad

ways in which those with cultivated tastes differentiate themselves from the vulgar

masses who prefer function over form and matter over manner (a hearty meal rather

than nouvelle cuisine, familiar representation rather than art for arts sake, conventional

narrative rather than avant-garde experimentation...).Social differentiation proceeds in distinct spheres or fields. If habitus is a way

of describing that feel for the game which distinguishes social players in terms of

confidence and finesse, then the rules that govern competition in any particular game

cultural, scientific, legal, journalistic, etc. are defined through its constitution as a

semi-autonomous field. For example, in the seventeenth century science begins to

emerge as a distinct field when, thanks to the development of particular kinds of

reasoning, experimentation and accreditation, the criteria that allow for the clear

distinction of scientific statements from unscientific (religious, magical, common-

sensical...) statements become relatively independent of other modes of socio-cultural

evaluation. As described in Bourdieus major work in the sociology of art (The Rules of

Art, 1992), the literary field likewise emerges as semi-autonomous when, in the age ofFlaubert and Baudelaire, competition among producers of literature a competition

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which distinguishes the proponents of a pure style of writing purged of any

constituent relation to the object of description or narration from the advocates of a

socially subversive realism on the one hand and the defenders of bourgeois norms on

the other becomes partially independent of the constraints (of patronage or

commercialisation) that had previously tied literature to the fields of political or

economic power. Again, in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger(1988),Bourdieu reads Heideggers work as an instance, conditioned by the specific limitations

and sophistications of the philosophical field, of that conservative revolution which

swept through the German academy in the 1920s and which also found expression in

the writings of Jnger, Spengler and the ideologues of National Socialism.

Since Bourdieu is chiefly interested in the opaque if not secret tendencies that

structure individual behaviour and that are themselves profoundly resistant to change,

he has often been criticised, for instance by Rancire and Latour, for failing to allow

sufficient scope for deliberate innovation or disruption. Partly in response to such

accusations, in the last decade of his life Bourdieu became increasingly preoccupied

with more overtly political issues. The Weight of the World(1993) is concerned with

the contemporary mechanics of destitution and social exclusion; several of Bourdieuslast publications raise searching questions about the responsibilities of intellectuals and

the media. Especially in the wake of the December 1995 strikes in France, Bourdieu

became a vocal critic of neo-liberal globalisation and a still more vocal champion of

groups or movements seeking to politicise, in alliance with progressive trade unions and

a strengthened confederation of European nation states, issues relating to employment,

poverty and discrimination.

Peter Hallward