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9 Contemporary theoretiCal SyntheSeS

Key Concepts  Habitus  Fields  Cultural Capital  Social Capital  Economic Capital  Symbolic Capital  Symbolic Violence

Pierre Bourdieu

Key Concepts  System  Lifeworld  Colonization of the Lifeworld  Communicative Action  Public Sphere  Steering Media  Money/Power

Jürgen Habermas

Anthony Giddens

Key Concepts  Agency  Structure  Rules/Resources

 System  Duality of Structure  Discursive Consciousness  Practical Consciousness  Trust  Time–Space Distanciation  Ontological Security

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  445

Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamen- tal, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism.

—Pierre Bourdieu

In this chapter, we consider the work of the three leading theorists in contemporary sociology: Pierre Bourdieu was engaged, and Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens are engaged in a similar project: developing a multidimensional theoretical approach to understanding social life. While most of the theorists whose work we have discussed thus far emphasize one or another approach to the questions of order and action, the theorists examined here all seek to bridge the divide in social theory between individualist (subjectiv- ist) and collectivist (objectivist) orientations, on the one hand, and rational and nonrational orientations on the other. This long-standing theoretical divide was tempered for some thirty years when Parsonian structural-functionalism (see Chapter 2) dominated sociological theo- rizing. The period of the “orthodox consensus,” however, was fractured during the 1960s as theorists began to incorporate ideas from an array of disciplines and perspectives—psycho- analysis, economics, comparative literature, linguistics, Marxism, phenomenology, and anthropology, to name but a few. While the injection of various approaches ushered in a period of astounding creativity, it also left many in the field to talk past one another. The proliferation of competing approaches made for little common ground between those who emphasized one aspect of social order and action and those who emphasized another dimen- sion of these fundamental theoretical questions. Equally important, this division necessarily produced incomplete portraits of social life, since the unidimensional theoretical models were ill equipped to capture the complexities of the relationship between the individual and society.

Addressing this state of the field, each of the three theorists discussed in this chapter has developed a perspective that explicitly incorporates elements from all sides of the theoreti- cal divide. Because each uniquely melds the work of a host of scholars, their various approaches cast different shades of light on their common effort to bridge the oppositions separating the different theoretical dimensions. Along the way, they also introduce a unique set of concerns. While Bourdieu develops his project through an emphasis on the reproduc- tion of class relations, Habermas examines the prospects for democracy in the modern world. For his part, Giddens explores the effects of modern society on the nature of trust, risk, and the self.

pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002): a BiographiCal SketCh 

Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in Denguin, a small village in southwestern France. Bourdieu was raised in a family of modest means; his father was a farmer turned town postman. Bourdieu proved to be a talented and hardworking student, enabling him to gain entry into the elite lycées (public secondary schools) in Paris. In 1951, Bourdieu entered the prestigious École Normale Superiéure, long a training ground for French intellectuals, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Louis Althusser, all of whom developed a decidedly Marxist orientation to their studies, as would Bourdieu. However, as a provincial outsider to the Parisian intellectual and cultural elite, Bourdieu became acutely aware of the advantages that his upper-class schoolmates

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possessed. This fostered within Bourdieu an antiestablishment sentiment that some have construed as an “extraordinary desire for revenge” against the Parisian intellectual world (Dufay and Dufort 1993:196, cited in Swartz 1997:18). Even though he himself was a successful product of it, Bourdieu would become a relentless critic of the French educa- tional establishment and the aura of meritocracy with which it legitimated itself. He wrote extensively about the hostility harbored by the upper classes toward the middle and lower classes, a hostility that was embedded not only in the educational system, but also in mat- ters such as the arts, sports, and food. In a number of his works, including The Inheritors (1979), Distinction (1979), and The State Nobility (1989), Bourdieu makes clear that education and cultural tastes are central to creating differences between social classes and to the reproduction of those class differences.

Bourdieu completed his agrégation (a highly competitive exam for teachers) in phi- losophy in 1955 and began teaching philosophy in the French provinces at the secondary level. Three years later, however, he was called into military service and sent to Algeria to combat the Algerians’ armed struggle to end French rule. Like many French intellectu- als, Bourdieu opposed the French colonial war effort, and his military experience had a profound effect on him, leading to his lifelong commitment to producing socially rele- vant empirical research. After completing his military duties, Bourdieu remained in Algeria to lecture at the University of Algiers and to carry out ethnographic studies of tribal life, farming communities, and industrial laborers. Bourdieu left for Algeria as a philosopher, but after conducting extensive interviews with local inhabitants and migrant workers and taking hundreds of photographs, he returned to France in 1960 as a self- taught anthropologist.

Upon his return to France, Bourdieu attended the Sorbonne (University of Paris, Sor- bonne), where he studied anthropology and sociology under the direction of Raymond Aron, one of France’s leading sociologists. In 1962, he took a position at the University of Lille; two years later, he joined the faculty of the Practical School of Advanced Studies in Paris (École pratique des hautes études). Ever the agent provocateur, Bourdieu refused to com- plete the state doctorate degree, which is the standard requirement for those seeking chairs in French universities (Swartz and Zolberg 2004:19).1

In 1968, in the midst of the student political protests that swept through much of Western Europe, Bourdieu split with Aron and set up his own research center, the Center of Sociology for Education and Culture (Centre de Sociologie de l'éducation et de la culture). Thereafter followed a spate of groundbreaking publications. In 1970, Bourdieu coauthored with Jean-Claude Passeron Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture, now considered a classic in the sociology of education. This was followed by Distinction (1979), which was named the sixth most important social scientific work of the twentieth century in a survey by the International Sociological Association (Swartz and Zolberg 2004:17), while his The Logic of Practice (1980) placed fourth in the same survey. In addition, he published Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), Sociology in Question (1984), Language and Symbolic Power (1982), Homo Aca- demicus (1984), and dozens of articles addressing a wide variety of methodological, philosophical, and other issues. Meanwhile, in 1975, Bourdieu founded the review journal Proceedings in Social Science Research; in 1981 he was elected chair in sociol- ogy at the prestigious College of France, a position formerly held by Aron.

1Grenfell (2004:3) subtitles his intellectual biography of Bourdieu “agent provocateur” because this “term seems best to sum up Bourdieu as iconoclast, as someone who was ready to challenge established orthodoxies and incite action against the violence (both symbolic and real) of the world.”

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Bourdieu dominated French public intellectual life during the 1980s and 1990s. He con- tinued to produce work at a prolific pace, publishing The Rules of Art (1992) and the widely read An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (coauthored with Loïc Wacquant) in 1992. Two more books were published in 1993: The Field of Cultural Production and The Weight of the World. In 1993, he was awarded the Gold Medal from the National Center for Scientific Research in France—the highest accolade to be awarded to an intellectual (Grenfell 2004:8). His last publications dealt with such topics as masculine domination, neoliberal newspeak, globalization, and television. Apt to be recognized in the streets or cafés throughout France, particularly after he was featured in the documentary film Sociology Is a Martial Art (2000), Bourdieu’s fame was unusual for an intellectual (Calhoun and Wacquant 2002). Bourdieu died from cancer in January 2002, with a lifetime achievement of more than forty books and hundreds of articles published in a variety of languages; his influence on sociology will undoubtedly be felt for years to come.

Bourdieu’S intelleCtual influenCeS and Core ideaS 

Bourdieu’s work largely can be understood as an attempt to overcome the “dualism” that plagues much of social theory. Indeed, he notes, “I can say that all of my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?” (quoted in Swartz 1997:95). In seeking to answer this question, he developed an approach that takes into consideration the objective or external social forces that shape attitudes and behaviors as well as an individual’s subjectivity or perception of and action in the world. Along the way, he has introduced a number of concepts into the lexicon of sociology: cultural and symbolic capital, fields, habitus, and symbolic violence, to name but a few. Moreover, his conceptual vocabulary evinces his cross-disciplinary influences: he draws not only from sociology, but also from anthropology and philosophy. In addition to Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, his work bears the imprint of Durkheim’s nephew, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss (1908–2009), and a range of philosophers, including the “father” of phenomenol- ogy Edmund Husserl (1859–1938; see Chapter 6) and many of his intellectual descen- dents, most notably Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Alfred Schutz (1899–1959; see Chapter 6), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Finally, important aspects of Bourdieu’s work were developed in reaction to the structural Marxist philosophy of Louis Althusser (1918–90), his teacher at the École Normale Superiéure.2

Bourdieu draws from these scholars but avoids adopting their ideas wholesale, opting instead to extend the themes they addressed by way of his own set of conceptual tools. In this way, the concepts he devises often fuse together those aspects of others’ ideas that he finds most fruitful for his own empirical analyses, while casting off those ideas deemed least instructive or useful. The result is a highly creative and complex approach to the study of social life that defies easy summary. Nevertheless, in the remainder of this

2Because Bourdieu, Habermas, and Giddens draw from numerous perspectives, discussing their intellectual influences at any length would exceed the space limitations of this chapter. However, we have outlined the work of many of their influences in previous chapters. Thus, to help readers better situate the approaches of the three theorists examined here, we will reference the relevant chapters whenever possible.

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section we attempt the impossible, discussing several of the concepts that are central to Bourdieu’s unique perspective while pointing to the intellectual sources from which he drew inspiration.

Habitus The cornerstone of Bourdieu’s efforts to link objectivist and subjectivist approaches is

his notion of habitus, a concept he began to develop during his anthropological studies of Kabyle society in Algeria. The habitus is a mental filter that structures an individual’s per- ceptions, experiences, and practices such that the world takes on a taken-for-granted, com- monsense appearance. It refers to an individual’s “dispositions” or “mental structures” through which the social world is apprehended and expressed through both verbal and bodily language (Bourdieu 1990:131). “As an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the condition of its production” (Bourdieu 1980/1990:55). In short, it is through the habitus that one acquires a “sense of one’s place” in the world or a “point of view” from which one is able to interpret one’s own actions as well as the actions of others. As a “way of being,” however, the habitus shapes not only interpretive schemes and thoughts—the mind—but also the body, by molding one’s “natural propensity” for a wide range of move- ments including posture, gait, and agility.3

Bourdieu’s notion of habitus draws from Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy and thus speaks to an understanding of social life that emphasizes its active construction as part and parcel of individuals’ attempts to navigate their everyday world. Yet, Bourdieu goes to great lengths to demonstrate that individuals do not create their dispositions—rather, they acquire them. In this way, his notion of habitus offers a critique of not only Husserl’s work, but also of that of Jean-Paul Sartre, a towering figure in French intellectual and political life. A Marxist philosopher, novelist, and playwright, Sartre’s work and political activism made him the model “total intellectual,” for which he served as a standard for some three decades. Most noted for his existentialist philosophy, Sartre maintained that “man is condemned to be free” (Sartre 1947:27) as a result of living in a world without meaning or design. How- ever, this inherent meaninglessness provided the opportunity for the individual to develop an “authentic” self, a potential that he notes as the “first principle of existentialism”: “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (ibid.:18). For Sartre, consciousness is not determined by one’s social environment; rather, individuals possess the capacity to will themselves an existence that is freely chosen. Ultimately, individuals are solely responsible for being what they have willed themselves to be.

While drawing on phenomenology and existentialism, Bourdieu maintains that the habitus is not simply a mental or internal compass that shapes one’s attitudes, percep- tions, tastes, and “inclinations,” nor does it refer to one’s will or undetermined conscious- ness; it is instead an “internalization of externality” (Bourdieu 1980/1990:55). Bourdieu introduces this objectivist or structural element into the workings of the habitus by criti- cally incorporating the insights of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structural anthropology was a landmark in the social sciences. Lévi-Strauss sought,

3Bourdieu’s emphasis on the corporeal dimensions of the habitus stems from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology emphasized the centrality of embodied practice to everyday experience. See Jeremy Lane (2000).

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  449

in part through a critique of Sartre’s subjectivist orientation and emphasis on free will, to uncover the “fundamental structures of the human mind” (Lévi-Strauss 1969:75) in the binary codes that structure a society’s cultural system. In essence, Lévi-Strauss was expanding Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics (see Chapter 8) to explain what he took as the universal foundation of human society—namely, the binary opposites (good/evil, weak/strong, masculine/feminine, etc.) that structure all human ways of think- ing, kinship systems, and myths. On the basis of his richly detailed anthropological stud- ies, Lévi-Strauss created quasi-mathematical formulas to map out the structural relations according to which all cultures are said to be organized like so many variations on a common theme.

Lévi-Strauss’s commitment to a scientific, as opposed to a philosophical, examination of social life had a major impact on Bourdieu’s empirical research. It was in the “confronta- tion” between the works of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss that he saw the possibility “of reconcil- ing theoretical and practical intentions, bringing together the scientific and the ethical or political vocation . . . in a humbler and more responsible way of performing [one’s] task as researcher” (ibid.:2). Nevertheless, Bourdieu did not adopt Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism wholesale. Most troubling for Bourdieu is structuralism’s “mechanical” view of action whereby individuals’ consciousness or reasons for acting are of secondary interest, since they are held to be reflections of underlying cultural codes of which they are unaware. Through his conception of the habitus, Bourdieu sought “to reintroduce agents that Lévi- Strauss and the structuralists . . . tended to abolish, making them into simple epiphenomena of structure” (1990:9). Contrary to the structuralists’ portrayal of conduct, Bourdieu con- tended, “action is not the mere carrying out of a rule, or obedience to a rule. Social agents . . . are not automata regulated like clocks, in accordance with laws they do not understand” (ibid.).

Despite Bourdieu’s criticism of the mechanistic nature of Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, there is a decidedly structuralist element in Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, since an individual’s dispositions are a product of the “internalization of externality.” The externality that shapes the habitus is readily apparent if we compare it to a “point of view.” As the term itself suggests, points of view “are views taken from a certain point, that is, from a given position within social space. And we know too that there will be different or even antagonistic points of view, since points of view depend on the point from which they are taken, since the vision that every agent has of space depends on his or her position in that space” (ibid.:131). For example, your vision of geographic space is dependent on your posi- tion or the point you occupy within that space. If you were to stand facing north, your sur- roundings would appear to you in a particular way that is quite different from how they would appear to someone facing south. You each will see things that the other is unaware of, because it is outside of your (his) field of vision. Moreover, those things that you both see will not look the same, because your distinctive points of view will determine their appearance. Nevertheless, both of you will perceive the world as natural or self-evident despite the fact that your perceptions are dependent not on the world, but rather on the point of view from which you apprehend the world.

Now extend the notion of geographic space to social space. In this case, your point of view or disposition is determined by your position within a space that is structured by two “principles of differentation”: economic capital and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1994/1998:6). Eco- nomic capital refers to the material resources—wealth, land, money—that one controls or pos- sesses. Cultural capital refers to nonmaterial goods such as educational credentials, types of knowledge and expertise, verbal skills, and aesthetic preferences that can be converted into eco- nomic capital. It is these two forms of capital that constitute the “externality” that is internalized

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via the habitus by forming the social space within which points of view are taken. Within this social space, individuals are positioned relative to one another, first according to the overall volume of the capital they possess and, second, according to the relative amount of economic and cultural capital they possess. Moreover, the closer individuals are to one another in terms of the amount and types of capital they possess, the more they have in common (the more their lifestyles, tastes, and aspirations coincide), while the farther apart they are in social space (that is, the less similar the composition of their capital), the less they have in common (ibid.:6, 7). Thus, you are more apt to see “eye to eye” or “hit it off” with someone the more your position in social space overlaps. But this is not a direct result of possessing similar amounts of money and types of educational credentials, per se, but rather a result of the similarity of the habitus each has acquired by virtue of being similarly positioned in social space.

The habitus, then, is a structured structure that structures how one views and acts in the world. First, as a scheme or structure of perceptions, dispositions, and actions, the habitus “generates and organizes practices and representations”—it structures an individual’s expe- rience of and orientation to the social world. An individual’s early childhood socialization has a particularly strong effect in this regard because it provides the basis for apprehending and structuring all future experiences. As Bourdieu notes, the habitus is a system of durable dispositions that “tends to ensure its own constancy and defence against change through the selection it makes within new information by rejecting information capable of calling into question its accumulated information. . . . Through the systematic ‘choices’ it makes among the places, events and people that might be frequented, the habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre- adapted as possible, that is, a relatively constant universe of situations tending to reinforce its dispositions” (Bourdieu 1980/1990:60, 61).

However, as a structure, the habitus is itself structured by one’s position in social space, which is determined by the volume and types of capital possessed. As a product of an objective position within social space, the habitus encompasses a system of objec- tively determined practices that reflect the possibilities or “life chances” that are tied to a given social position. In this way, the habitus is an “embodiment of history” or a “present past” born out of the long accumulation of life experiences distinctive to a given social position.

Bourdieu sees in the habitus the union of structures and practices: “objective structures tend to produce structured subjective dispositions that produce structured actions which, in turn, tend to reproduce objective structure” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970/1977: 203, quoted in Swartz 1997:103). For Bourdieu, however, a central unintended consequence of this cir- cular process is the legitimation and reproduction of a stratified social order that advantages some groups while disadvantaging others. Insofar as an individual’s habitus is structured by the existing social distribution of economic and cultural capital, the aspirations and expecta- tions it engenders will conform to what is objectively accessible, given one’s class position. Objective probabilities for success or failure are translated into a subjective appraisal of a “sense of one’s place.” On the one hand, a person whose parents are successful, college- educated professionals or corporate executives will grow up expecting to be a successful, college-educated professional or corporate executive; more than likely, he will not aspire to be a worker in a furniture assembly plant. On the other hand, a person whose family has worked as manual laborers for generations will be more likely to expect to do the same while assuming that a career as a corporate executive or physician is outside of his reach. As a result, an individual’s internalized estimation of what is objectively possible or impossible, reasonable or unreasonable to accomplish, fosters aspirations and practices that reproduce the objective structures that generate the world of unequal possibilities. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the habitus perpetuates structural inequality across generations by adapting

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individuals’ expectations and behaviors to a social space that is constructed on an unequal distribution of resources (Swartz 1997:103–107).

The discriminatory effects of the habitus apply not only to life chances and career aspira- tions, but also to a wide range of lifestyle “choices.” For example, persons who possess relatively little economic capital but possess a relatively high volume of cultural capital (the “dominated fraction of the dominant class,” in Bourdieu’s terms) are likely to enjoy the same types of food, read the same types of books, listen to the same types of music, speak with a similar vocabulary and accent, participate in the same types of sports, and share similar political views. These affinities are the product of a shared point of view that enables those who occupy this space to acquire the code necessary for understanding, for example, the distinctions that make Beethoven different from Mozart, James Joyce different from Joseph Conrad, a Monet different from a Manet, or a bottle of Bordeaux different from a bottle of Gallo. Those situated differently in social space—for instance, those who possess little in the way of economic and cultural capital—are unlikely to be exposed to the neces- sary socialization that would endow them with the categorical schemes required to appreci- ate these distinctions. Being unable to “understand” such types of music, novels, paintings, or wines, those so situated would be little interested in partaking of them.

In his groundbreaking book, Distinction, Bourdieu (1979) analyzed the schemes of per- ception individuals bring to bear on the social world, including works of art. Based on interviews and questionnaires, he documented distinctive modes of apprehending art that corresponded to the class position of respondents. For instance, when asked to comment on the photo of an old woman’s hands (see Photo 9.1), working-class respondents—those who possessed little economic and cultural capital—replied in everyday terms that lacked an explicitly aesthetic judgment: “Oh, she’s got terribly deformed hands! . . . Looks like she’s got arthritis. . . . I really feel sorry seeing that poor old woman’s hands, they’re all knotted.” Respondents from the more privi- leged classes, however, described the pho- tograph in abstract terms that reflect their own distance from the necessities of every- day life and their possession of the aesthetic code required for properly appreciating art: “I find this a very beautiful photograph. It’s the very symbol of toil. It puts me in mind of Flaubert’s old servant-woman. . . . That woman’s gesture, [is] at once very hum- ble. . . . It’s terrible that work and poverty are so deforming” (Bourdieu 1984/1990: 44, 45).

Like their comments on the photo of the woman’s hands, when responding to a “modernist” photo similar to Photo 9.2, those pos- sessing little cultural capital were unable to apply an aesthetic code to the photograph that would allow them to perceive it as a form of artistic expression. Neither, however, could the image be decoded through common, “realist” perceptual schemes. Perplexed and defeated, manual workers offered the following descriptions: “At first sight it’s a construction in metal but I can’t make head or tail of it. It might be something used in an electric power station. . . . I can’t make out what it really is, it’s a mystery to me.” “Now, that one really bothers me, I haven’t got anything to say about it. . . . I can’t see what it could be, apart from lighting. It isn’t car headlights, it wouldn’t be all straight lines like that.” “That’s something to do with electronics, I don’t know anything about that.” Similarly situated in social space, small shopkeepers and craftsmen offered similar verdicts: “That is of no interest, it may be

Photo 9.1 An Old Woman’s Hands

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all very fine, but not for me. . . . Personally that stuff leaves me cold.” “ I wouldn’t know what to do with a photo like that. Perhaps it suits modern tastes.” By contrast, members of the dominant class were able to “appreciate” the image by applying an abstract, aesthetic code in which judgments of form are freed from judgments of contents: “It’s inhuman but aesthetically beautiful because of the contrasts” (ibid.:46, 47).

Bourdieu’s analysis reveals how possessing the code—that is, the cultural capital—to prop- erly understand works of art, haute cuisine, or the finer points of golf is not simply a matter of an individual’s aesthetic preferences and tastes. Because differences in lifestyles and knowledge are the product of hierarchically ordered posi- tions within social space, they, too, are ordered hierarchically. In class-based societies, it matters whether or not an individual prefers to visit museums or watch wrestling on TV, read The New Yorker or The National Enquirer, attend a tennis match or a stock car race. While the former are generally considered “highbrow” and refined, the latter are considered “lowbrow” and vulgar.

As a result, tastes symbolically mark the social positions they are connected to—and the individuals who inhabit them—as either dignified or inferior, and serve to legitimate exist- ing social inequalities. Even how a person handles his silverware at mealtime can signify the cultural capital he possesses; “cultured” parents who are attuned to the symbolic sig- nificance of such behavior often stress to their young children the need to refrain from holding their forks and spoons like a “caveman.”

Social Reproduction While Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus speaks to a central debate that has long framed

the social sciences—namely, the relationship between agency and structure—he combines the concept of the habitus with his discussion of economic and cultural capital to shed light on another longstanding problematic: how are societies reproduced from one generation to the next such that social stability is preserved? In answering this question, Bourdieu draws heavily from Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to fashion a novel account of the process of social reproduction. The resulting analyses of cultural capital and its accumulation through social- ization and education represent one of his most important contributions to social theory.

Like Marx, Bourdieu sees modern societies as based fundamentally on relations of power. Arguing that “economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital” (Bour- dieu 1990:252), Bourdieu shares with Marx’s work, and Marxism more generally, an emphasis on class-based forms of dominance. Economic capital (money and property) provides the means for acquiring other forms of capital, including cultural capital, by pro- viding an escape from “necessity.” The more wealth a person possesses, the more he is able to remove himself from the necessary daily concerns over physical survival. By freeing one from pressing concerns over one’s material existence, economic capital grants opportunities for traveling to foreign lands, frequenting the bastions of high culture (museums, operas, etc.), and otherwise indulging one’s tastes. In short, economic capital affords an individual

Photo 9.2 Nighttime Industrial Scene

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the possibility for becoming “worldly”—that is, “knowing” the world—and thus deserving of the privileged status that is bestowed on him by others. Most important for the purposes of social reproduction, economic capital can be readily transferred to succeeding genera- tions through inheritance. Certainly it is easier to give your money to your family members than it is to give them your cultural capital in the form of knowledge and aesthetic prefer- ences, no matter how “superior” they may be. Moreover, the value of specific tastes can fluctuate within a relatively short period of time, while the value of money remains an enduring feature of advanced societies.

Although Bourdieu contends that class relations form the basis of modern, hierarchical societies and that economic capital is the most valuable form of capital, his analysis of social reproduction parts in significant ways from traditional Marxist interpretations. Marxist social theory typically assigns a derivative role to noneconomic domains. Thus, political, legal, and cultural systems compose a “superstructure” that reflects the organiza- tion of production within the more primary economic “base.” However, as our discussion of cultural capital suggests, Bourdieu contends that economic resources alone do not form the social space of positions. Nor are money and property the only avenues for expressing and sustaining relations of domination. Moreover, in addition to cultural capital, social positions also are endowed with varying degrees of social capital or networks of contacts and acquaintances that can be used to secure or advance one’s position. For instance, a friend’s father may write a letter of recommendation on your behalf to attend a prestigious university of which he is an alumnus, or perhaps someone you know knows someone who can arrange an interview for you at a well-respected software firm. Of course, irrespective of the amount of economic and cultural capital we may possess, we all have friends and acquaintances that can help us in one way or another. Bourdieu’s point, however, is that social capital circulates within defined boundaries of social space and thus serves to repro- duce existing relations of domination. If one is raised in a poor family living in a rural community, it is unlikely that one will have connections to corporate executives working in a major metropolitan center. Thus, social capital promotes the perpetuation of class posi- tion across generations by providing access to opportunities denied to those who do not possess such resources.

Social reproduction, then, essentially consists of the reproduction of stratified, hierarchi- cal relations that deflect or resist calls for radical change by those positioned in dominated positions in social space. Typically, this requires that dominated social groups sanction the legitimacy of the existing system of relations, thus perpetuating their own domination. Like Marx, who argued that “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,” Bourdieu sees relations of domination disguised through a false consciousness that renders the social sys- tem immune from challenges. This is made possible once the real sources of individuals’ domination are “misrecognized” as stemming from personal failings or from causes beyond the control of their society and its leaders.

According to Bourdieu, no institution does more to ensure the reproduction of class rela- tions than education. Misrecognized as a meritocratic institution that rewards individual aptitudes over hereditary privileges, the educational system “maintains the preexisting social order, that is, the gap between pupils endowed with unequal amounts of cultural capital. More precisely, by a series of selection operations, the system separates holders of inherited cultural capital from those who lack it. Differences of aptitude being inseparable from social differences according to inherited capital, the system thus tends to maintain preexisting social differences” (Bourdieu 1994/1998:20). As guardians of the dominant culture—what is worth knowing and what the worthy should know—universities are charged with separating the cultured from the uncultured. Their mission is effected through an application process and competitive entrance exams (e.g., SATs) that establish a “true magical threshold separating the last candidate to have passed from the first to have failed”

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and thus a boundary separating the sacred from the profane (ibid.:21). Applicants are judged, and, once admitted, grades are assigned, as much, if not more, on the basis of what students already know than on what they will have learned in class. And what successful students already know is the “feel for the game” that comes with possessing the same types of cultural capital that are enshrined in institutions of higher education. Success in school is not simply tied to writing and speaking well; rather, it is a matter of writing and speaking in a particular way. Similarly, knowing how to install home plumbing, repair a television, or provide emotional support to those who are distressed is of little value in university class- rooms unless it is coupled with an understanding of, and ability to articulate, the science that underlies such skills. What the best schools do best—the Grandes Écoles in France or the Ivy League in the United States—is conceal the links between scholastic aptitude and inher- ited cultural capital in a diploma that consecrates a social difference in the guise of a techni- cal competence (ibid.:22). Ostensibly, meritocratic qualifications serve to perpetuate social inequalities by transforming their effects into the fate of personal traits.

Symbolic Struggles While economic, cultural, and social capital are crucial resources that shape an individ-

ual’s position in social space and thus his life chances, Bourdieu argues that these forms of capital are not directly responsible for charting one’s destiny or for the reproduction of social relations more generally. Instead, these forms of capital are realized symbolically through a “war of words,” the stakes of which are establishing a monopoly over the “legiti- mate principle of vision and division” on which social reality is constructed (Bourdieu 1990:134). In this “war,” opposing sides struggle to define what is just and unjust, good and bad, right and wrong, pure and corrupt. Both the stability of and challenges to the prevailing social order are the consequence of individuals and groups strategically marshalling the capital at their disposal in an effort to advance their particular interests.

However, the struggle to impose a particular vision of the world in the name of a univer- sal “truth” cannot be waged through naked coercion or under the banner that “might makes right” if that vision is to retain its legitimacy. To be effective, capital must be deployed in a “disinterested” fashion such that all strategies, interests, and calculations appear to be untainted by self-serving ambition. This requires that individuals and groups possess sym- bolic capital. Commonly labeled prestige, honor, reputation, or charisma, symbolic capital is converted economic or cultural capital denied as capital, “recognized as legitimate, that is, misrecognized as capital” (Bourdieu 1980/1990:118). Here, Bourdieu is extending Weber’s insights into charisma as a source of legitimacy and authority (Swartz 1997:43). In his studies of world religions, Weber examined how the charisma of prophets served as a basis for exercising authority over their followers. Charisma—a state of “grace”—endows religious prophets with a virtual magical power that instills in believers an unquestioned obedience to their commands. While Weber confined his discussion of charisma to the reli- gious field, Bourdieu argues that charisma operates within the secular world as well. Artists, scientists, politicians, university professors, journalists, and others can use their charisma or reputation, accumulated within their respective areas of expertise, as a source of power to legitimately demand obedience from others. Those who possess symbolic capital possess the authority to make the world through a “magical power” that transforms and disguises what is the result of the self-interested exercise of economic and political domination into the naturally inevitable.

Bourdieu uses the term symbolic violence to refer to acts leading to the misrecognition of reality or distortion of underlying power relations. “Symbolic violence rests on the adjustment between the structures constitutive of the habitus of the dominated and the struc- ture of the relation of domination to which they apply: the dominated perceive the dominant

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through the categories that the relation of domination has produced and which are thus identical to the interests of the dominant” (Bourdieu 1994/1998:121). In this way, relations of domination take on a “naturalness” that is inscribed in the habitus—the schemes of per- ception and apprehension—of both the dominant and the dominated. Through committing acts of symbolic violence, a misrecognized vision of the social world is legitimated—a vision that reproduces, with the complicity of the dominated, a stratified social order. Thus, for instance, through acts of symbolic violence the beneficiaries of the educational system appear intrinsically worthy of their success, while the less successful appear intrinsically unworthy (Bourdieu 1982/1991:24, 25).

The struggle to impose the legitimate categories according to which social life is under- stood is, for Bourdieu, at the root of all action. This struggle takes place within “fields,” a concept central in Bourdieu’s theoretical scheme. Fields are relatively autonomous arenas within which actors and institutions mobilize their capital in an effort to capture the stakes— the distribution of capital—that are specific to it. Examples of fields include art, literature, science, religion, the family, and education. The evolving history of each of these arenas is determined by the struggles that take place between its dominant and subordinate factions as each attempts to either defend or subvert the legitimacy of existing practices—the status quo—and the meanings assigned to them. For instance, painters and critics within the field of art are engaged in a continual struggle over what qualifies as “art” and whose works deserve to be so consecrated. As is the case in all such struggles, participants here adopt strategies that correspond to the amount and types of capital they possess. Thus, artists, crit- ics, dealers, and gallery owners whose interests and positions are aligned with established, orthodox styles will put into play their symbolic capital to denounce avant-garde or heretical works as “pretentious,” “undisciplined,” or, the worst of all charges in the artistic field, “commercial.” For their part, the “newcomers” will challenge the legitimacy of the estab- lishment by classifying works associated with it as “stale,” “dated,” or “hackneyed.” While the former seek to fix the current boundaries of the field, the latter, who can make a name for themselves only by being different or distinctive from consecrated producers, seek to rupture those boundaries (Bourdieu 1984/1993).

No matter the field, those who have an interest or stake in it take a position—that is, they pursue a strategy that corresponds to the position they occupy in that field. In this light, all action is self-interested, although in order to be perceived as legitimate it must be misrec- ognized as disinterested. Because strategies of misrecognition are carried out symbolically, the words used to classify or assign meaning to acts and others are instruments of power. Symbolic power is a power of “worldmaking,” “a power of creating things with words” exercised in the struggle to impose the legitimate vision of the social world (Bourdieu 1980/1990:137, 138). Of course, not every individual or group is able to exercise symbolic power and define the “truth.” The power to name the world—to “make people see and believe”—is dependent on the amount of symbolic capital (charisma, authority, recognition) one possesses, which, in turn, is dependent on the outcome of previous struggles as well as one’s position within the relevant field.

Consider the controversies surrounding the definition of obscenity, attempts to form an employee union in a retail store chain, or efforts to redraw electoral districts. In each instance, the interested parties (artists and religious leaders, workers and business owners, politicians and community activists) seek to impose their particular vision on the issue as the universal, and thus legitimate, truth. When is a painting or song lyric a form of artistic expression and when is it an obscenity? What is the best way to strike a balance between workers’ rights and a corporation’s ability to turn a profit? When does redistricting serve to enhance democratic representation or unfairly distort the voting process? Seldom do such questions yield a simple, obvious answer. Nevertheless, they are answered, when one fac- tion in the controversy is able to mobilize belief in the legitimacy of its words through “an

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almost magical power which enables [it] to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force (whether physical or economic)”—namely, the ability to establish the social order (Bourdieu 1982/1991:170).

We conclude this section by briefly noting several of the influences Bourdieu draws on in developing his analyses of symbolic struggles and their relevance to the reproduction of social relations. Like Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu views all symbolic systems as grounded in fundamental binary categories.4 Evincing the imprint of both scholars, he notes,

All the agents in a given social formation share a set of basic perceptual schemes, which receive the beginnings of objectification in the pairs of antagonistic adjectives commonly used to classify and qualify persons or objects in the most varied areas of practice. The network of oppositions between high (sublime, elevated, pure) and low (vulgar, low, modest), spiritual and material, fine (refined, elegant) and coarse (heavy, fat, crude, brutal), light (subtle, lively, sharp, adroit) and heavy (slow, thick, blunt, laborious, clumsy), free and forced, broad and narrow, or, in another dimension, between unique (rare, different, distinguished, exclusive, exceptional, singular, novel) and common (ordinary, banal, commonplace, trivial, routine), brilliant (intelligent) and dull (obscure, grey, mediocre), is the matrix of all the commonplaces which find such ready acceptance because behind them lies the whole social order. (Bourdieu 1984/1990:468)

Bourdieu parts company with Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, however, when he argues that binary classifications, while serving as the foundation for appending the everyday world and creating shared meaning and social solidarity, also provide the conceptual basis for social domination (Swartz 1997). The world of common sense produced by the logic of binary opposites is a world in which only some individuals and groups are entitled to the privileged axis of opposing terms. The binary categories we use to distinguish practices and things classify at the same time those individuals and groups associated with them. As an outcome of symbolic struggles, what is consecrated as sacred, pure, strong, or brilliant reflects and legitimates the underlying hierarchical social order that pits the dominant against the domi- nated (ibid.:85, 86).

This leads us to consider the influence of Weber’s work on Bourdieu. Like Weber, Bourdieu sees interests and power as deriving from a number of sources; his analyses of multiple forms of capital represent an important extension of Weber’s earlier work in this regard.5 Bourdieu’s analyses of lifestyle patterns as signs of distinction that disguise class- based domination are particularly indebted to Weber’s conceptualization of class and status groups (ibid.:45). Bourdieu also adopts a view similar to Weber’s regarding the existence of social classes. For Weber, classes, contrary to Marxian definitions of the concept, are not real groups whose composition reflects existing property relations. Instead, classes refer to individuals who share life chances that are determined by “economic interests in the

4Durkheim (1912/1965) saw in the early religious distinction drawn between the sacred and the profane the basis for all other systems of thought. This distinction was born out of focused group activity in tribal societies that produced in participants an altered state of consciousness. Durkheim referred to this group energy as “mana” or “collective effervescence,” and argued that tribal members attributed their newly found feelings of efficacy to the influence of supernatural spirits and gods. These feelings, in turn, provided the foundation for group solidarity and a sense of community. Lévi- Strauss would later develop Durkheim’s ideas regarding binary classifications into the basis for his structural anthropology. 5In his essay “Class, Status, Party,” Weber (1925) explored how interests and the power to realize them flow not only from one’s class position, but from one’s position in the status hierarchy as well. Moreover, Weber notes that “parties” can be formed in an effort to strategically pursue group goals or otherwise influence communal action that is not directly tied to specific class or status group interests.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  457

possession of goods and opportunity for income” (Weber 1925/1978:927). As you will read in the first selection excerpted below, Bourdieu argues that classes exist only “on paper,” as individuals who are “related” to one another in social space, and not as real groups. This view has important ramifications for understanding how the social order and relations of domination are maintained and challenged, particularly by calling attention to the shortcom- ings of Marxist perspectives.

Randall Collins (1941– ): Bridging the Micro and Macro

Randall Collins was born in 1941. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer who at various times was stationed in Moscow, South America, and Germany. Among Collins’s earliest memories are seeing bomb craters and dead bodies in Berlin at the end of the second world war. His childhood experiences were central to the emergence of his sociological imagination. As Collins notes,

this experience made [me] receptive toward the ideas of Erving Goffman, because there’s nothing like the diplomatic world for this stark contrast between what happens on the very formal idealized front stage and what happens back stage. I can remember my mother being wonderfully polite to people who were coming to visit in this tremendous round of sociability in the diplomatic world, and then she’d shut the door and it was like she took off a mask and became a different person. (R. Collins 2000)

Collins’s neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian conflict sociology combines his early understanding of the world as being full of large-scale, violent power conflicts, with the microlevel ideas of Goffman and Mead and a Durkheimian emphasis on social solidarity. This multidimensional theoretical orientation is also a product of Collins’s educational training. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Collins was influenced by the work of Talcott Parsons (see Chapter 2). Although there are many points on which Parsons and Collins sharply disagree, they both share an interest in building a comprehensive sociological theory that works on both the micro and the macro levels, as well as a particular appreciation for the works of Durkheim and Weber. Later, as a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, Collins worked with Goffman and Blumer, both of whom helped to further refine his interests in microsociology. Meanwhile, the turbulent political climate prevailing at that time and place also shaped his views by making clear the continuing real-world relevance of the works of Marx and Weber.

The central premise of Collins’s conflict theory is that social life is based on individuals seeking to satisfy their own needs and wants through using whatever material or cultural resources they have at their disposal. As Collins (1975:59) succinctly states, “[T]he basic insight [of conflict theory] is that human beings are sociable but conflict- prone animals. . . . The simultaneous existence of emotional bases for solidarity—which may well be the basis of cooperation, as Durkheim emphasized—only adds group divisions and tactical resources to be used in these conflicts” with one another.

In his most recent book, Interaction Ritual Chains (2005), Collins continues to draw on Durkheim, Mead, and Goffman to further develop his version of microsociology.

(Continued)

Significant Others

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 Bourdieu’S theoretiCal orientation

As noted at the outset, Bourdieu developed his theoretical model with the intention of over- coming the theoretical dualism that, in his estimation, is responsible for producing only partial understandings of social life. Bourdieu’s concerns in this matter speak directly to the questions of both action and order. Specifically, with regard to the question of order, Bour- dieu’s concept of the habitus is a theoretical device that makes possible an encompassing answer to the question, “What accounts for the patterns of behavior that lead us to experience social life as routine and predictable?” Bourdieu’s response is centered on the notion that the habitus, as the “internalization of externality,” structures an individual’s perception of the social world at the same time that it is itself a product of social and historical conditions.

Describing the book as interpreting the theory of Durkheim “through the eyes of Goffman and the microsociological movement, that is . . . in the spirit of symbolic interaction, ethnomethodology, social constructionism, and sociology of emotions” (ibid.:xi), Collins investigates variations in the emotional intensity of social rituals in order to explain patterns of group membership. Here he argues that successful rituals create feelings of group membership and “pump up” individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy, making continued interaction between the individuals involved less likely. Moreover, indicative of his conflict approach to understanding social life, Collins emphasizes that privilege and power are not only tied to an unequal distribution of material and cultural resources, but are also derived from a “flow of emotional energy across situations that makes some individuals more impressive, more attractive or dominant” while narrowing the sources of emotional energy for others (ibid.:xiii). Describing the emotional and symbolic exchanges at the heart of such activities as sex and smoking, Collins argues that individuals are drawn to interactions in which their economic and cultural capital promises them the best emotional payoff.

Collins has also written extensively on the “credential society” (see Credential Society, 1979). For Collins, educational credentials (university degrees) not only serve as barriers to the labor market that lead to further inflationary effects (the need for more and more degrees), but also are mired in inequality. In order for individuals to receive fair treatment in the labor market, then, this system of barriers would have to be removed. Collins argues that “credential abolitionism” is necessary because “the prospects of continuing to expand the credential system indefinitely, to let job requirements inflate to the point where 4 years of college is needed for a manual laborer or 20 years of postdoctoral study is required for a technical profession, would be exceedingly alienating to all concerned. Moreover, it would not affect the rate of mobility, nor change the order of stratification among ethnic groups; it would simply reproduce their order at higher and higher levels of education” (ibid.:197). Evidencing his disdain for the credential society, at various points in his life Collins has quit the academic world because of his disapproval of the credential-seeking process.

During his time away from academia, Collins wrote textbooks and novels, such as The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring (1978). Drawn back into the profession by the appeal of working with interesting colleagues, Collins has taught at a number of universities, including the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Riverside; and the University of Virginia. Since 1997, he has been professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

(Continued)

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  459

Understood as “schemes of perception, thought and action,” the habitus incorporates both individualist and collectivist dimensions of the nature of social order (see Figure 9.1). The habitus both enables and constrains our actions that then reproduce the very social conditions that structure the habitus. Bourdieu goes to great lengths to argue that the system of dispositions produced by the habitus does not lead to “mechanical” conduct that simply reflects the external conditions that structure the habitus. In this light, individuals actively make and remake the social order as they “take positions” or advance particular points of view, constructing their vision of the world in the process. However, position-taking is not unconstrained: individuals are not free to adopt any stance they choose. Points of view and the “strategies” individuals construct as they go about fitting their conduct to others’ are structured by the point they occupy in the space of social positions. The distribution of capital, in particular economic and cultural capital, structures the relation of positions within social space as well as within the specific fields in which individuals seek to impose the legitimate categories of perception. This is crucial, because the distribution of capital, in defining the space of positions, defines the space of possible position-takings—that is, the dispositions or habitus that is internalized by those who are located in one point or another.

Nonrational

Rational

Position- taking

Interests Strategies

Figure 9.1 Bourdieu’s Basic Concepts and Theoretical Orientation

CollectiveIndividual Habitus/

Dispositions

Cultural capital

Symbolic capital/ Symbolic power

Symbolic struggles

Symbolic violence/ Collective misrecognition

Economic capital

Social capital

Concerning the question of action, Bourdieu has developed a framework that likewise seeks to incorporate both rational and nonrational dimensions. (This is indicated by the boxed terms that span the rational/nonrational axis in Figure 9.1.) His efforts are based on adopting a conceptual language linked to economic and utilitarian perspectives (“interests,” “strate- gies,” “calculation,” “profit”) that underscores the rational aspects of motivation while argu- ing that action is typically carried out in a prereflective, nonrational manner. Bourdieu argues that all action is “interested” and thus oriented to the maximization of profit. Indeed, Bour- dieu extends the notion of interests and profits to incorporate economic or material gains and advantages as well as the pursuit of symbolic “goods” (Swartz 1997:42). Thus, Bourdieu

460  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

contends that actors adopt strategies that maximize their economic, cultural, social, and sym- bolic capital. In this light, we might take Bourdieu to mean that action is motivated by a conscious, rational calculation of costs and benefits. Yet, this is the very interpretation of action he means to dispel. Action is not guided by the logic of profit: it is driven by a practi- cal logic that Bourdieu likens to a prereflective “feel for the game.” Similar to how a good tennis player will position himself “not where the ball is but where it will be, one invests oneself and one invests not where the profit is but where it will be” (Bourdieu 1994/1998:79). Bourdieu argues that the habitus embodies actors with a “know-how” that enables them to strategically orient their conduct without necessarily having a strategic intention or goal that can be put into words. Actions are more adaptive than purposive in nature (Robbins 2000:29).

Put in another way, in taking a position, actors deploy their capital so as to realize their interests. However, conduct is not consciously chosen as if alternative means were weighed in terms of their potential for achieving specific ends. Rather, conduct is inscribed in the very nature of the “game” in which actors are involved and in the habitus through which a taken- for-granted world is constructed. Although the strategies that actors pursue are rational—that is, fitting to the field in which they are “absorbed”—they are not pursued rationally. While a politician may find it “natural” to publicly express his religious commitments on the cam- paign trail, a scientist would not be predisposed to such a strategy when trying to convince the public of the significance of her findings.

Readings

In the first selection, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Bourdieu outlines his relational model for the study of social life. He conceptualizes social space as an arena in which individuals and groups are positioned in relation to one another based on the amount and types of capital they have at their disposal. It is on the basis of such relations that struggles are waged to classify the world. In the second selection, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,” Bourdieu argues that artistic competence, far from being the product of an individual’s natural aesthetic preferences, is dependent on the possession of cultural capital. Unrec- ognized as such, artistic tastes function as a sign of distinction that legitimates the dominance of those who possess the code for deciphering works of art.

Introduction to “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups”

In this reading, Bourdieu addresses many of the themes discussed above. After describing social space as structured according to the distribution of capital, he embarks on a critique of “substantialist” approaches to social classes by emphasizing the space of relations within which ongoing struggles are waged to name the social world. In particular, Bourdieu takes aim at Marxist theory for treating classes as real groups mobilized solely on the basis of the conditions of economic production. He counters by presenting the view that classes and groups do not “exist”; rather, they are an outcome of symbolic struggles that seek to pro- nounce a reality that exists only because it is pronounced by those in an authorized position to declare its existence—that is, by those who possess the necessary symbolic capital. It is

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  461

above all the spokesperson “who, speaking about a group, speaking on behalf of a group, surreptitiously posits the existence of the group in question, institutes the group, through that magical operation which is inherent in any act of naming” (Bourdieu 1982/1991:250).

Yet, the struggle for the “monopoly of legitimate naming” is not an entirely symbolic affair. Imposing the legitimate vision of the social world reproduces the relations of power that structure the social world. Thus, to fully understand the classifications, the principles of vision and division, according to which the world is named, one must account for the posi- tions occupied by those engaged in the struggle to establish meaning, because the categories through which the world is perceived “are the product of the incorporation of the very structures to which they are applied” (ibid.:238). Different points of view, and the categories of perception that are used to express them, are but expressions, mediated through the habitus, of different points or positions within the space of objective relations. Any “science of classifications” must acknowledge this fundamental reality if it is to offer sound analyses of social life.

Constructing a theory of the social space presupposes a series of breaks with Marxist theory. First, a break with the tendency to privi- lege substance—here, the real groups, whose number, limits, members, etc., one claims to define—at the expense of relationships; and with the intellectualist illusion which leads one to consider the theoretical class, constructed by the sociologist, as a real class, an effectively mobilized group. Secondly, there has to be a break with the economism which leads one to reduce the social field, a multi-dimensional space, solely to the economic field, to the relations of economic production, which are thus constituted as coor- dinates of social position. Finally, there has to be a break with the objectivism which goes hand-in-hand with intellectualism and which leads one to ignore the symbolic struggles of which the different fields are the site, where what is at stake is the very representation of the social world and, in particular, the hierarchy within each of the fields and among the differ- ent fields. . . .

the SoCial SpaCe

Initially, sociology presents itself as a social topology. Thus, the social world can be repre- sented as a space (with several dimensions) con- structed on the basis of principles of differentia- tion or distribution constituted by the set of prop- erties active within the social universe in question, i.e. capable of conferring strength, power within that universe, on their holder. Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative posi- tions within that space. Each of them is assigned to a position or a precise class of neighbouring positions (i.e. a particular region in this space) and one cannot really—even if one can in thought— occupy two opposite regions of the space. Inas- much as the properties selected to construct this space are active properties, one can also describe it as a field of forces, i.e. as a set of objective power relations which impose themselves on all who enter the field and which are irreducible to the intentions of the individual agents or even to the direct interactions among the agents.

“Social Space and the Genesis of Groups” (1982)

Pierre Bourdieu

SOURCE: “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups” is reprinted by permission of the publisher from Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 229–250, edited and introduced by John B. Thompson, trans. by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copyright © Pierre Bourdieu 1983, 1977, 1981, 1984. This English translation copyright © 1991 by Polity Press.

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The active properties which are selected as principles of construction of the social space are the different kinds of power or capital which are current in the different fields. Capital, which may exist in objectified form—in the form of material properties—or, in the case of cultural capital, in the embodied state, and which may be legally guaranteed, represents a power over the field (at a given moment) and, more precisely, over the accumulated products of past labour (in particular over the set of instruments of produc- tion) and thereby over the mechanisms tending to ensure the production of a particular category of goods and so over a set of incomes and profits. The kinds of capital, like the aces in a game of cards, are powers which define the chances of profit in a given field (in fact, to each field or sub-field there corresponds a particular kind of capital, which is current, as a power or stake, in that game). For example, the volume of cul- tural capital (the same thing would be true, muta- tis mutandis, of the economic game) determines the aggregate chances of profit in all the games in which cultural capital is effective, thereby helping to determine position in social space (to the extent that this is determined by success in the cultural field).

The position of a given agent within the social space can thus be defined by the positions he occupies in the different fields, that is, in the distribution of the powers which are active within each of them. These are, principally, eco- nomic capital (in its different kinds), cultural capital and social capital, as well as symbolic capital, commonly called prestige, reputation, renown, etc., which is the form in which the dif- ferent forms of capital are perceived and recog- nized as legitimate. One can thus construct a simplified model of the social field as a whole which makes it possible to conceptualize, for each agent, his position in all possible spaces of competition (it being understood that, while each field has its own logic and its own hierarchy, the hierarchy which prevails among the different kinds of capital and the statistical link between the different types of assets tends to impose its own logic on the other fields).

The social field can be described as a multi- dimensional space of positions such that every actual position can be defined in terms of a multi-dimensional system of co-ordinates whose

values correspond to the values of the different pertinent variables. Thus, agents are distributed within it, in the first dimension, according to the overall volume of the capital they possess and, in the second dimension, according to the composi- tion of their capital—i.e. according to the rela- tive weight of the different kinds of assets within their total assets. . . .

Thus, in the first dimension, which is undoubt- edly the most important, the holders of a great volume of overall capital, such as industrial employers, members of liberal professions, and university professors are opposed, in the mass, to those who are most deprived of economic and cultural capital, such as unskilled workers. But from another point of view, that is, from the point of view of the relative weight of economic capital and cultural capital in their patrimony, professors (relatively wealthier in cultural capital than in economic capital) are strongly opposed to industrial employers (relatively wealthier in eco- nomic capital than in cultural capital). . . . The second opposition, like the first, is the source of differences in dispositions and, therefore, in position-takings. This is the case of the opposi- tion between intellectuals and industrial employ- ers or, on a lower level of the social hierarchy, between, [for instance,] primary school teachers and small merchants. . . .

In a more general sense, the space of social positions is retranslated into a space of position- takings through the mediation of the space of dispositions (or habitus). In other words, the sys- tem of differential deviations which defines the different positions in the two major dimensions of social space corresponds to the system of differen- tial deviations in agents’ properties (or in the properties of constructed classes of agents), that is, in their practices and in the goods they possess. To each class of positions there corresponds a class of habitus (or tastes) produced by the social conditioning associated with the corresponding condition and, through the mediation of the habi- tus and its generative capability, a systematic set of goods and properties, which are united by an affinity of style.

One of the functions of the notion of habitus is to account for the unity of style, which unites the practices and goods of a single agent or a class of agents. . . . The habitus is this generative and unifying principle which retranslates the

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intrinsic and relational characteristics of a posi- tion into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices.

Like the positions of which they are the prod- uct, habitus are differentiated, but they are also differentiating. Being distinct and distinguished, they are also distinction operators, implementing different principles of differentiation or using dif- ferently the common principles of differentiation.

Habitus are generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices—what the worker eats, and especially the way he eats it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions and the way he expresses them are sys- tematically different from the industrial owner’s corresponding activities. But habitus are also classificatory schemes, principles of classifica- tion, principles of vision and division, different tastes. They make distinctions between what is good and what is bad, between what is right and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so forth, but the distinc- tions are not identical. Thus, for instance, the same behavior or even the same good can appear distinguished to one person, pretentious to some- one else, and cheap or showy to yet another.

But the essential point is that, when perceived through these social categories of perception, these principles of vision and division, the differ- ences in practices, in the goods possessed, or in the opinions expressed become symbolic differ- ences and constitute a veritable language. Differ- ences associated with different positions, that is, goods, practices, and especially manners, func- tion, in each society, in the same way as differ- ences which constitute symbolic systems, such as the set of phonemes of a language or the set of distinctive features and of differential “écarts” that constitute a mythical system, that is, as dis- tinctive signs. . . .

The form that is taken, at every moment, in each social field, by the set of distributions of the different kinds of capital (embodied or material- ized), as instruments for the appropriation of the objectified product of accumulated social labour, defines the state of the power relations, institu- tionalized in long-lasting social statuses, socially recognized or legally guaranteed, between social agents objectively defined by their position in these relations; it determines the actual or poten- tial powers within the different fields and the chances of access to the specific profits that they offer.i

Knowledge of the position occupied in this space contains information as to the agents’ intrinsic properties (their condition) and their relational properties (their position). This is seen particularly clearly in the case of the occupants of the intermediate or middle posi- tions, who, in addition to the average or median values of their properties, owe a num- ber of their most typical properties to the fact that they are situated between the two poles of the field, in the neutral point of the space, and that they are balanced between the two extreme positions.

ClaSSeS on paper

On the basis of knowledge of the space of posi- tions, one can separate out classes, in the logical sense of the word, i.e. sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who, being placed in simi- lar conditions and subjected to similar condition- ings, have every likelihood of having similar dispositions and interests and therefore of pro- ducing similar practices and adopting similar stances. This “class on paper” has the theoretical existence which is that of theories: insofar as it is

iIn some social universes, the principles of division which, like volume and structure of capital, determine the structure of the social space, are reinforced by principles of division relatively independent of economic or cultural properties, such as ethnic or religious affiliation. In such cases, the distribution of the agents appears as the product of the intersection of two spaces which are partially independent: an ethnic group situated in a lower position in the space of the ethnic groups may occupy positions in all the fields, including the highest, but with rates of representation inferior to those of an ethnic group situated in a higher position. Each ethnic group may thus be characterized by the social positions of its members, by the rate of dispersion of these positions, and by its degree of social integration despite this dispersion. (Ethnic solidarity may have the effect of ensuring a form of collective mobility.)

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the product of an explanatory classification, entirely similar to those of zoologists or botanists, it makes it possible to explain and predict the practices and properties of the things classified— including their group-forming practices. It is not really a class, an actual class, in the sense of a group, a group mobilized for struggle; at most, it might be called a probable class, inasmuch as it is a set of agents which will present fewer hin- drances to efforts at mobilization than any other set of agents.

Thus, contrary to the nominalist relativism which cancels out social differences by reducing them to pure theoretical artefacts, one must therefore assert the existence of an objective space determining compatibilities and incompat- ibilities, proximities and distances. Contrary to the realism of the intelligible (or the reification of concepts), one must assert that the classes which can be separated out in social space (for example, for the purposes of the statistical analy- sis which is the only means of manifesting the structure of the social space) do not exist as real groups although they explain the probability of individuals constituting themselves as practical groups, in families (homogamy), clubs, associa- tions and even trade-union or political “move- ment.” What does exist is a space of relation- ships which is as real as a geographical space, in which movements are paid for in work, in efforts and above all in time (moving up means raising oneself, climbing, and acquiring the marks, the stigmata, of this effort). Distances within it are also measured in time (time taken to rise or to convert capital, for example). And the probabil- ity of mobilization into organized movements, equipped with an apparatus and spokesmen, etc. (precisely that which leads one to talk of a “class”) will be inverse ratio to distance in this space. While the probability of assembling a set of agents, really or nominally—through the power of the delegate—rises when they are closer in social space and belong to a more restricted and therefore more homogeneous con- structed class, alliance between those who are

closest is never necessary, inevitable (because the effects of immediate competition may act as a screen), and alliance between those most dis- tant from each other is never impossible. Though there is more chance of mobilizing the set of workers than the set composed of workers and bosses, it is possible, in an international crisis, for example, to provoke a grouping on the basis of links of national identity (partly because, by virtue of its specific history, each national social space has its specific structure—e.g. as regards hierarchical distances within the economic field).

Like “being,” according to Aristotle, the social world can be uttered and constructed in different ways. It may be practically perceived, uttered, constructed, according to different prin- ciples of vision and division—for example, eth- nic division. But groupings grounded in the structure of the space constructed in terms of capital distribution are more likely to be stable and durable, while other forms of grouping are always threatened by the splits and oppositions linked to distances in social space. To speak of a social space means that one cannot group just anyone with anyone while ignoring the funda- mental differences, particularly economic and cultural ones. But this never entirely excludes the possibility of organizing agents in accor- dance with other principles of division—ethnic or national ones, for example,—though it has to be remembered that these are generally linked to the fundamental principles, with ethnic groups themselves being at least roughly hierarchized in the social space, in the USA for example (through seniority in immigration).ii

This marks a first break with the Marxist tra- dition. More often than not, Marxism either sum- marily identifies constructed class with real class (in other words, as Marx complained about Hegel, it confuses the things of logic with the logic of things); or, when it does make the dis- tinction, with the opposition between “class-in- itself,” defined in terms of a set of objective conditions, and “class-for-itself,” based on sub- jective factors, it describes the movement from

iiThe same thing would be true of the relationship between geographical space and social space. These two spaces never coincide completely, but a number of differences that are generally attributed to the effect of geographical space, e.g. the opposition between centre and periphery, are the effect of distance in social space, i.e. the unequal distribution of the different kinds of capital in geographical space.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  465

one to the other (which is always celebrated as nothing less than an ontological promotion) in terms of a logic which is either totally determinist or totally voluntarist. In the former case, the tran- sition is seen as a logical, mechanical or organic necessity (the transformation of the proletariat from class-in-itself to class-for-itself is presented as an inevitable effect of time, of the “maturing of the objective conditions”); in the latter case, it is seen as the effect of an “awakening of conscious- ness” (prise de conscience) conceived as a “taking cognizance” (prise de connaissance) of theory, performed under the enlightened guidance of the Party. In all cases, there is no mention of the mys- terious alchemy whereby a “group in struggle,” a personalized collective, a historical agent assign- ing itself its own ends, arises from the objective economic conditions.

A sleight of hand removes the most essential questions. First, the very question of the political, of the specific action of the agents who, in the name of a theoretical definition of the “class,” assign to its members the goals officially best matching their “objective”—i.e. theoretical— interests; and of the work whereby they manage to produce, if not the mobilized class, then belief in the existence of the class, which is the basis of the authority of its spokesmen. Secondly, the question of the relationship between the would- be scientific classifications produced by the social scientist (in the same way as a zoologist) and the classifications that the agents themselves constantly produce in their ordinary existence, and through which they seek to modify their position within the objective classifications or to modify the very principles which underlie these classifications.

perCeption of the SoCial World and politiCal Struggle

The most resolutely objectivist theory has to integrate the agents’ representation of the social world; more precisely, it must take account of the contribution that agents make towards con- structing the view of the social world, and through this, towards constructing this world, by means of the work of representation (in all senses of the word) that they constantly perform in order to impose their view of the world or the

view of their own position in this world—their social identity. Perception of the social world is the product of a double social structuration: on the “objective” side, it is socially structured because the properties attached to agents or insti- tutions do not offer themselves independently to perception, but in combinations that are very unequally probable (and, just as animals with feathers are more likely to have wings than are animals with fur, so the possessors of a substan- tial cultural capital are more likely to be museum- goers than those who lack such capital); on the “subjective” side, it is structured because the schemes of perception and appreciation avail- able for use at the moment in question, espe- cially those that are deposited in language, are the product of previous symbolic struggles and express the state of the symbolic power relations, in a more or less transformed form. The objects of the social world can be perceived and uttered in different ways because, like objects in the natural world, they always include a degree of indeterminacy and fuzziness—owing to the fact, for example, that even the most constant combinations of properties are only founded on statistical connections between interchangeable features; and also because, as historical objects, they are subject to variations in time so that their meaning, insofar as it depends on the future, is itself in suspense, in waiting, dangling, and therefore relatively indeterminate. This element of play, or uncertainty, is what provides a basis for the plurality of world views, itself linked to the plurality of points of view, and to all the symbolic struggles for the power to produce and impose the legitimate world view and, more pre- cisely, to all the cognitive “filling-in” strategies which produced the meaning of the objects of the social world by going beyond the directly visible attributes by reference to the future or the past. This reference may be implicit and tacit, through what Husserl calls protention and retention, practical forms of prospection or retrospection without a positing of the future and the past as such; or it may be explicit, as in political strug- gles, in which the past—with retrospective reconstruction of a past tailored to the needs of the present—and especially the future, with creative forecasting, are endlessly invoked, to determine, delimit and define the always open meaning of the present.

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To point out that perception of the social world implies an act of construction in no way entails acceptance of an intellectualist theory of knowledge: the essential part of the experience of the social world and of the act of construction that it implies takes place in practice, below the level of explicit representation and verbal expres- sion. More like a class unconscious than a “class consciousness” in the Marxist sense, the sense of the position occupied in social space (what Erving Goffman calls the “sense of one’s place”) is the practical mastery of the social structure as a whole that reveals itself through the sense of the position occupied within that structure. The categories of perception of the social world are, as regards their most essential features, the prod- uct of the internalization, the incorporation, of the objective structures of social space. Conse- quently, they incline agents to accept the social world as it is, to take it for granted, rather than to rebel against it, to counterpose to it different, even antagonistic, possibles. The sense of one’s place as a sense of what one can or cannot “per- mit oneself,” implies a tacit acceptance of one’s place, a sense of limits (“that’s not for the likes of us,” etc.), or, which amounts to the same thing, a sense of distances, to be marked and kept, respected or expected. It does so all the more strongly where the conditions of existence are most rigorous and where the reality principle most rigorously asserts itself. (Hence the pro- found realism which generally characterizes the world view of the dominated; functioning as a sort of socially constituted instinct of conserva- tion, it can be seen as conservative only in terms of an external, and therefore normative, repre- sentation of the “objective interest” of those whom it helps to live, or survive.)

If objective power relations tend to reproduce themselves in views of the social world which contribute to the permanence of these relations, this is therefore because the structuring principles of a world view are rooted in the objective struc- tures of the social world: power relations are also present in people’s minds, in the form of the cat- egories of perception of these relations. However, the degree of indeterminacy and fuzziness in the objects of the social world, together with the practical, pre-reflexive and implicit nature of the schemes of perception and appreciation that are applied to them, is the Archimedean leverage

point that is objectively offered for political action proper. Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories which make it possible, are the stakes, par excellence, of politi- cal struggle, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which it is perceived.

The capacity to make entities exist in the explicit state, to publish, make public (i.e. render objectified, visible, and even official) that which had not previously attained objective and collec- tive existence and had therefore remained in the state of individual or serial existence—people’s malaise, anxiety, disquiet, expectations—repre- sents a formidable social power, the power to make groups by making the common sense, the explicit consensus, of the whole group. In fact, this work of categorization, i.e. of making- explicit and of classification, is performed inces- santly, at every moment of ordinary existence, in the struggles in which agents clash over the meaning of the social world and of their position within it, the meaning of their social identity, through all the forms of benediction or maledic- tion, eulogy, praise, congratulations, compli- ments, or insults, reproaches, criticisms, accusa- tions, slanders, etc. . . .

It becomes clear why one of the elementary forms of political power, in many archaic socie- ties, consisted in the quasi-magical power to name and to make-exist by virtue of naming. Thus in traditional Kabylia, the function of making-explicit and the work of symbolic pro- duction that the poets performed, particularly in crisis situations, when the meaning of the world slips away, conferred on them major political functions, those of the warlord or ambassador. But with the growing differentiation of the social world and the constitution of relatively autono- mous fields, the work of producing and imposing meaning is carried on in and through the strug- gles within the field of cultural production (par- ticularly the political sub-field); it becomes the particular concern, the specific interest, of the professional producers of objectified representa- tions of the social world or, more precisely, of methods of objectification.

If the legitimate mode of perception is such an important prize at stake in social struggles,

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this is partly because the shift from the implicit to the explicit is in no way automatic: the same experience of the social may be uttered in very different expressions. And partly it is because the most marked objective differences may be masked by more immediately visible differences (e.g. those between ethnic groups). It is true that perceptual configurations, social Gestalten, exist objectively, and that the proximity of conditions, and therefore of dispositions, tends to be trans- lated into durable linkages and groupings, imme- diately perceptible social units, such as socially distinct regions or neighbourhoods (with spatial segregation), or sets of agents endowed with entirely similar visible properties, such as Weber’s Stände. But the fact remains that socially known and recognized differences only exist for a subject capable not only of perceiving differ- ences but of recognizing them as significant, interesting, i.e. only for a subject endowed with the capacity and inclination to make the distinc- tions that are regarded as significant in the social universe in question.

Thus, particularly through properties and their distributions, the social world achieves, objectively, the status of a symbolic system, which, like the system of phonemes, is organized according to the logic of difference, differential deviation, thereby constituted as significant dis- tinction. The social space, and the differences that “spontaneously” emerge within it, tends to function symbolically as a space of life-styles or as a set of Stände, of groups characterized by different life-styles.

Distinction does not necessarily imply the pursuit of distinction, as is often supposed, fol- lowing Veblen and his theory of conspicuous consumption. All consumption and, more gener- ally, all practice, is “conspicuous,” visible, whether or not it is performed in order to be seen; it is distinctive, whether or not it springs from the intention of being “conspicuous,” standing out, or distinguishing oneself or behav- ing with distinction. As such, it inevitably func- tions as a distinctive sign and, when the differ- ence is recognized, legitimate and approved, as a sign of distinction (in all senses of the phrase). However, because social agents are capable of perceiving as significant distinctions the “spon- taneous” distinctions that their categories of perception lead them to regard as pertinent, it

follows that they are also capable of intentionally underscoring these spontaneous differences in life-style by what Weber calls “the stylization of life” (die Stilisierung des Lebens). The pursuit of distinction—which may be expressed in ways of speaking or the refusal of misalliances— produces separations intended to be perceived or, more precisely, known and recognized, as legiti- mate differences, which most often means differ- ences in nature (“natural distinction”).

Distinction—in the ordinary sense of the word—is the difference inscribed in the very structure of the social space when perceived through categories adapted to that structure; and the Weberian Stände, which is often contrasted with the Marxist class, is the class constructed by an adequate division of social space, when per- ceived through categories derived from the struc- ture of that space. Symbolic capital—another name for distinction—is nothing other than capi- tal, in whatever form, when perceived by an agent endowed with categories of perception arising from the internalization (embodiment) of the structure of its distribution, i.e., when it is known and recognized as self-evident. Distinc- tions, as symbolic transfigurations of de facto differences and, more generally, ranks, orders, grades, and all other symbolic hierarchies, are the product of the application of schemes of con- struction which, like (for example) the pairs of adjectives used to utter most social judgements, are the product of the internalization of the struc- tures to which they are applied; and the most absolute recognition of legitimacy is nothing other than the apprehension of the everyday world as self-evident which results from the quasi-perfect coincidence of objective structures and embodied structures.

It follows, among other things, that symbolic capital goes to symbolic capital, and that the— real—autonomy of the field of symbolic produc- tion does not prevent it being dominated, in its functioning, by the constraints which dominate the social field, so that objective power relations tend to reproduce themselves in symbolic power relations, in views of the social world which help to ensure the permanence of these power rela- tions. In the struggle to impose the legitimate view of the social world, in which science itself is inevitably involved, agents wield a power pro- portionate to their symbolic capital, i.e. to the

468  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

recognition they receive from a group. The author- ity which underlies the performative efficacy of discourse about the social world, the symbolic strength of the views and forecasts aimed at imposing principles of vision and division of the social world, is a percipi, a being-known and being-recognized (this is the etymology of nobi- lis), which makes it possible to impose a perci- pere. Those most visible in terms of the prevailing categories of perception are those best placed to change the vision by changing the categories of perception. But also, on the whole, those least inclined to do so.

the SymBoliC order and the poWer to name

In the symbolic struggle over the production of common sense or, more precisely, for the monop- oly of legitimate naming, that is to say, official— i.e. explicit and public—imposition of the legiti- mate vision of the social world, agents engage the symbolic capital they have acquired in previ- ous struggles, in particular, all the power they possess over the instituted taxonomies, inscribed in minds or in objectivity, such as qualifications. Thus, all the symbolic strategies through which agents seek to impose their vision of the divi- sions of the social world and their position within it, can be located between two extremes: the insult, and idios logos with which an indi- vidual tries to impose his point of view while taking the risk of reciprocity, and official nomi- nation, an act of symbolic imposition which has behind it all the strength of the collective, the consensus, the common sense, because it is per- formed by a delegated agent of the state, the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence. On the one hand, there is the world of particular perspectives, singular agents who, from their individual viewpoint, their personal position, produce particular, self-interested nam- ings of themselves and others (nicknames, by- names, insults, even accusations, slanders) that lack the capacity to force recognition, and there- fore to exert a symbolic effect, to the extent that their authors are less authorized and have a more direct interest in forcing recognition of the view- point they seek to impose. On the other hand, there is the authorized viewpoint of an agent

authorized, in his personal capacity, such as a “major critic,” a prestigious prefacer or a conse- crated author (cf. Zola’s J’accuse); and, above all, the legitimate viewpoint of the authorized spokesman of the mandated representative of the state, the “plane of all perspectives,” in Leibniz’s phrase—official nomination, the “entitlement” (titre) which, like the academic qualification (titre scolaire) is valid on all markets and which, as an official definition of official identity, rescues its holders from the symbolic struggle of all against all, by uttering the authorized, universally recognized perspec- tive on all social agents. The state, which produces the official classifications, is in a sense the supreme tribunal to which Kafka was refer- ring in The Trial when he had Block say of the advocate and his claim to be one of the “great advocates”: “Naturally anyone can call himself ‘great’ if he wants to, but in such matters it is the practices of the court that decide.” The fact is that scientific analysis does not have to choose between perspectivism and what has to be called absolutism; the truth of the social world is the stake in a struggle between agents very unequally equipped to achieve absolute, i.e. self-fulfilling, vision and pre-vision.

One could analyse in this light the functioning of an institution like the French national statistics office, INSEE, a state institute which produces official taxonomies, invested with quasi-legal authority, particularly, in relations between employers and employees, that of the title, capable of conferring rights independent of actual productive activity. In so doing, it tends to fix the hierarchies and thus to sanction and con- secrate a power relationship between the agents with respect to the names of trades and occupa- tions, an essential component of social identity. The management of names is one of the ways of managing material scarcity, and the names of groups, especially occupational groups, record a state of the struggles and bargaining over official designations and the material and symbolic advantages associated with them. The occupa- tional name which is conferred on agents, the title they are given, is one of the positive or negative retributions (on the same footing as their salary), inasmuch as it is a distinctive mark (an emblem or stigma) which receives its value from its posi- tion in a hierarchically organized system of titles

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  469

and which thereby helps to determine the relative positions of agents and groups. Consequently, agents have recourse to practical or symbolic strategies aimed at maximizing the symbolic profit of naming: for example, they may decline the economic gratifications provided by one job in order to occupy a less well-paid but more prestigiously named position; or they may try to move towards positions whose designation is less precise and so escape the effects of symbolic devaluation. Similarly, in stating their personal identity, they may give themselves a name which includes them in a class sufficiently broad to include agents occupying positions superior to their own: for example, in France, a primary school teacher, an instituteur, may refer to him- self as an enseignant, thereby implying that he might be a lycée teacher or a university teacher. More generally, they always have a choice between several names and they can play on the uncertainties and the effects of vagueness linked to the plurality of perspectives so as to try to escape the verdict of the official taxonomy.

But the logic of official naming is most clearly seen in the case of all the symbolic prop- erty rights which in French are called titres— titles of nobility, educational qualifications, pro- fessional titles. Titles are symbolic capital, socially and even legally recognized. The noble is not just someone who is known (nobilis), note- worthy, well-regarded, recognized, he is some- one recognized by an official, “universal” tribu- nal, in other words known and recognized by all. The professional or academic title is a kind of legal rule of social perception, a “being- perceived” guaranteed as a right. It is symbolic capital in an institutionalized, legal (and no lon- ger merely legitimate) form. Increasingly insepa- rable from the academic qualification, since the educational system increasingly tends to repre- sent the ultimate and only guarantee of profes- sional titles, it has a value in itself and, although

it is a “common noun,” it functions like a “great name” (the name of a great family or a proper name), securing all sorts of symbolic profits (and assets that cannot be obtained directly with money).iii It is the symbolic scarcity of the title in the space of the names of professions that tends to govern the rewards of the occupation (and not the relationship between the supply of and demand for a particular form of labour). It fol- lows from this that the rewards of the title tend to acquire autonomy with respect to the rewards of labour. Thus the same work may receive dif- ferent remuneration depending on the titles of the person who does it (e.g. tenured, official post-holder (titulaire) as opposed to a part-timer (intérimaire) or someone “acting” (faisant fonc- tion) in that capacity, etc.). Since the title is in itself an institution (like language) that is more durable than the intrinsic characteristics of the work, the rewards of the title may be maintained despite changes in the work and its relative value. It is not relative value of the work that determines the value of the name, but the institu- tionalized value of the title that can be used as a means of defending or maintaining the value of the work.iv

This means that one cannot conduct a science of classifications without conducting a science of the struggle over classifications and without taking account of the position occupied, in this struggle over the power of knowledge, for power through knowledge, for the monopoly of legiti- mate symbolic violence, by each of the agents or groups of agents who are involved in it, whether they be ordinary individuals, exposed to the vicissitudes of the everyday symbolic struggle, or authorized (and full-time) professionals, which includes all those who speak or write about the social classes, and who are distin- guished according to the greater or lesser extent to which their classifications commit the author- ity of the state, the holder of the monopoly of

iiiEntry into an occupation endowed with a title is increasingly subordinated to possession of an educational qualification (titre scolaire), and there is a close relationship between educational qualifications and remuneration, in contrast to untitled occupations in which agents doing the same work may have very different qualifications. ivThe possessors of the same title tend to constitute themselves into a group and to equip themselves with permanent organizations—medical associations, alumni associations, etc. intended to ensure the group’s cohesion—periodic meetings, etc. and to promote its material and symbolic interests.

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official naming, correct classification, the correct order.

While the structure of the social world is defined at every moment by the structure of the distribution of the capital and profits characteristic of the different particular fields, the fact remains that in each of these arenas, the very definition of the stakes and of the “trump cards” can be called into question. Every field is the site of more or less overt struggle over the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field. The question of legitimacy arises from the very possibility of this questioning, of a break with the doxa which takes the ordinary order for granted. Having said this, the symbolic strength of the participants in this struggle is never completely independent of their position in the game, even if the specifically symbolic power of nomination constitutes a strength relatively independent of the other forms of social power. The constraints of the necessity inscribed in the very structure of the dif- ferent fields continue to bear on the symbolic struggles aimed at conserving or transforming that structure. The social world is, to a large extent, what the agents make of it, at each moment; but they have no chance of un-making and re-making it except on the basis of realistic knowledge of what it is and of what they can do with it from the position they occupy within it.

In short, scientific work aims to establish adequate knowledge both of the space of objec- tive relations between the different positions constituting the field and of the necessary rela- tions set up, through the mediation of the habitus of their occupants, between these positions and their corresponding stances (prises de position), that is to say, between the points occupied within that space and the points of view on that very space, which play a part in the reality and the evolution of that space. In other words, the objective delimitation of constructed classes, i.e. of regions of the constructed space of positions, makes it possible to understand the principle and the efficacy of the classificatory strategies by means of which agents seek to conserve or modify this space, in the forefront of which is the constituting of groups organized with a view to defending their members’ interests.

Analysis of the struggle over classifications brings to light the political ambition which per- vades the epistemic ambition of producing the

correct classification—the ambition which defines the rex, to whom it falls, according to Emile Benveniste, to regere fines and regere sacra, to set forth the frontier between the sacred and the profane, good and evil, the vulgar and the distinguished. If he is not to make social sci- ence merely a way of pursuing politics by other means, the sociologist must take as his object the intention of assigning others to classes and of telling them thereby what they are and what they have to be (this is the whole ambiguity of fore- casting); he must analyse, in order to repudiate, the ambition of the creative world view, a kind of intuitus originarius that would make things exist in accordance with its vision (this is the whole ambiguity of the Marxist conception of class, which is inextricably an “is” and an “ought”). He must objectify the ambition of objectifying, of classifying from outside, objectively, agents who struggle to classify others and to classify them- selves. If he does classify—by making divisions, for the purposes of statistical analysis, in the continuous space of social positions—he does so precisely so as to be able to objectify all forms of objectification, from the particular insult to the official nomination, not forgetting the claim, characteristic of science in its positivist, bureau- cratic, definition, to arbitrate in these struggles in the name of “axiological neutrality.” The sym- bolic power of agents, understood as the power to make things seen—theorein—and to make things believed, to produce and impose the legitimate or legal classification, in fact depends, as the case of the rex reminds us, on the position occupied in the space (and in the classifications potentially inscribed in it). But objectifying objectification means, above all, objectifying the field of production of objectified representations of the social world, in particular, of the law- making taxonomies, in a word, the field of cul- tural or ideological production, a space and a game in which the social scientist himself is caught, like all those who argue about the social classes (and who else talks about them?).

the politiCal field and the effeCt of the homologieS

It is this field of political struggles, in which the professional practitioners of representation, in all

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senses of the word, clash with one another over another field of struggles, that has to be ana- lysed if one wants to understand (without sub- scribing to the mythology of the “awakening of consciousness”) the shift from the practical sense of the position occupied, itself amenable to being made explicit in different ways, to spe- cifically political manifestations. Those who occupy the dominated positions within the social space are also located in dominated posi- tions in the field of symbolic production, and it is not clear where they could obtain the instru- ments of symbolic production that are needed in order to express their specific viewpoint on the social space, were it not that the specific logic of the field of cultural production, and the particular interests that are generated within it, have the effect of inclining a fraction of the professionals involved in this field to supply the dominated, on the basis of homology of posi- tion, with the means of challenging the repre- sentations that arise from the immediate com- plicity between social structures and mental structures, and which tend to ensure the con- tinuous reproduction of the distribution of sym- bolic capital. . . .

The inadequacies of the Marxist theory of classes, in particular its inability to explain the set of objectively observed differences, stems from the fact that, in reducing the social world solely to the economic field, it is forced to define social position solely in terms of position in the relations of economic production and conse- quently ignores positions in the different fields and sub-fields, particularly in the relations of cultural production, as well as all the oppositions that structure the social field, which are irreduc- ible to the opposition between owners and non- owners of the means of economic production. It thereby secures a one-dimensional social world, simply organized around the opposition between two blocs (and one of the major ques- tions is then that of the boundary between these two blocs, with all the associated, endlessly debated, questions of the “labour aristocracy,” the “embourgeoisement” of the working class, etc.). In reality, the social space is a multi-dimensional space, an open set of fields that are relatively autonomous, i.e. more or less strongly and directly subordinated, in their functioning and their transformations, to the field of the economic

production. Within each of these sub-spaces, the occupants of the dominated positions are con- stantly engaged in struggles of different forms (without necessarily constituting themselves into antagonistic groups).

But the most important thing, from the standpoint of the problem of breaking the circle of symbolic production, is the fact that, on the basis of the homologies between positions within different fields (and the invariant, or indeed universal, content of the relationship between the dominant and the dominated), alliances can be set up which are more or less lasting and always based on a more or less con- scious misunderstanding. Homology of position between intellectuals and industrial workers— with the former occupying within the field of power, i.e. vis-à-vis industrial and commercial employers, positions which are homologous to those which industrial workers occupy within the social space as a whole—is the basis of an ambiguous alliance, in which the cultural pro- ducers, dominated agents among the dominant, divert their accumulated cultural capital so as to offer to the dominated the means of objectively constituting their view of the world and the representation of their interest in an explicit theory and in institutionalized instruments of representation—trade-union organizations, par- ties, social technologies for mobilization and demonstration, etc. . . .

But above all it would become clear that the effect of the specific interests associated with the position they occupy in the field and in the com- petition to impose views of the social world, inclines professional theoreticians and spokes- men, i.e. all those who are called in everyday language “full-time” or “permanent” officials, to produce differentiated, distinctive products which, because of the homology between the field of professional producers and the field of the con- sumers of opinions, are quasi-automatically adjusted to the different forms of demand—this demand being defined, especially in this case, as a demand for difference, for opposition, which they actually help to produce by helping it to find expression. It is the structure of the political field, in other words the objective relationship to the occupants of the other positions, and the rela- tionship to the competing stances which they offer, which, as much as the direct relationship to

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their mandators, determines the stances they take, i.e. the supply of political products. Because the interests directly involved in the struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate expression of the truth of the social world tend to be the specific equivalent of the interests of the occupants of homologous positions in the social field, politi- cal discourses have a sort of structural duplicity. They seem to be directly addressed to the man- dators, but in reality they are aimed at competi- tors within the field. . . .

ClaSS aS repreSentation and aS Will

But to establish how the power to constitute and institute that is held by the authorized spokesman—a party leader or trade-union leader, for example—is itself constituted and instituted, it is not sufficient to give an account of the specific interests of the theoreticians or spokesmen and of the structural affinities that link them to their mandators. One must also analyze the logic of the process of institution, which is ordinarily perceived and described as a process of delegation, in which the man- dated representative receives from the group the power to make the group. Here, making the necessary transpositions, we may follow the historians of law (Kantorowicz, Post and others), when they describe the mystery of “ministry”—the mysterium of ministerium, a play on words much favoured by the canonists. The mystery of the process of transubstantia- tion whereby the spokesman becomes the group that he expresses can only be understood through a historical analysis of the genesis and functioning of representation, through which the representative makes the group he repre- sents. The spokesman endowed with full power to speak and act in the name of the group, and first of all to act on the group through the magic of the slogan, the password (mot d’ordre), is the substitute of the group which exists only through this surrogacy. Personify- ing a fictitious person, a social fiction, he raises those whom he represents from the state of separate individuals, enabling them to act and speak, through him, as one man. In exchange, he receives the right to take himself for

the group, to speak and act as if he were the group made man: “status est magistratus,” “l’etat c’est moi,” “the union thinks that . . . ,” etc.

The mystery of ministry is one of those cases of social magic in which a thing or a person becomes something other than what it or he is, so that a man (a government minister, a bishop, a delegate, a member of parliament, a general sec- retary, etc.) can identify himself, and be identi- fied, with a set of men, the People, the Workers, etc. or a social entity, the Nation, the State, the Church, the Party. The mystery of ministry cul- minates when the group can only exist through delegation to a spokesman who will make it exist by speaking for it, i.e. on its behalf and in its place. The circle is then complete: the group is made by the man who speaks in its name, who thus appears as the source of the power which he exerts on those who are its real source. This cir- cular relationship is the root of the charismatic illusion in which, in extreme cases, the spokes- man can appear to himself or herself and others as causa sui. Political alienation arises from the fact that isolated agents—the more so the less strong they are symbolically—cannot constitute themselves as a group, i.e. as a force capable of making itself heard in the political field, except by dispossessing themselves in favour of an apparatus; in other words from the fact that one always has to risk political dispossession in order to escape political dispossession. Fetishism, according to Marx, is what happens when “the products of the human brain appear as autono- mous figures endowed with a life of their own”; political fetishism lies precisely in the fact that the value of the hypostatized individual, a prod- uct of the human brain, appears as charisma, a mysterious objective property of the person, an impalpable charm, an unnameable mystery. The minister—a minister of religion or a minister of state—is related metonymically to the group; a part of the group, he functions as a sign in place of the whole of the group. It is he who, as an entirely real for an entirely symbolic being, induces a “category mistake,” as Ryle would have said, rather like that of the child who, after seeing the soldiers composing a regiment march past, asks where the regiment is. By his mere vis- ible existence, he constitutes the pure serial diversity of the separate individuals (collectio

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  473

personarum plurium) into an “artificial person” (une personne morale), a corporatio, a consti- tuted body, and, through the effect of mobiliza- tion and demonstration, he may even make it appear as a social agent.

Politics is the site par excellence of symbolic efficacy, the action that is performed through signs capable of producing social things and, in particular, groups. Through the potency of the old- est of the metaphysical effects linked to the exis- tence of a symbolism, the one that enables one to regard as really existing everything that can be symbolized (God or non-being), political repre- sentation produces and reproduces at every moment a derived form of the case of the bald king of France, so dear to the logicians: any pred- icative proposition having “the working class” as its subject disguises an existential proposition (there is a working class). More generally, all utterances which have as their subject a collective noun—people, class, university, school, state, etc.—presuppose the existence of the group in question and conceal the same sort of metaphysi- cal boot-strapping that was denounced in the ontological argument. The spokesman is he who, in speaking of a group, on behalf of a group, sur- reptitiously posits the existence of the group in question, institutes the group, through the magical operation that is inherent in any act of naming. That is why one must perform a critique of politi- cal reason, which is intrinsically inclined to abuses of language that are also abuses of power, if one wants to pose the question with which all sociology ought to begin, that of the existence and the mode of existence of collectives.

A class exists insofar—and only insofar—as mandated representatives endowed with plena potestas agendi can be and feel authorized to speak in its name—in accordance with the ques- tion “the Party is the working class,” or “the working class is the Party,” a formula which reproduces the canonists’ equation: “The Church is the Pope (or the Bishops), the Pope is (or the Bishops are) the Church”—and so to make it exist as a real force within the political field. The mode of existence of what is nowadays called, in

many societies (with variations, of course), “the working class,” is entirely paradoxical: it is a sort of existence in thought, an existence in the think- ing of a large proportion of those whom the tax- onomies designate as workers, but also in the thinking of the occupants of the positions remotest from the workers in the social space. This almost universally recognized existence is itself based on the existence of a working class in representation, i.e. of political and trade-union apparatuses and professional spokesmen, vitally interested in believing that it exists and in having this believed both by those who identify with it and those who exclude themselves from it, and capable of mak- ing the “working class” speak, and with one voice, of invoking it, as one invokes gods or patron saints, even of symbolically manifesting it through demonstration, a sort of theatrical deployment of the class-in-representation, with on the one hand the corps of professional representatives and all the symbolism constitutive of its existence, and on the other the most convinced fraction of the believers who, through their presence, enable the representatives to manifest their representative- ness. This working class “as will and representa- tion” (in the words of Schopenhauer’s famous title) is not the self-enacting class, a real group really mobilized, which is evoked in the Marxist tradition. But it is no less real, with the magical reality which (as Durkheim and Mauss main- tained) defines institutions as social fictions. It is a “mystical body,” created through an immense historical labour of theoretical and practical inven- tion, starting with that of Marx himself, and end- lessly re-created through the countless, constantly renewed, efforts and energies that are needed to produce and reproduce belief and the institution designed to ensure the reproduction of belief. It exists in and through the corps of mandated repre- sentatives who give it material speech and visible presence, and in the belief in its existence which this corps of plenipotentiaries manages to enforce, by its sheer existence and by its representations, on the basis of the affinities objectively uniting the members of the same “class on paper” as a prob- able group.

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474  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

Introduction to “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception”

In this essay, Bourdieu examines artistic competence as a symbolic asset that legitimates relations of social domination. As an asset, the ability to appropriately decipher and appreci- ate works of art functions as a sign of distinction that separates those who possess the abil- ity from those who do not. Individuals are not born with this competence; rather, they acquire it through exposure to and internalization of uniquely artistic interpretive schemes. These schemes allow the viewer to understand works of art in an aesthetic manner that is freed from the “necessities” of everyday reality. However, the connection between “being” cultured and “acquiring” culture is seldom recognized. Instead, the link between artistic competence and education is denied by a “charismatic ideology” that misrecognizes social privilege as a gift of nature. Thus, while art is made accessible to all, not everyone is equally comfortable in its presence. To the extent that we understand the “unfortunate” as simply being born without the blessings of grace that allow an individual’s spirit to be touched by works of art, we fail to uncover the ideological functions of culture. Bourdieu speaks directly to the ideological or political dimensions of art when he notes,

By symbolically shifting the essential of what sets them apart from other classes from the eco- nomic field to that of culture, or rather, by adding to strictly economic differences, namely those created by the simple possession of material wealth, differences created by the possession of symbolic wealth such as works of art, or by the pursuit of symbolic distinctions in the manner of using such wealth (economic or symbolic) . . . the privileged members of bourgeois society replace the difference between two cultures, historic products of social conditions, by the essen- tial difference between two natures, a naturally cultivated nature and a naturally natural nature. Thus, the sacralization of culture and art fulfills a vital function of contributing to the consecra- tion of the social order: to enable educated people to believe in barbarism and persuade the barbarians within the gates of their own barbarity, all they must and need do is manage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditions which render possible not only culture as a second nature in which society recognizes human excellence or “good form” as the “real- ization” in a habitus of the aesthetics of the ruling classes, but also the legitimized domi- nance . . . of a particular definition of culture. (Bourdieu 1968/1993:236)

To reproduce their privileged position, the “civilized” need only convince the “barbar- ians” that the conditions that produce the culturally gifted and ungifted are but the expres- sion of a state of nature that condemns both to their destinies.

“Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception” (1968)

Pierre Bourdieu

Any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation.

An act of deciphering unrecognized as such, immediate and adequate “comprehension,” is

possible and effective only in the special case in which the cultural code which makes the act of deciphering possible is immed iately and completely mastered by the observer (in the form of cultivated ability or incli- nation) and merges with the cultural code which has rendered the work perceived possible. . . .

SOURCE: “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception” from International Social Science Journal, Vol. 20, Winter 1968, pp. 518–612. Copyright © 1968. Reprinted with permission of Wiley Blackwell.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  475

The question of the conditions that make it possible to experience the work of art (and, in a more general way, all cultural objects) as at once endowed with meaning is totally excluded from the experience itself, because the recapturing of the work’s objective meaning (which may have nothing to do with the author’s intention) is com- pletely adequate and immediately effected in the case—and only in the case—where the culture that the originator puts into the work is identical with the culture or, more accurately, the artistic competence which the beholder brings to the deciphering of the work. In this case, everything is a matter of course and the question of the meaning, of the deciphering of the meaning and of the conditions of this deciphering does not arise.

Whenever these specific conditions are not fulfilled, misunderstanding is inevitable: the illu- sion of immediate comprehension leads to an illusory comprehension based on a mistaken code. In the absence of the perception that the works are coded, and coded in another code, one uncon- sciously applies the code which is good for every- day perception, for the deciphering of familiar objects, to works in a foreign tradition. There is no perception which does not involve an unconscious code and it is essential to dismiss the myth of the “fresh eye,” considered a virtue attributed to naïveté and innocence. One of the reasons why the less educated beholders in our societies are so strongly inclined to demand a realistic representa- tion is that, being devoid of specific categories of perception, they cannot apply any other code to works of scholarly culture than that which enables them to apprehend as meaningful objects of their everyday environment. Minimum, and apparently immediate, comprehension, accessible to the sim- plest observers and enabling them to recognize a house or a tree, still presupposes partial (uncon- scious) agreement between artist and beholder concerning categories that define the representa- tion of the real that a historic society holds to be “realistic.” . . .

The spontaneous theory of art perception is founded on the experience of familiarity and imme- diate comprehension—an unrecognized special case.

Educated people are at home with scholarly culture. They are consequently carried towards that kind of ethnocentrism which may be called class-centrism and which consists in considering

as natural (in other words, both as a matter of course and based on nature) a way of perceiving which is but one among other possible ways and which is acquired through education that may be diffuse or specific, conscious or unconscious, institutionalized or non-institutionalized. “When, for instance, a man wears a pair of spectacles which are so close to him physically that they are ‘sitting on his nose,’ they are environmentally more remote from him than the picture on the opposite wall. Their proximity is normally so weakly perceived as to go unnoticed.” Taking Heidegger’s analysis metaphorically, it can be said that the illusion of the “fresh eye” as a “naked eye” is an attribute of those who wear the spectacles of culture and who do not see that which enables them to see, any more than they see what they would not see if they were deprived of what enables them to see.

Conversely, faced with scholarly culture, the least sophisticated are in a position identi- cal with that of ethnologists who find them- selves in a foreign society and present, for instance, at a ritual to which they do not hold the key. The disorientation and cultural blind- ness of the less-educated beholders are an objective reminder of the objective truth that art perception is a mediate deciphering opera- tion. Since the information presented by the works exhibited exceeds the deciphering capabilities of the beholder, he perceives them as devoid of signification—or, to be more precise, of structuration and organization— because he cannot “decode” them, i.e. reduce them to an intelligible form.

Scientific knowledge is distinguished from naïve experience (whether this is shown by dis- concertment or by immediate comprehension) in that it involves an awareness of the conditions permitting adequate perception. The object of the science of the work of art is that which ren- ders possible both this science and the immediate comprehension of the work of art, that is, cul- ture. It therefore includes, implicitly at least, the science of the difference between scientific knowledge and naïve perception.

The work of art considered as a symbolic good (and not as an economic asset, which it may also

476  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

be) only exists as such for a person who has the means to appropriate it, or in other words, to decipher it.i

The degree of an agent’s art competence is measured by the degree to which he or she mas- ters the set of instruments for the appropriation of the work of art, available at a given time, that is to say, the interpretation schemes which are the prerequisite for the appropriation of art capi- tal or, in other words, the prerequisite for the deciphering of works of art offered to a given society at a given moment.

Art competence can be provisionally defined as the preliminary knowledge of the possible divisions into complementary classes of a uni- verse of representations. A mastery of this kind of system is necessarily determined in relation to another class, itself constituted by all the art rep- resentations consciously or unconsciously taken into consideration which do not belong to the class in question. The style proper to a period and to a social group is none other than such a class defined in relation to all the works of the same universe which it excludes and which are com- plementary to it. The recognition (or, as the art historians say when using the vocabulary of logic, the attribution) proceeds by successive elimination of the possibilities to which the class is—negatively—related and to which the possi- bility which has become a reality in the work concerned belongs. It is immediately evident that the uncertainty concerning the different charac- teristics likely to be attributed to the work under consideration (authors, schools, periods, styles, subjects, etc.) can be removed by employing dif- ferent codes, functioning as classification sys- tems; it may be a case of a properly artistic code which, by permitting the deciphering of specifi- cally stylistic characteristics, enables the work concerned to be assigned to the class formed by the whole of the works of a period, a society, a

school or an author (“that’s a Cézanne”), or a code from everyday life which, in the form of previous knowledge of the possible divisions into complementary classes of the universe of signifiers and of the universe of signifieds, and of the correlations between the divisions of the one and the divisions of the other, enables the particular representation, treated as a sign, to be assigned to a class of signifiers and consequently makes it possible to know, by means of the cor- relations with the universe of signifieds, that the corresponding signified belongs to a certain class of signifieds (“that’s a forest”). In the first case the beholder is paying attention to the manner of treating the leaves or the clouds, that is to say to the stylistic indications, locating the possibility realized, characteristic of one class of works, by reference to the universe of stylistic possibilities; in the other case, she is treating the leaves or the clouds as indications or signals associated, according to the logic set forth above, with sig- nifications transcendent to the representation itself (“that’s a poplar,” “that’s a storm”).

Artistic competence is therefore defined as the previous knowledge of the strictly artistic principles of division which enable a representa- tion to be located, through the classification of the stylistic indications which it contains, among the possibilities of representation consti- tuting the universe of art and not among the pos- sibilities of representation constituting the uni- verse of everyday objects or the universe of signs, which would amount to treating it as a mere monument, i.e. as a mere means of com- munication used to transmit a transcendent signi- fication. The perception of the work of art in a truly aesthetic manner, that is, as a signifier which signifies nothing other than itself, does not consist of considering it “without connecting it with anything other than itself, either emotion- ally or intellectually,” in short of giving oneself

iThe laws governing the reception of works of art are a special case of the laws of cultural diffusion: whatever may be the nature of the message—religious prophecy, political speech, publicity image, technical object— reception depends on the categories of perception, thought and action of those who receive it. In a differentiated society, a close relationship is therefore established between the nature and quality of the information transmit- ted and the structure of the public, its “readability” and its effectiveness being all the greater when it meets as directly as possible the expectations, implicit or explicit, which the receivers owe chiefly to their family upbring- ing and social circumstances (and also, in the matter of scholarly culture at least, to their school education) and which the diffuse pressure of the reference group maintains, sustains and reinforces by constant recourse to the norm.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  477

up to the work apprehended in its irreducible singularity, but rather of noting its distinctive stylistic features by relating it to the ensemble of the works forming the class to which it belongs, and to these works only. On the contrary, the taste of the working classes is determined, after the manner of what Kant describes in his Cri- tique of Judgement as “barbarous taste,” by the refusal or the impossibility (one should say the impossibility-refusal) of operating the distinc- tion between “what is liked” and “what pleases” and, more generally, between “disinterested- ness,” the only guarantee of the aesthetic quality of contemplation, and “the interest of the senses” which defines “the agreeable” or “the interest of reason”: it requires that every image shall fulfil a function, if only that of a sign. This “functional- ist” representation of the work of art is based on the refusal of gratuitousness, the idolatry of work or the placing of value on what is “instructive” (as opposed to what is “interesting”) and also on the impossibility of placing each individual work in the universe of representations, in the absence of strictly stylistic principles of classification. . . .

Being an historically constituted system, founded on social reality, this set of instruments of perception whereby a particular society, at a given time, appropriates artistic goods (and, more generally, cultural goods) does not depend on individual wills and consciousnesses and forces itself upon individuals, often without their knowledge, defining the distinctions they can make and those which escape them. Every period arranges artistic representations as a whole according to an institutional system of classification of its own, bringing together works which other periods separated, or distinguishing between works which other periods placed together, and individuals have difficulty in imag- ining differences other than those which the available system of classification allows them to imagine. . . .

iii

Since the work of art only exists as such to the extent that it is perceived, or, in other words, deciphered, it goes without saying that the satis- factions attached to this perception—whether it be a matter of purely aesthetic enjoyment or of

more indirect gratification, such as the effect of distinction—are only accessible to those who are disposed to appropriate them because they attrib- ute a value to them, it being understood that they can do this only if they have the means to appro- priate them. Consequently, the need to appropri- ate goods which, like cultural goods, only exist as such for those who have received the means to appropriate them from their family environment and school, can appear only in those who can satisfy it, and it can be satisfied as soon as it appears. . . .

The disposition to appropriate cultural goods is the product of general or specific education, institutionalized or not, which creates (or culti- vates) art competence as a mastery of the instru- ments for appropriation of these goods, and which creates the “cultural need” by giving the means to satisfy it.

The repeated perception of works of a certain style encourages the unconscious internalization of the rules that govern the production of these works. Like rules of grammar, these rules are not apprehended as such, and are still less explicitly formulated and capable of being formulated; for instance, lovers of classical music may have nei- ther awareness nor knowledge of the laws obeyed by the sound-making art to which they are accus- tomed, but their auditive education is such that, having heard a dominant chord, they are induced urgently to await the tonic which seems to them the “natural” resolution of this chord, and they have difficulty in apprehending the internal coherence of music founded on other principles. The unconscious mastery of the instruments of appropriation which are the basis of familiarity with cultural works is acquired by slow familiar- ization, a long succession of “little perceptions,” in the sense in which Leibniz uses the expres- sion. Connoisseurship is an “art” which, like the art of thinking or the art of living, cannot be imparted entirely in the form of precepts or instruction, and apprenticeship to it presupposes the equivalent of prolonged contact between disciple and initiate in traditional education, i.e. repeated contact with the work (or with works of the same class). And, just as students or disciples can unconsciously absorb the rules of the art—including those which are not explicitly known to the initiates themselves—by giving themselves up to it, excluding analysis and the

478  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

selection of elements of exemplary conduct, so art-lovers can, by abandoning themselves in some way to the work, internalize the principles and rules of its construction without there ever being brought to their consciousness and formu- lated as such. This constitutes the difference between the art theorist and the connoisseur, who is usually incapable of explicating the principles on which his judgements are based. In this field as in others (learning the grammar of one’s native tongue, for instance), school education tends to encourage the conscious reflection of patterns of thought, perception or expression which have already been mastered unconsciously by formulating explicitly the principles of the creative grammar, for example, the laws of har- mony and counterpoint or the rules of pictorial composition, and by providing the verbal and conceptual material essential for naming differ- ences previously experienced in a purely intui- tive way. . . .

Even when the educational institution makes little provision for art training proper (as is the case in France and many other countries), even when, therefore, it gives neither specific encour- agement to cultural activities nor a body of con- cepts specifically adapted to the plastic arts, it tends on the one hand to inspire a certain famil- iarity—conferring a feeling of belonging to the cultivated class—with the world of art, in which people feel at home and among themselves as the appointed addressees of works which do not deliver their message to the first-comer; and on the other to inculcate (at least in France and in the majority of European countries, at the level of secondary education) a cultivated disposition as a durable and generalized attitude which implies recognition of the value of works of art and the ability to appropriate them by means of generic categories.ii Although it deals almost exclusively with literary works, in-school learn- ing tends to create on the one hand a transpos- able inclination to admire works approved by the school and a duty to admire and to love certain works or, rather, certain classes of works which gradually seem to become linked to a certain

educational and social status; and, on the other hand, an equally generalized and transposable aptitude for categorizing by authors, by genres, by schools and by periods, for the handling of educational categories of literary analysis and for the mastery of the code which governs the use of the different codes, giving at least a tendency to acquire equivalent categories in other fields and to store away the typical knowledge which, even though extrinsic and anecdotal, makes possible at least an elementary form of apprehension, however inadequate it may be. Thus, the first degree of strictly pictorial competence shows itself in the mastery of an arsenal of words mak- ing it possible to name differences and to appre- hend them while naming them: these are the proper names of famous painters—da Vinci, Picasso, Van Gogh—which function as generic categories, because one can say about any paint- ing or non-figurative object “that suggests Picasso,” or, about any work recalling nearly or distantly the manner of the Florentine painter, “that looks like a da Vinci”; there are also broad categories, like “the Impressionists” (a school commonly considered to include Gaugin, Cézanne and Degas), “the Dutch School,” “the Renaissance.” It is particularly significant that the proportion of subjects who think in terms of schools very clearly grows as the level of educa- tion rises and that, more generally, generic knowledge which is required for the perception of differences and consequently for memoriz- ing—proper names and historical, technical or aesthetic concepts—becomes increasingly spe- cific as we go towards the more educated beholders, so that the most adequate perception differs only from the least adequate in so far as the specificity, richness and subtlety of the cate- gories employed are concerned. By no means contradicting these arguments is the fact that the less educated visitors to museums—who tend to prefer the most famous paintings and those sanc- tioned by school teaching, whereas modern painters who have the least chance of being men- tioned in schools are quoted only by those with the highest educational qualifications—live in

iiSchool instruction always fulfils a function of legitimation, if only by giving its blessing to works which it sets up as worthy of being admired, and thus helps to define the hierarchy of cultural goods valid in a particular society at a given time.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  479

large cities. To be able to form discerning or so- called “personal” opinions is again a result of the education received: the ability to go beyond school constraints is the privilege of those who have sufficiently assimilated school education to make their own the free attitude towards scholas- tic culture taught by a school so deeply impreg- nated with the values of the ruling classes that it accepts the fashionable depreciation of school instruction. The contrast between accepted, ste- reotyped and, as Max Weber would say, “routin- ized” culture, and genuine culture, freed from school discourse, has meaning only for an infi- nitely small minority of educated people for whom culture is second nature, endowed with all the appearances of talent, and the full assimila- tion of school culture is a prerequisite for going beyond it towards this “free culture”—free, that is to say, from its school origins—which the bourgeois class and its school regard as the value of values.

But the best proof that the general principles for the transfer of training also hold for school training lies in the fact that the practices of one single individual and, a fortiori, of individuals belonging to one social category or having a specific level of education, tend to constitute a system, so that a certain type of practice in any field of culture very probably implies a corre- sponding type of practice in all the other fields; thus, frequent visits to museums are almost nec- essarily associated with an equal amount of the- atre-going and, to a lesser degree, attendance at concerts. Similarly, everything seems to indicate that knowledge and preferences tend to form into constellations that are strictly linked to the level of education, so that a typical structure of prefer- ences in painting is most likely to be linked to a structure of preferences of the same type in music or literature.

Owing to the particular status of the work of art and the specific logic of the training which it implies, art education which is reduced to a dis- course (historical, aesthetic or other) on the works is necessarily at a secondary level; like the teaching of the native tongue, literary or art education (that is to say “the humanities” of tra- ditional education) necessarily presupposes, without ever, or hardly ever, being organized in the light of this principle, that individuals are endowed with a previously acquired competence

and with a whole capital of experience unequally distributed among the various social classes (vis- its to museums or monuments, attending con- certs, lectures, etc.).

In the absence of a methodical and systematic effort, involving the mobilization of all available means from the earliest years of school onwards, to procure for all those attending school a direct contact with the works or, at least, an approxi- mate substitute for that experience (by showing reproductions or reading texts, organizing visits to museums or playing records, etc.), art educa- tion can be of full benefit only to those who owe the competence acquired by slow and impercep- tible familiarization to their family milieu, because it does not explicitly give to all what it implicitly demands from all. While it is true that only the school can give the continuous and pro- longed, methodical and uniform training capable of mass production, if I may use that expression, of competent individuals, provided with schemes of perception, thought and expression which are prerequisites for the appropriation of cultural goods, and endowed with that generalized and permanent inclination to appropriate them which is the mark of devotion to culture, the fact remains that the effectiveness of this formative action is directly dependent upon the degree to which those undergoing it fulfil the preliminary conditions for adequate reception: the influence of school activity is all the stronger and more lasting when it is carried on for a longer time (as is shown by the fact that the decrease of cultural activity with age is less marked when the dura- tion of schooling was longer), when those upon whom it is exercised have greater previous com- petence, acquired through early and direct con- tact with works (which is well known to be more frequent always as one goes higher up the social scale) and finally when a propitious cultural atmosphere sustains and relays its effectiveness. Thus, humanities students who have received a homogeneous and homogenizing training for a number of years, and who have been constantly selected according to the degree to which they conform to school requirements, remain sepa- rated by systematic differences, both in their pursuit of cultural activities and in their cultural preferences, depending upon whether they come from a more or less cultivated milieu and for how long this has been so; their knowledge of

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the theatre (measured according to the average number of plays that they have seen on the stage) or of painting is greater if their father or grandfa- ther (or, a fortiori, both of them) belongs to a higher occupational category; and, furthermore, if one of these variables (the category of the father or of the grandfather) has a fixed value, the other tends, by itself, to hierarchize the scores. Because of the slowness of the accultura- tion process, subtle differences linked with the length of time that they have been in contact with culture thus continue to separate individuals who are apparently equal with regard to social suc- cess and even educational success. Cultural nobility also has its quarterings.

Only an institution like the school, the spe- cific function of which is methodically to develop or create the dispositions which pro- duce an educated person and which lay the foundations, quantitatively and consequently qualitatively, of a constant and intense pursuit of culture, could offset (at least partially) the initial disadvantage of those who do not receive from their family circle the encouragement to undertake cultural activities and the compe- tence presupposed in any discourse on works, on the condition—and only on the condition— that it employs every available means to break down the endless series of cumulative pro- cesses to which any cultural education is con- demned. For if the apprehension of a work of art depends, in its intensity, its modality and in its very existence, on the beholders’ mastery of the generic and specific code of the work, i.e. on their competence, which they owe partly to school training, the same thing applies to the pedagogic communication which is responsi- ble, among its other functions, for transmitting the code of works of scholarly culture (and also the code according to which it effects this trans- mission). Thus the intensity and modality of the communication are here again a function of culture (as a system of schemes of perception, expression and historically constituted and socially conditioned thinking) which the receiver owes to his or her family milieu and which is more or less close to scholarly culture and the linguistic and cultural models according to which the school effects the transmission of

this culture. Considering that the direct experi- ence of works of scholarly culture and the insti- tutionally organized acquisition of culture which is a prerequisite for adequate experience of such works are subject to the same laws, it is obvious how difficult it is to break the sequence of the cumulative effects which cause cultural capital to attract cultural capital. In fact, the school has only to give free play to the objective machinery of cultural diffusion without working systematically to give to all, in and through the pedagogical message itself, what is given to some through family inheritance—that is, the instruments which condition the adequate recep- tion of the school message—for it to redouble and consecrate by its approval the socially con- ditioned inequalities of cultural competence, by treating them as natural inequalities or, in other words, as inequalities of gifts or natural talents.

Charismatic ideology is based on parenthesiz- ing the relationship, evident as soon as it is revealed, between art competence and education, which alone is capable of creating both the dis- position to recognize a value in cultural goods and the competence which gives a meaning to this disposition by making it possible to appro- priate such goods. Since their art competence is the product of an imperceptible familiarization and an automatic transferring of aptitudes, mem- bers 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 con- tradictions and ambiguities of the relationship which the most cultured among them maintain with their culture are both encouraged and per- mitted by the paradox which defines the “realiza- tion” of culture as becoming natural. Culture is thus achieved only by negating itself as such, that is, as artificial and artificially acquired, so as to become second nature, a habitus, a possession turned into being; the virtuosi of the judgement of taste seem to reach an experience of aesthetic grace so completely freed from the constraints of culture and so little marked by the long, patient training of which it is the product that any reminder of the conditions and the social condi- tioning which have rendered it possible seems to be at once obvious and scandalous. It follows

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that the most experienced connoisseurs are the natural champions of charismatic ideology, which attributes to the work of art a magical power of conversion capable of awakening the potentialities latent in a few of the elect, and which contrasts authentic experience of a work of art as an “affection” of the heart or immediate enlightenment of the intuition with the laborious proceedings and cold comments of the intelli- gence, ignoring the social and cultural conditions underlying such an experience, and at the same time treating as a birthright the virtuosity acquired through long familiarization or through the exer- cises of a methodical training; silence concerning the social prerequisites for the appropriation of culture or, to be more exact, for the acquisition of art competence in the sense of mastery of all the means for the specific appropriation of works of art is a self-seeking silence because it is what makes it possible to legitimatize a social privilege by pretending that it is a gift of nature.

To remember that culture is not what one is but what one has, or rather, what one has become; to remember the social conditions which render possible aesthetic experience and the existence of those beings—art lovers or “people of taste”—for whom it is possible; to remember that the work of art is given only to those who have received the means to acquire the means to appropriate it and who could not seek to possess it if they did not already possess it, in and through the possession of means of possession as an actual possibility of effecting the taking of possession; to remember, finally, that only a few have the real possibility of benefitting from the theoretical possibility, gener- ously offered to all, of taking advantage of the works exhibited in museums—all this is to bring to light the hidden force of the effects of the majority of culture’s social uses.

The parenthesizing of the social conditions which render possible culture and culture become nature, cultivated nature, having all the appear- ances of grace or a gift and yet acquired, so therefore “deserved,” is the precedent condition of charismatic ideology which makes it possible

to confer on culture and in particular on “love of art” the all-important place which they occupy in bourgeois “sociodicy.” The bourgeoisie find naturally in culture as cultivated nature and cul- ture that has become nature the only possible principle for the legitimation of their privilege. Being unable to invoke the right of birth (which their class, through the ages, has refused to the aristocracy) or nature which, according to “demo- cratic” ideology, represents universality, i.e. the ground on which all distinctions are abolished, or the aesthetic virtues which enabled the first gen- eration of bourgeois to invoke their merit, they can resort to cultivated nature and culture become nature, to what is sometimes called “class,” through a kind of tell-tale slip, to “education,” in the sense of a product of education which seems to owe nothing to education,iii to distinction, grace which is merit and merit which is grace, an unacquired merit which justifies unmerited acqui- sitions, that is to say, inheritance. To enable cul- ture to fulfil its primary ideological function of class co-optation and legitimation of this mode of selection, it is necessary and sufficient that the link between culture and education, which is simultaneously obvious and hidden, be forgotten, disguised and denied. The unnatural idea of inborn culture, of a gift of culture, bestowed on certain people by nature, is inseparable from blindness to the functions of the institution which ensures the profitability of the cultural heritage and legitimizes its transmission while concealing that it fulfils this function. The school in fact is the institution which, through its outwardly irre- proachable verdicts, transforms socially condi- tioned inequalities in regard to culture into inequalities of success, interpreted as inequalities of gifts which are also inequalities of merit. Plato records, towards the end of The Republic, that the souls who are to begin another life must them- selves choose their lot among “patterns of life” of all kinds and that, when the choice has been made, they must drink of the water of the river Lethe before returning to earth. The function which Plato attributes to the water of

iiiIt was understood thus by a very cultivated old man who declared during a conversation: “Education, Sir, is inborn.”

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forgetfulness falls, in our societies, on the uni- versity which, in its impartiality, through pre- tending to recognize students as equal in rights and duties, divided only by inequalities of gifts and of merit, in fact confers on individuals degrees judged according to their cultural heri- tage, and therefore according to their social status.

By symbolically shifting the essence of what sets them apart from other classes from the eco- nomic field to that of culture, or rather, by add- ing to strictly economic differences, namely those created by the simple possession of mate- rial goods, differences created by the posses- sion of symbolic goods such as works of art, or by the pursuit of symbolic distinctions in the manner of using such goods (economic or sym- bolic), in short, by turning into a fact of nature everything which determines their “value,” or to take the word in the linguistic sense, their distinction—a mark of difference which, according to the Littré, sets people apart from the common herd “by the characteristics of elegance, nobility and good form”—the privi- leged members of bourgeois society replace the difference between two cultures, historic prod- ucts of social conditions, by the essential differ- ence between two natures, a naturally cultivated nature and a naturally natural nature. Thus, the sacralization of culture and art fulfils a vital function by contributing to the consecration of the social order: to enable educated people to believe in barbarism and persuade the barbar- ians within the gates of their own barbarity, all they must and need do is to manage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditions which render possible not only culture as a sec- ond nature in which society recognizes human

excellence or “good form” as the “realization” in a habitus of the aesthetics of the ruling classes, but also the legitimized dominance (or, if you like, the legitimacy) of a particular defi- nition of culture. And in order that the ideologi- cal circle may be completely closed, all they have to do is to find in an essentialist represen- tation of the bipartition of society into barbar- ians and civilized people the justification of their right to conditions which produce the pos- session of culture and the dispossession of cul- ture, a state of “nature” destined to appear based on the nature of the men who are con- demned to it.

If such is the function of culture and if it is love of art which really determines the choice that separates, as by an invisible and insuperable barrier, those who have from those who have not received this grace, it can be seen that museums betray, in the smallest details of their morphol- ogy and their organization, their true function, which is to strengthen the feeling of belonging in some and the feeling of exclusion in others.iv Everything, in these civic temples in which bour- geois society deposits its most sacred posses- sions, that is, the relics inherited from a past which is not its own, in these holy places of art, in which the chosen few come to nurture a faith of virtuosi while conformists and bogus devotees come and perform a class ritual, old palaces or great historic homes to which the nineteenth century added imposing edifices, built often in the Greco-Roman style of civic sanctuaries, everything combines to indicate that the world of art is as contrary to the world of everyday life as the sacred is to the profane. The prohibition against touching the objects, the religious silence which is forced upon visitors, the puritan

ivIt is not infrequent that working-class visitors explicitly express the feeling of exclusion which, in any case, is evident in their whole behaviour. Thus, they sometimes see in the absence of any indication which might facilitate the visit—arrows showing the direction to follow, explanatory panels, etc.—the signs of a deliberate intention to exclude the uninitiated. The provision of teaching and didactic aids would not, in fact, really make up for the lack of schooling, but it would at least proclaim the right not to know, the right to be there in igno- rance, the right of the ignorant to be there, a right which everything in the presentation of works and in the organization of the museum combines to challenge, as this remark overheard in the Chateau of Versailles testi- fies: “This chateau was not made for the people, and it has not changed.”

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  483

asceticism of the facilities, always scarce and uncomfortable, the almost systematic refusal of any instruction, the grandiose solemnity of the decoration and the decorum, colonnades, vast galleries, decorated ceilings, monumental stair- cases both outside and inside, everything seems done to remind people that the transition from the profane world to the sacred world presup- poses, as Durkheim says, “a genuine metamor- phosis,” a radical spiritual change, that the bring- ing together of the worlds “is always, in itself, a delicate operation which calls for precaution and a more or less complicated initiation,” that “it is not even possible unless the profane lose their specific characteristics, unless they themselves become sacred to some extent and to some degree.”v Although the work of art, owing to its sacred character, calls for particular dispositions or predispositions, it brings in return its conse- cration to those who satisfy its demands, to the small elite who are self-chosen by their aptitude to respond to its appeal.

The museum gives to all, as a public legacy, the monuments of a splendid past, instruments of the sumptuous glorification of the great figures of bygone ages, but this is false generosity, because free entrance is also optional entrance, reserved for those who, endowed with the ability to appro- priate the works, have the privilege of using this freedom and who find themselves consequently

legitimized in their privilege, that is, in the posses- sion of the means of appropriating cultural goods or, to borrow an expression of Max Weber, in the monopoly of the handling of cultural goods and of the institutional signs of cultural salvation (awarded by the school). Being the keystone of a system which can function only by concealing its true function, the charismatic representation of art experience never fulfills its function of mystifying so well as when it resorts to a “democratic” lan- guage: to claim that works of art have power to awaken the grace of aesthetic enlightenment in anyone, however culturally uninitiated he or she may be, to presume in all cases to ascribe to the unfathomable accidents of grace or to the arbitrary bestowal of “gifts” aptitudes which are always the product of unevenly distributed education, and therefore to treat inherited aptitudes as personal virtues which are both natural and meritorious. Charismatic ideology would not be so strong if it were not the only outwardly irreproachable means of justifying the right of the heirs to the inheri- tance without being inconsistent with the ideal of formal democracy, and if, in this particular case, it did not aim at establishing in nature the sole right of the bourgeoisie to appropriate art treasures to itself, to appropriate them to itself symbolically, that is to say, in the only legitimate manner, in a society which pretends to yield to all, “democrati- cally,” the relics of an aristocratic past.

vE. Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 6th edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 55–6. The holding of a Danish exhibition showing modern furniture and utensils in the old ceramic rooms of the Lille museum brought about such a “conversion” in the visitors as can be summarized in the fol- lowing contrasts, the very ones which exist between a department store and a museum: noise/silence; touch/ see; quick, haphazard exploration, in no particular order/leisurely, methodical inspection, according to a fixed arrangement; freedom/constraint; economic assessment of works which may be purchased/aesthetic apprecia- tion of “priceless” works. However, despite these differences, bound up with the things exhibited, the solemniz- ing (and distancing) effect of the museum no less continued to be felt, contrary to expectations, for the structure of the public at the Danish exhibition was more “aristocratic” (in respect of level of education) than the ordi- nary public of the museum. The mere fact that works are consecrated by being exhibited in a consecrated place is sufficient, in itself, profoundly to change their signification and, more precisely, to raise the level of their emission; were they presented in a more familiar place, a large emporium for instance, they would be more accessible.

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