Extending a research program in the sociology of culture

Some Festschriften are like rituals whose social function prevails over their intellectual significance. Others are not a simple homage to a respected professor or colleague, but instantiate the liveliness of a scholarly community which shares a paradigm, concepts and methods, that they discuss and confront with empirical data. This collection is of the second kind. It actually bridges two communities, one which develops Bourdieu’s research program in the sociology of culture, and the (heterodox) Marxist community. The intersection between these two networks is Bridget Fowler, and in this sense this collection reflects her intellectual trajectory, from the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies to Bourdieu and back. Bourdieu himself built his sociology of culture in closely reading Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E. P. Thompson, and he introduced the work of all three in France at a time when Althusser (whom he knew well) was the main Marxist reference. He was also very interested in Lucien Goldmann. However, Bridget Fowler is one of the rare Bourdieu experts who so intimately share with him these references. This makes her reading, appropriation and discussion of Bourdieu’s work very singular. Her Marxist background immediately drew her attention to aspects of his theory that were less visible than his major concepts of capital, field and habitus, like the idea of misrecognition, which underlies the functioning of symbolic violence. Her research interests led her to extend both research programs, that of the Birmingham School and of Bourdieu’s group, in new directions, theoretically and empirically, for instance in her work on reception – The Alienated Reader – based not only on text analysis but also on interviews with female readers. In a similar manner to Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, to which she adds a theoretical framework and a feminist perspective, her book proposes a much more complex view of popular literature and of its readers than the mystification theory of the Frankfurt School.

Like the Birmingham School and like Bourdieu, Bridget Fowler doesn’t consider research as ‘neutral’. An inquiry about the social world is always an intervention in this world: it can either serve to reproduce it by confirming the existing social hierarchies, or question it by denaturalizing them. The task of the researcher is, for Bridget Fowler, as for them, not to confirm the dominant worldview but to question it. While drawing from Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, Bridget Fowler extends the Birmingham program of studying the experience of the dominated, asking what helps them resist domination. Between the literary fiction and the popular romance, she identified the middlebrow but also the ‘radical canon’ which refracted the culture of trade unions, offering working-class women an alternative representation of the social world (from this standpoint, her work also echoed Terry Lowell’s analysis of the role of reading in the emancipation of women). Bridget Fowler also studied how a middlebrow art like photography became legitimate and even canonized, contrary to Bourdieu’s predictions. Her enlightening contribution in this issue shows that this process can be traced back to the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially to Alexander Rodchenko’s blend of abstraction and photography as well as to his aesthetic framing of photographs with reference to art history, which was soon recognized by gallerists in the United States. This observation leads her to reconsider the canonization process in art fields. Her reflections on official and unofficial modes of selection and transmission across generations are not unrelated to another research project she has carried out: fruitfully crossing Bourdieu’s emphasis on the role of cultural intermediaries with the reflections on memory by Maurice Halbwachs and Walter Benjamin, Bridget Fowler brought to light the hidden role of the obituary editor, thus demonstrating the social mechanisms by which the collective memory of individuals is produced. This is a research project that could be interestingly extended to sociologists’ obituaries, as suggested in the interview with Les Back included in this issue.

In this interview, Bridget Fowler provides a lively account of her intellectual trajectory, which accompanied the rise of cultural studies and sociology in the United Kingdom, albeit at the margins of the British academic field. Because of her social origins (which she defines as ‘déclassé’) and political orientation, both immediately attracted her and she significantly contributed to their institutionalization, all the while opening them to feminist perspectives. Attesting to her constant reflexivity, her insightful reflections about what it meant to be a woman in a male-dominated academia at the time are a precious testimony to the study of the slow feminization of the academic field and the move of women from subaltern positions to full acknowledgment of their skills; although, as she points out, research needs to be done on the gendered division of academic labor and on the manner in which some tasks, such as advising graduate students, are carried out by women and men. The interview is also a fascinating account of a reader’s trajectory. Bridget Fowler generously displays what she calls her ‘influences’, but one can detect in the way she confronts them her active and critical appropriation of their work. And this critical appropriation is also manifest in her discussion of Bourdieu’s approach to photography in her article on the avant-garde uses of this medium to defamiliarize the world, as theorized by the Hungarian avant-garde painter László Moholy-Nagy (who was drawing upon Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement as the most specific effect of literariness).

The articles in the monograph issue of The Sociological Review show that this is also how she worked collectively and transmitted her theoretical and research practice. In which way can poetry be conceived not only as an elite genre alienating readers deprived of cultural capital but also as a source of resistance to the lived experience of capitalism? What processes are implied in the recognition of the aesthetic value of physical performance as ‘dance’? How do wine production and consumption draw cultural and social boundaries? How did an outsider become a hegemonic art critic? What dispositions lead students in economics to disciplinary orthodoxy or heterodoxy? All these research questions, which are empirically substantiated in the contributions, heuristically extend Bourdieu’s research program. Others revise and enrich the Marxist perspective through feminist and intersectional lenses. Because of their critical perspective and choice of non-canonical objects, in the spirit of Bridget Fowler, reflexivity is present all along these articles, and especially in the study of Fowler’s translation practice in her translation of Bourdieu.

In the present conjuncture of devaluation of scholarly knowledge and of academic neoliberal management, as described in the closing article by Robert Gibb, who also delineates how to take the research program further based on Fowler’s main works, this Festschriften stands out as a model of a true scholarly community, driven by a shared passion, an ethics of commitment, high intellectual standards, and the ability to elaborate constructive criticism in discussing certain questions. Or of what Bourdieu called a scientific (sub)field, by contrast with a church or an ‘apparatus’.