Abstract
The incredible breadth of Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on global sociology may not be contested, but the precise character and utility of it certainly is. With the man himself no longer around to authoritatively update his older arguments, respond to particular readings and criticisms and apply his conceptual tools to new topics, a site of intense struggle has opened up within this intellectual universe defined by explicit or implicit, developed or concise, catholic or selective embracement or rejection of the French thinker and manifest as much in the empty references of empirical pieces comprising the academic equivalent of ‘passing’ as in the heated defences and polemical critiques. Such conflicts usually find direct material incarnation in the form of edited collections and journal special issues detailing the ‘state of play’ (from a certain perspective), and so a lengthy train of volumes assessing the sociological world post-Bourdieu, with this or that particular emphasis, has emerged in the last few years. The most recent offering of this ilk, however, is a little different. Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde’s book, the product of a concluding symposium flowing from the productive Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project, boasts an impressive gathering of celebrated (UK, US and French) names, explicitly juxtaposes their clashing claims on Bourdieu’s long-term legacy and thus – despite the stated focus on cultural theory and analysis – neatly encapsulates the current scrimmage in sociology.
The editors themselves, in their opening overview, carve the contributions, and with it the field of debate, into four factions. Firstly there are the ‘defenders of the legacy’, represented by Grenfell’s step-by-step guide to working with a Bourdieusian framework, Fantasia’s faithful and insightful analysis of the structure and changes in the French gastronomic field, Swartz’s outline of Bourdieu’s political sociology and Lebaron’s critical reflections on the contributions. Second, there are the ‘partial appropriators’, which includes Savage, Warde and Silva’s exploration of class identification (which actually mentions Bourdieu very little), Reay’s examination of students’ higher education choices, Devine’s plea for further work on classification processes and Silva and Warde’s epilogue, which seems to pass partial appropriation off, under the guise of summary, as the soundest approach. Then there are the ‘critical revisers’, comprising Sayer’s attempt to inject some moral philosophy into the equation and Bennett’s critical comparison of Bourdieu and Foucault. Finally, there are the ‘repudiators’: Michele Lamont, who gives an overview of her own academic trajectory and breaks from the master, and Antoine Hennion, who criticises Bourdieu’s presentational style in Distinction.
So what is the outcome of this meeting of illustrious minds? Well, the first thing to make clear is that anyone already familiar with the ideas of the contributors will learn little substantively novel here, as, on the whole, the same old arguments and ideas are revisited and repeated; though in some instances (i.e. Fantasia, Savage et al. and Reay) buttressed by new and interesting empirical material. There is, furthermore, an awful lot of talking past one another – the number of completely contradictory viewpoints, arguments and interpretations whirling around these pages, and the lack of any really meaningful dialogue between them, is astounding. But perhaps the most important and intriguing conclusion to be drawn from this assembly is a thoroughly unintended one: between them the contributors manage to demonstrate that none of their four proffered options is particularly satisfactory.
The repudiators, for example, flout Grenfell’s wise warning against unreflexive and unconsidered intellectual strategies, demonstrate that which they denounce and crudely use Bourdieu’s work as a foil against which to define and champion their own perspective in the sociological field. They thus unconvincingly paint the French thinker as grossly objectivist, determinist or mechanical and reel off a list of supposedly damaging problems – the social mediation of scientific ‘findings’, the incomparability of France and the US, the importance of morality in boundary drawing, the impact of national cultural discourses or repertoires, ‘self-concept’, pleasure and curiosity as springs of action, etc. – which are in fact easily resolvable. Close attention to the principles of applied rationalism, as well as Bourdieu’s sociology of science (which recognizes curiosity and pleasure as part and parcel of the libido scientifica), tracing the logic of his analysis of classification struggles and applying his relational approach rather than looking to his substantive findings, for example, will all swiftly reveal the critics’ core concerns to be trifling non-issues. Similarly, as Lebaron notes, much of the so-called revision of the revisers, generally worked out in a theoreticist register, is already perfectly graspable if one sets out to work with Bourdieu rather than try to find fault, even if it is undoubtedly fruitful to explore the areas he did not and pad out where necessary.
As for partial appropriation, seemingly a British speciality, this is patently premised on two flawed assumptions. First, there is the pervasive conviction that Bourdieu’s theory is, and should be seen as, a ‘toolkit’ to be ransacked, selectively applied, mashed with other ideas and twisted as empirical findings dictate, a viewpoint justly shot down by Grenfell. Bourdieu’s concepts may well be tools, he says, but they are ‘epistemologically charged’ (p. 26) ones, bounded by a set of integrating philosophical assumptions – rationalism, relationalism, dispositionalism, etc. – the neglect or disregard of which reduces them to a meaningless descriptive vocabulary. The flabby notions of ‘emotional capital’ and ‘institutional habitus’ are aptly, if briefly, pilloried in this regard, and I would add that other notions such as ‘family habitus’ and ‘gender capital’ deserve the same treatment. Second, there is the utterly false belief, exposed by Lebaron, that Bourdieu’s apparatus as a whole is somehow powerless to account for various phenomena – class identity, global mobility, divisions other than class, etc. – and so must be scavenged from instead. Either it clearly has done, but just in a different conceptual register, or, if not, would easily be able to with a little imagination.
Yet the defenders, with whom I am evidently most sympathetic, do not and cannot answer all the critical points raised. The common reproach that Bourdieu sidelined consciousness, deliberation or intention, for example, is met by Lebaron’s linking of the habitus to neural plasticity and procedural knowledge, prompting the immediate question ‘but what about declarative knowledge?’. Furthermore, while Grenfell correctly insists on the distinction between fields, networks, sites and social spaces (to counter extremely impressionistic and inappropriate applications of Bourdieu’s concepts), and Fantasia provides a skilled example of field analysis, one is left wondering: if there is more to the social world than fields and social spaces, how do we conceive of them and analyse them in a consistent, coherent way? How are we to conceptualize social processes and mutual influence in situations where, rather than a specific field, the dynamics in question involve transactions between concrete individuals in manifold different fields? Something more than straightforward defence is obviously necessary after all, even if Grenfell and Lebaron’s sagacious counsel should nevertheless be heeded. It must be consistent, it must be logical and, crucially, it must start from the Bourdieusian schema in toto rather than abstracted bits and pieces, of course, but clearly there is room, and need, for development, elaboration and refinement.
From Epistemic to Empirical Individuals
This would, broadly, seem to be the same conclusion reached by Bernard Lahire, a long-time sympathetic critic of Bourdieu in France whose creeping influence in anglophone debates is set to grow with the translation of his 1998 theoretical work, L’homme pluriel, summarizing years of empirical work on education. Refusing what he sees as the slavish application of endless Bourdieu epigones and the blind dogmatism of his foes, Lahire laudably seeks to proceed through ‘creative criticism’ (p. ix) and imaginative reinvention of the famed Frenchman’s work, the real driving impetus being the effort to forge a ‘sociology at the level of the individual’ which switches attention from the dynamics of particular fields to the complexities and contradictions of singular habitus forged and actualized across multiple fields and social relations.
Lahire’s rhetorical strategy through the book is, however, wholly familiar and only partially convincing, essentially piling up dichotomy after dichotomy, sometimes questionably placing Bourdieu on one side, and then stating the need to synthetically surmount them in good Hegelian fashion. ‘Act one, Scene one’ (for the actor metaphor) thus opposes conceptualizations of unified actors (e.g. possessing transposable dispositions à la Bourdieu) to images of plural ones (e.g. occupying multiple roles and identities à la Goffman) before then declaring that the degree of unity/plurality is historically variable, the implication (familiar from Margaret Archer’s work) being that the notion of habitus is more applicable to undifferentiated societies. Some very useful points are made in the course of this – that the notion of field, for example, struggles to capture the totality of formative experience and relations (or, reminiscent of Becker, ‘worlds’) – but it is hardly fair to Bourdieu, who latterly wrote of cleft habitus (beyond Algeria, contra Lahire), which could certainly accommodate the splits and disjunctions caused by occupying incongruent positions in different fields and spaces and would fruitfully see many (though not all) of the non-field ‘worlds’ Lahire mentions as fields (e.g. the family). ‘Scene two’, similarly, pits theories emphasizing the weight of the past on action (Bourdieu) against those emphasizing the present (interactionism again), transcending the split by maintaining that the present situation defines which elements of the incorporated past are actualized. Once more some valuable nuances are registered (e.g. that adaptations and tendencies can be of varying strengths), though these are hardly unthinkable from a Bourdieusian position, but overall Bourdieu is a woeful straw man here. To claim he made no space for analysis of how the habitus intersects with the solicitations of the present situation (often shaped by field dynamics), visible not least in his analysis of the hysteresis and ‘fish out of water’ effects, is absurd.
The next two dualisms, however, are more persuasively constructed. In ‘Act two’ – non-intentional spontaneity versus conscious projection – we get a fair critique of the sporting metaphor of action Bourdieu was so keen on, a nuanced analysis of planning in action and the postulation of a scale of intention, though even here some points are overdrawn (Bourdieu did imply projection at times, albeit briefly). ‘Act three’, furthermore, treats bodily learning versus understanding through signs and, like others before, rightly flags Bourdieu’s vagueness on ‘interiorization’, the range of learning modes and the complexities and problems of disposition sedimentation which question the ‘transmission’ metaphor for capital, complementing an earlier chapter refining Bourdieu’s model of educational reproduction by underscoring the glitches and practical pressures of parenting. Of course Bourdieu did acknowledge the difference between implicit and explicit pedagogy, and the other points are far from incompatible with his perspective, but their articulation is worthwhile.
So what is Lahire’s solution to all these difficulties and complications? Not very much, it seems. This is, it turns out, a book heavy on problem-finding and demonstrating, but light on real conceptual answers. True, there is some effort to bring the psychology of habit into the mix to conceive of the reawakening of the past in the present through practical analogy, but this seems to deal only with the level of transferability of schemes of perception and action, and the summative meat at the end of the book (‘Act four’) amounts to a manifesto for a change of perspective from collectives or fields to individuals, but not much more. To be fair, this shift hits upon something important – the need for fresh theoretical thinking when swapping the focus, in Bourdieusian parlance, from epistemic to empirical individuals – but we are not really given the tools here to effectively cohere all the thorny conceptual tangles which Lahire skilfully spotlights (the varieties of learning, scales of intention, levels of projection within limits and non-field experiences and relations) with the rest of the Bourdieusian framework. Elsewhere I have argued that phenomenology – a mode of thought upon which Bourdieu built but which Lahire gives little or no attention (even, surprisingly, on projection) – can plug precisely these gaps, but there is also, as the last treatise to be considered indicates, a case to be made for a deepening of the relational worldview which ultimately underpins Bourdieu’s vision.
Relationalism beyond Fields
Nick Crossley was once a fellow phenomenologically-minded pro-Bourdieusian, but not, it seems, any more. His latest offering concludes his steady conversion to the ever-popular social network approach, a perspective sometimes aligned with but often sharply contrasted to Bourdieu’s on account of them both being ‘relational’ (as opposed to substantialist), but in starkly different ways: for Bourdieu, the sociologically pertinent relations are those referring to the abstract systems of difference and distance in fields and social spaces on the basis of capital possession, whilst for the network theorists they comprise concrete ties and chains of interaction between individuals. Now making the case for the latter, Crossley endeavours to elaborate and fuse various allied strands of thought. In itself, therefore, the book offers little that is particularly original, as the author himself readily admits (p. 4): take Mead on the self, symbolic interactionism on ‘worlds’ (again), Wittgenstein on forms of life, Elias, Simmel, empirical network analysis and (to link up to macro-analysis) Coleman and world-systems theory and you have the nub of it. This is not to say that the overview is not clear, fresh and ambitious – it claims, like Lahire, to have solved or rejected just about all intellectual dualisms – but perhaps its most interesting feature (again demonstrating the field effects it refutes?) is the consistent and robust effort to use Bourdieu as a negative foil. Words are not minced here: the Frenchman’s vision of social structure is, we are told, ‘flawed’ (p. 113), ‘doomed to failure’ (p. 27) and even ‘very odd’ (p. 24) for a few reasons, none of which, however, really stack up.
First of all, Crossley contends, Bourdieu’s antagonistic vision of relations cannot account for consensus, convention or intersubjectivity like networks and ‘worlds’ can (pp. 133ff) – a reading which, insofar as it ignores the notions of doxa and nomos, is simply wrong. Second, since fields and social spaces are merely ‘comparisons of capital’ (p. 26) possessed by ‘atomised’ agents propelled by capital possession alone (p. 28), they exist ‘only in Bourdieu’s head’ (p. 26) and thus are not ‘real’ relations at all – a stroke of extraordinary empiricism that does violence to the principle of construction of social spaces and ignores the fact that the latter exist in agents’ heads as a practical sense of ‘place’, difference and ‘what is to be done’. Third, and getting more substantial, the network enthusiast declares that Bourdieu has the world upside down: capital possession and tastes – and thus, if one insists, position in social or symbolic space – are formed through interaction with concrete others, not (as embodied in the notion of elective affinity) the other way around, hinting at the broader point, also mentioned by Lahire, that Bourdieu ignores or sees as illusory the autonomous causal powers of interaction. In fact, Crossley continues (p. 175), Bourdieu provides no real generative connection between capital possession and habitus at all, leaving us unable to explain, for example, the taste for football or rugby or their homology with different sections of social space at different times. The remedy is simple: people like what they do because they interact with others who like it.
Several slips and omissions undermine this rejection somewhat: the contradictory claim that taste-networks are shaped by occupation, education and area of residence, which in turn are conditioned by access to resources (p. 176); the remarkably thin presentation of Bourdieu’s genetic reasoning, without any reference to distance from necessity, symbolic mastery versus practical or bodily mastery, the shifting dynamics and homologies of fields of production, supply and demand and so on; and the inadequate reduction of formative experience to interactions between people, thereby discounting the effect of objects and spaces encompassed in conditions of existence (unless via a rather overstretched definition of networks). Although Bourdieu’s provocative disposition undoubtedly led him to overstatement, furthermore, there was plenty of space in his research for understanding the effect of networks and interactions, including in the formation of dispositions (embodied social capital), it was just that his emphasis was on how any interface is necessarily inflected by the participants’ sense of one another’s relative places in the pertinent spaces or fields. Yet, for all this, Crossley’s main points, just like Lahire’s, cannot be disregarded outright. It seems, again, a case of shifting from epistemic to empirical individuals, but insofar as they draw attention to the impact of concrete interactions and consociates of the agent’s lifeworld individuating conditions of existence and their interweaving in relations and linkages which, even if refracted by field dynamics, are not themselves fields, elements of the social cosmos underplayed, though not necessarily ruled out, by Bourdieu are fruitfully brought to the fore. Crossley’s intriguing rereading of Foucault through network lenses, for example, offers a potentially fertile means of investigating the circuits of symbolic power. He may well have been aiming for overthrow, then, but opportunities for enhancement seem to be the real outcome of the former Bourdieu supporter’s efforts.
Conclusion
The overall conclusion is clear. We should be wary of attempts to either reject or pick and choose from Bourdieu’s framework when they are premised on superficial, distorted or contradictory understandings, but equally we must recognize that there is plenty of space for consistent development and elaboration, specifically in fleshing out what analysis of empirical individuals involves, in grappling with the complexities of the formation and actualization of dispositions and in coherently broadening the relational perspective to encompass a wider range of formative experiences. Very careful thought will be needed by those who embark on these tasks, however, especially in guarding against the omnipresent temptations and traps of substantialism, otherwise their efforts may end up no sounder than those blindly discarding or needlessly watering down Bourdieu’s legacy.