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INCE
THE end of the 19th century there has always been a small group of
French intellectuals who were, in Pierre Bourdieu's poignant term,
"miraculous survivors", who owed their careers to a path of free education
from the lycee to a grande ecole, and from there into academia. Bourdieu,
as the son of a postman, was one of such a group, empowered undoubtedly
by a trajectory through the Ecole Normale Superieure, but - despite
a prolific output of 25 books - never entirely at ease as an intellectual.
He could never forget the profound "scholastic bias" in the more privileged
thinkers whose own leisurely comforts led them to extend the order
of logic too far and too readily. Yet, in him, academic difference
induced clarity of vision rather than resentment. Thus his knowledge
of the French peasantry from his own family in the Hautes-Pyrenees
turned out to enrich his understanding of the precapitalist world
of Kabylia, southern Algeria, in a manner unavailable to most other
anthropologists.
Indeed, Bourdieu was unlike most high-flying
thinkers in undertaking "fieldwork in philosophy" at all. His happy
phrase describes in fact a quite exceptional journey - at once disciplinary
and geographical - from philosophy in 1950s Paris, to anthropological
observation of the Kabylean "art of living", courtesy of military
service, at the height of the Algerian war (his first book published
in English was The Algerians, 1962, a translation of Sociologie de
l'Algerie, 1958), and from there to large-scale sociological enquiries
into French students, culture and consumption in both Lille and the
metropolis.
This gave his sociology an unrivalled
depth of theoretical knowledge and mastery of methods. It also gave
him a profound sense of the scope and the tensions in the stakes to
be fought for, nothing less than a symbolic revolution in sociology.
Indeed what might appear combative in Bourdieu was more precisely
an acute insight into the importance of such symbolic representations
of the world, with a simultaneous concern for the necessity of an
"active materialism". Choice of theoretical stance was always conditioned
by the value of those theoretical positions for humanity as a whole.
The influences shaping Bourdieu's theory
of practice are remarkably diverse, combining sociologists and anthropologists
with philosophers. His most profound debts, however, are to Pascal
and Marx: that is to the dual critiques of a disembodied and individualist
rationalism on the one hand and of an ahistorical, one-sided spiritualistic
interpretation of the world on the other.
Perhaps his most important work was bringing
to bear his understanding from Algeria on what was distinctive in
French late capitalism in the 1960s. He was concerned especially with
France's democratisation of cheap luxuries, but also with the expansion
of education and the more individualised transition into work. Consequently,
for the subordinate class, failure was increasingly felt less as a
collective group outcome and more as a personal inadequacy.
A continuing theme of his work from the
Sixties was the shift from an old to a new mode of class and gender
reproduction. One aspect of this was the huge extension in the "market
for symbolic [cultural] goods": Bourdieu was to build a whole
theoretical construction over apparently small details such as the
contemporary lack of legitimacy for photography as high culture.
He insisted on the need to reintegrate
what was normally kept separate and sacred: people's taste for, say,
Stravinsky, had to be understood as part of a seamless web of tastes
of a more "profane" kind, types of wall covering, for example, or
for eating boned fish. In a series of four extraordinary books - La
Distinction (1979; translated as Distinction, 1984), Le Sens pratique
(1980; The Logic of Practice, 1990), La Noblesse d'Etat (1989; The
State Nobility, 1996) and Les Regles d'art (1992; The Rules of Art,
1995) - Bourdieu simultaneously turned the tables on all the warring
theoretical camps. He did so by developing a new and powerful synthesis,
the theory of practice or constructivist objectification, within which
earlier theories were taken up and transcended.
This was a theory based not on "things"
or substances, but on the structural arrangement and meanings of their
social relations. From this singular perspective, which built on the
classical social theorists, he demystified the distinctive ideologies
of our time.
Perhaps the most important of these concerned
the field of cultural production. A suspicion of accounts of the free
availability of the artistic heritage to all led Bourdieu to show
systematically that the public with a taste for the canonised works
of high culture were those with much greater education. Some tastes,
such as that for modern jazz, might have varying structural relations
in different societies and periods. But the rarest passions - say,
for Mondrian - were possessed by those whose educational capital was
the greatest, and especially by those whose origins were from the
liberal professions and from artists themselves.
Creativity, he contended, was not due
to an artist's innate or natural gifts or "inspiration" but was particularly
linked to a Bohemian avant- garde, high in cultural capital (education),
and sufficiently insulated by parental allowances to be able to spend
early adulthood in voluntary poverty for the long period of experimentation
necessary to make an artistic mark.
The first modernists, Manet, Flaubert
and Baudelaire, celebrated "the virtues of revolt and resistance".
Members of later modernist movements did not need to be so heroic;
there were subtle accommodations to power. Works of art were liberated
from specific political or moral discourse, artists' economic disinterestedness
was imposed as a rule.
In the last decade, Bourdieu gave much
of his energy to the public movement against neo-liberal globalisation,
marked by the end of job stability in the interests of ever- extended
productivity, a movement accompanied by what he saw as the high but
uncalculated social costs, in terms of crime, broken families, divorces
and suicides.
His earlier Distinction had objectified
the game of culture and the great post-war shift from the ethic of
self-denial to the fun ethic. It had shown not only that the unleashed
aesthetic sense created new bases of sociability - "Taste is a matchmaker,"
he remarked - but also, more insidiously, that the social exclusions
proliferating with the rise in significance of aesthetic and bodily
cultivation reduced some to a state of lower being, mere existence,
in a way that material inequalities did not.
Thus, in his most sustained and brilliant
combinations of empirical data and theoretical construction, Bourdieu
had explored the "velvet glove" of the new post-1968 regime of accumulation.
At the end of his life he was forced to rethink his earlier abandonment
of political prophecy for sociology in order to warn against the iron
fist. He saw neo- liberalism, the ideology of economists, as a "conservative
revolution", plausibly allying it to the similar revolution of Ernst
Junger and Martin Heidegger in inter-war Germany, and suggesting that
its hidden power was to present, in the language of reform, policies
that were deeply regressive.
He spoke out to and for those who are
not usually heard: Le Monde in 1995 wrote of the respectful silence
in which he was heard by public- sector strikers as he criticised
the Juppe government and the technocratic elite's condescending advice
as to where their true interests lay. Thus he came to draw out a new
logic from Max Weber's twin essays "Politics as a Vocation" and "Science
as a Vocation". Intellectuals, Bourdieu argued, might enter the public
sphere, not as the total intellectuals advocated by Jean-Paul Sartre,
but rather as "rational militants" who acted within a "corporatism
of the universal". A precondition for such an intervention was the
personal guarantee of public trust gained from earlier, specific achievements,
an expertise won only in one's own field and through the intensive
testing offered by one's scientific and artistic peers.
Bourdieu's last period at the College
de France was marked by determination to popularise his work. The
delicate but dense Proustian sentences were replaced by more accessible
responses to interview questions, La Misere du monde (1993; The Weight
of the World, 1999) - a collection of interview- based narratives
about people's lives - was staged as theatre, and a documentary
film was released in France.
To those who knew Pierre Bourdieu he
was a generous teacher and unstintingly helpful, a man devoid of any
personal arrogance. To a small number of his political antagonists,
this most gentle of men appeared as a monster: one recent opponent
compared his work to sociological "terrorism". For some critics, his
most problematic element appeared as a tendency to reinvent himself
periodically. For others his death means the loss of an architect
of a great and consistent synthesis of social theory - a defender
of scientific procedures as a counter to relativism.
Pierre
Bourdieu, sociologist: born Denguin, France 1 August 1930; Professor
of Sociology, College de France 1981-2002; married 1962 Marie-Claire
Brizard (three sons); died Paris 23 January 2002.
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