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move of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) from academic
analysis towards vigorous public engagement was a refreshing reversal
of a familiar trend. It was also characteristic of an intellectual
whose interest in power, value, “symbolic violence” and the quality
of media and political culture is increasingly relevant to the way
we live. A London-based colleague, working in an environment less
receptive to Bourdieu’s radicalism, pays warm tribute.
"Pierre Bourdieu est mort”. It was his prolific and increasingly
radical scholarship, not any attractions of image or temperament,
that guaranteed Pierre Bourdieu’s death to be the front-page headline
in Le Monde last month. A figure once esteemed solely by his
professional colleagues – he had studied with Louis Althusser in the
early 1950s, and his proposer to the chair of sociology at the College
de France in 1982 was Michel Foucault – gradually won through to public
acclaim and respect by the strength of his ideas alone.
It is a story with particular resonance from the perspective of London,
which Bourdieu last visited just over a year ago when he spoke at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts to mark the translation of his
eight hundred-page volume The Weight of the World. (This 1993
study, La misere du Monde in the original, of the ordinary
travails of disadvantaged persons across France in their own words,
sold over one hundred and twenty thousand copies in France alone.)
Bourdieu was joined on the panel by the playwright David Edgar, and
policy advisor to the British prime minister, Geoff Mulgan.
Bourdieu was no doubt delighted that his study was so well received
by Geoff Mulgan, who indicated its enormous value to the British government’s
Social Exclusion Unit; but in characteristic form Bourdieu then went
on to deal a savage blow to all such policy units and think tanks
for their piecemeal approach to social policy and their preference
for American style ‘good ideas’ which could almost be drawn out of
a hat. Mulgan winced, not just because of the swipe at New Labour
but also because on this occasion Bourdieu was able to command the
full moral and political high ground.
David Edgar made the point that the days were long gone when the left
and liberals recognised the heroism of poverty, the daily dramas of
trying to make ends meet, of stretching a budget to allow for some
minuscule pleasures. The evening ended with Bourdieu – who used to
invoke “the Left of the Left” as his constituency – indicating the
need for a new left political party.
This direction from sociology into the mainstream of political debate
reflected Bourdieu’s role in recent years. More often the opposite
is the case, with youthful radicalism giving way to a retreat into
the academy. For Bourdieu it was the dangers of French political life
– following the pathway of America and the UK in the embracing of
free market values, de-regulation and the running down of the public
sector – which forced him onto the streets in the strikes and demonstrations
of the last few years.
This also encouraged him to produce an endless stream of articles
and monographs on, among other things, the growth of ‘polling’ and
focus groups in French politics, which emulates the American model
of ‘marketing’ policies in the right kind of way to attract the electorate
as though they were customers, not citizens.
Bourdieu also wrote forcibly about changes in the media where a critical
agenda has been abandoned in favour of “demagogy and subordination
to commercial values” and where entertainment has become the touchstone
for journalistic practice.
Insight,
quality and relevance versus fashion
Pierre Bourdieu was undoubtedly the most important sociologist of
the post-war period. He knew and debated with all the leading French
intellectuals of his era. There is no doubt that he often felt that
to be a sociologist was a secondary status in comparison to the brilliant
stars of French philosophy. On the other hand there are many like
myself who would dispute the ‘foundational’ claims of philosophy.
Bourdieu himself was the sociologist of structures, of ‘fields’, of
taste, and especially of hierarchies. He demonstrated throughout his
career how power works to sustain existing social relations including
those connected with knowledge itself. From the wallpaper we choose,
to the books we read, to the qualifications we aim for, to the election
of vice-chancellors, Bourdieu was able to explain, with recourse to
empirical and conceptual research, how these seemingly naturalised
processes were often the result of “symbolic violence”.
I only met Bourdieu once, at the ICA event mentioned above, but I
wrote several pieces for his ‘literary supplement’ entitled Liber
– an offshoot from his many publishing ventures.
Just a couple of weeks ago I thought to email him to let him know
how the heartland of British television, the so-called ‘makeover TV’
programmes dedicated to homes, gardens, food and clothing, were vivid
re-enactments of his most famous study of taste first published in
France in 1976. Indeed I wanted to get on the Eurostar with a clutch
of videos of the latest taste presenter and cultural legitimator Lawrence
Llewellyn Bowen telling the tasteless how they could do it better.
Now it is too late for that and I’m so sorry.
Like most great intellectuals, Bourdieu provoked and outraged. In
the last few years he typecast Anthony Giddens as the pangloss of
neoliberalism and British Cultural Studies as an offshoot of multi-national
publishing corporations, neither of which endeared him to overworked
and beleaguered UK academics who thought themselves to be endlessly
defending public sector values.
But this fraternal concern – for that is what at root it was – is
even more reason for us to mark his death as the passing away of one
of the foremost world intellectuals of the post-war period. That the
wider British public know so little about Pierre Bourdieu says a good
deal about the decline of ideas and the role of thinkers in public
life in my own country. But although he never become fashionable in
the Anglo-Saxon world in his lifetime, his readership will grow, I
believe, as the importance of his critique of globalisation with all
its ramifications becomes more influential.
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