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death on January 23 of the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu came as the American chattering classes were busy checking
the math in Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline--an
unintentional parody of sociology in which Posner presents a top-100
list ranking writers and professors according to the number of times
they turned up on television or Internet searches. Bourdieu, whose
heaviest passages crackled with sardonic wit, would have had a wonderful
time exploring this farcical project, which takes for granted that
Henry Kissinger (No. 1), Sidney Blumenthal (No.7) and Ann Coulter
(No. 74) are in the Rolodex because they are leading the life of the
mind--why not include Dr. Ruth or, as one wag suggested, Osama bin
Laden? In tacitly conceding the fungibility of celebrity even while
decrying it, Posner confirms Bourdieu's gloomy predictions about the
direction modernity is swiftly taking us: away from scholarship and
high culture as sources of social prestige and toward journalism and
entertainment.
Bourdieu himself argued that scholars and writers could and should
bring their specialized knowledge to bear responsibly and seriously
on social and political issues, something he suspected couldn't be
done on a talk show. His involvement during the 1990s in campaigns
for railway workers, undocumented immigrants and the unemployed, and
most recently against neoliberalism and globalization, was the natural
outgrowth of a lifetime of research into economic, social and cultural
class domination among peoples as disparate as Algerian peasants and
French professors, and as expressed in everything from amateur photography
to posture. It's hard to think of a comparable figure on the American
left. Noam Chomsky's academic work has no connection with his political
activities, and it's been decades since his byline appeared in The
New York Review of Books or the New York Times. One friend
found himself reaching all the way back to C. Wright Mills.
Bourdieu, who loved intellectual combat,
called himself "to the left of the left"--that is, to the left of
the ossified French left-wing parties and also to the left of the
academic postmodernists aka antifoundationalists, about whose
indifference to empirical work he was scathing. Reading him could
be a disturbing experience, because the explanatory sweep of his key
concept of habitus--the formation and expression of self around an
internalized and usually accurate sense of social destiny--tends to
make ameliorative projects seem rather silly. Sociology, he wrote,
"discovers necessity, social constraints, where we would like to see
choice and free will. The habitus is that unchosen principle of so
many choices that drives our humanists to such despair." Take, for
example, his attack on the notion that making high culture readily
available--in free museums and local performances--is all that is
necessary to bring it to the masses. (In today's America, this fond
hope marks you as a raving Bolshevik, but in France it was the pet
conviction of de Gaulle's minister of culture, André Malraux.)
In fact, as Bourdieu painstakingly demonstrated in Distinction,
his monumental study of the way class shapes cultural preferences
or "taste," there is nothing automatic or natural about the ability
to "appreciate"--curious word--a Rothko or even a Van Gogh: You have
to know a lot about painting, you have to feel comfortable in museums
and you have to have what Bourdieu saw as the educated bourgeois orientation,
which rests on leisure, money and unselfconscious social privilege
and expresses itself as the enjoyment of the speculative, the distanced,
the nonuseful. Typically, though, Bourdieu used this discouraging
insight to call for more, not less, effort to make culture genuinely
accessible to all: Schools could help give working-class kids the
cultural capital--another key Bourdieusian concept--that middle-class
kids get from their families. One could extend that insight to the
American context and argue that depriving working-class kids of the
"frills"--art, music, trips--in the name of "the basics" is not just
stingy or philistine, it's a way of maintaining class privilege.
Although Bourdieu has been criticized
as too deterministic--a few years ago The New Yorker characterized
his views, absurdly, as leading "inexorably to Leninism"--he retained,
in the face of a great deal of contrary evidence, including much gathered
by himself, a faith in people's capacities for transformation. He
spent much of his life studying the part played by the French education
system in reifying class and gender divisions and in selecting and
shaping the academic, technocratic and political elite--the "state
nobility"--that runs France, but he believed in education; he railed
against the popularization and vulgarization of difficult ideas, but
he believed in popular movements and took part in several. In one
of his last books, Masculine Domination, he comes close to
arguing that male chauvinism is a cultural universal that structures
all society and all thought; he is that rare man who chastises feminists
for not going far enough--but the book closes with a paean to love.
Bourdieu's twenty-five books and countless
articles represent probably the most brilliant and fruitful renovation
and application of Marxian concepts in our era. Nonetheless, he is
less influential on the American academic left than the (to my mind,
not to mention his!) obscurantist and, at bottom, conservative French
deconstructionists and antifoundationalists. Perhaps it is not irrelevant
that Bourdieu made academia and intellectuals a major subject of withering
critique: You can't read him and believe, for example, that professors
(or "public intellectuals," or writers, or artists) stand outside
the class system in some sort of unmediated relation to society and
truth. The ground most difficult to see is always the patch one is
standing on, and the position of the intellectuals, the class that
thinks it is free-floating, is the most mystified of all. It was not
the least of Bourdieu's achievements that he offered his colleagues
the means of self-awareness, and it's not surprising either that many
decline the offer. His odd and original metaphor of the task of sociology
holds both a message and a warning: "Enlightenment is on the side
of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers."
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