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Framing Bourdieu’s

CHAPTER EIGHT Work on Culture
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Derek Robbins

Bourdieu’s ‘Bind’

In one of his late articles, co-authored with Loïc Wacquant, entitled ‘Sur les ruses de
la raison impérialiste’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1998) and translated as ‘On the cun-
ning of Imperialist Reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999), Bourdieu presented
indicative analyses which sought to demonstrate the contention stated in the first
sentence, that: ‘Cultural imperialism rests on the power to universalize particularisms
linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 41). The statement drew upon the notion of mécon-
naissance which Bourdieu had elaborated in La reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron,
1970) to argue that school curricula were presented as universally valid so as to con-
ceal the extent to which they were in reality the means by which the arbitrary power
of socially and culturally dominant classes was arbitrarily sustained under the guise
of absolute legitimacy. There was, therefore, continuity in Bourdieu’s resistance to
attempts to deploy culture to euphemize power relations. At bottom, this continuity
arose from Bourdieu’s distrust of any cultural form that might become the reified
instrument of social control, as opposed to cultural forms which are the expressions
of the habitus of social agents who become the instruments for constructing their
own systems of cultural exchange. It was politically important for Bourdieu that cul-
tural products should not acquire spurious autonomy but should remain in a non-
deterministic relationship to the social trajectories of their producers and their
consumers, both of whom colluded reciprocally in the construction of specific cul-
tural fields in which specific cultural products acquired meaning and were assigned
value.
Among the cultural products now being diffused universally and insidiously as
universally pertinent was, for Bourdieu, the very notion of ‘culture’ itself. What was
being internationally diffused was a view of culture which was the construct of a
small, essentially Western, international intellectual elite. At two points in ‘Sur les
ruses de la raison impérialiste’, ‘Cultural Studies’ were the specific object of
Bourdieu’s attack. In the first case, the argument is combined with an attack on the

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