Page 153 - Cultural Theory

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••• Derek Robbins •••

role of publishing houses in promoting spurious universalization – an attack which
relates to Bourdieu’s critique in the 1990s of the role of the mass media in subvert-
ing the autonomy of the intellectual field as institutionalized in universities. After
commenting adversely on some practices of the Basil Blackwell publishing house,
Bourdieu continued:

Thus it is that decisions of pure book marketing orient research and university
teaching in the direction of homogenization and submission to fashions com-
ing from America, when they do not fabricate wholesale ‘disciplines’ such as
Cultural Studies, this mongrel domain, born in England in the 1970s, which
owes its international dissemination (which is the whole of its existence) to a
successful publishing policy. Thus the fact, for instance, that this ‘discipline’
does not exist in the French university and intellectual fields did not prevent
Routledge from publishing a compendium entitled French Cultural Studies, on
the model of British Cultural Studies (there are also volumes of German Cultural
Studies and Italian Cultural Studies). And one may forecast that, by virtue of the
principle of ethnico-editorial parthogenesis in fashion today, we shall soon find
in bookstores a handbook of French-Arab Cultural Studies to match its cross-
channel cousin, Black British Cultural Studies which appeared in 1997 (but bets
remain open as to whether Routledge will dare German-Turkish Cultural Studies).
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1998: 47)

Bourdieu proceeded to argue that the effects of publishing policies were among the
factors which explain the hegemony that US production exercises over the intellec-
tual world market. Institutionalized or commercialized effects such as these could
not, however, ‘completely explain’ that hegemony. Bourdieu was lamenting that
what, by analogy with economic discourse, he had called in 1971 the ‘market of sym-
bolic goods’ in which cultural producers traded their own products in a collectively
consolidated cultural market, had become an actual economic market which is in the
hands of cultural entrepreneurs. The dominant cause of the degradation of cultural
exchange, therefore, was the role played by dealers in the cultural import–export
business. Bourdieu sought to subject their activities to sociological analysis, challeng-
ing the supposed autonomy of the economic field as he was to do shortly after in his
Les structures sociales de l’économie (2000). Here, again, Bourdieu mentions cultural
studies critically. He claims that it is one of several disciplines which have claimed to
represent the interests of the dominated while, in fact, reinforcing a culturally root-
less domination of ‘cultural’ conceptualization. As Bourdieu puts it:

As for those in the USA who, often without realizing it, are engaged in this huge
international cultural import–export business, they occupy for the most part dom-
inated positions in the American field of power and even in the intellectual field.
Just as the products of America’s big cultural industry like jazz or rap, or the com-
monest food and clothing fashions, like jeans, owe part of the quasi-universal
seduction they wield over youth to the fact that they are produced and worn by
subordinate minorities (see Fantasia, 1994), so the topics of the new world

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