Page 154 - Cultural Theory

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••• Framing Bourdieu •••

vulgate no doubt derive a good measure of their symbolic efficacy from the fact
that, supported by specialists from disciplines perceived to be marginal or subver-
sive, such as Cultural Studies, Minority Studies, Gay Studies or Women’s Studies,
they take on, in the eyes of writers from the former European colonies for exam-
ple, the allure of messages of liberation. Indeed, cultural imperialism … never
imposes itself better than when it is served by progressive intellectuals … who
would appear to be above suspicion of promoting the hegemonic interests of a
country against which they wield the weapons of social criticism.
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1998: 50–1)

It should now be clear that Bourdieu found himself in a bind in respect of ‘cultural
theory’ which was indicative of an ambivalence in his general stance. I want now to
explore that ambivalence in more detail. I shall suggest that the ambivalence was
made seriously problematic for Bourdieu at the point when he began to lose control
over his own cultural production, when, in other words, his products ceased to be
exclusively given meaning within an intellectual field of his own creation (substan-
tially through the efficacy of the publication after 1975 of the Actes de la recherche en
sciences sociales under his direction) and fell, instead, into the hands of multinational
publishing houses and international cultural dealers. Finally, I shall give some
specific attention to La distinction, published in French in 1979 as the culmination
of empirical research first published as ‘anatomie du goût’ in 1976 in Actes de la
recherche, and then subsequently published in English translation in paperback by
Routledge in 1986, by which date Polity Press had commenced the task of publish-
ing Bourdieu’s work which it has continued, almost monopolistically, ever since.
Briefly, we can say that Bourdieu’s ‘bind’ was that his personal project from the
beginning had been to adopt social scientific method to analyse cultural behaviour
and cultural forms. This remained possible within the French tradition, but, increas-
ingly, Anglo-US discourse which autonomized ‘culture’, detaching it from its social
roots and divorcing it from its social function, came to dominate the international
field of cultural conceptualization. Bourdieu wanted both to resist and to deploy the
power of the international field within which his works began to circulate after the
end of the 1970s. Hence the ambivalence of Bourdieu’s general stance: he wanted to
mobilize the field which was surreptitiously neutralizing his message.

The Ambivalent Function of the Intellectual Field in Bourdieu’s Theory

Bourdieu always argued that we have to guard against the extent to which our per-
sonal perceptions are controlled by the dominant ways of seeing the world advanced
by those possessing dominant power. He liked to quote Thomas Bernhard, particu-
larly, for instance, at the beginning of a lecture which he gave in Amsterdam in June,
1991, which was subsequently included in Practical Reason (1998) as an article enti-
tled: ‘Rethinking the state: genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field’. Bourdieu
quoted from Bernhard’s Alte Meister Komodie:

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