Page 161 - Cultural Theory

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••• Derek Robbins •••

projet créateur’ (1966), ‘Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945’ (1967) and
the work on Panofsky, in which Bourdieu was advocating a ‘sociology of sociology’
as a form of Bachelardian ‘rupture épistémologique’ and also beginning to articulate
the poststructuralist emphasis on agency which was presented in Esquisse d’une
théorie de la pratique (1972). Homo Academicus re-visited the early data in the light of
the work of the 1970s, particularly the project on ‘Le Patronat’ which was subse-
quently published in La noblesse d’état (1989) and, of course, the work on taste which
led from the article on ‘L’anatomie du goût’ to La distinction (1979). In other words,
the text of Homo Academicus was able to superimpose the sociological analysis artic-
ulated in his ‘Les stratégies de reconversion’ (1973) on the primary sociology of
knowledge. This meant that the text was no longer a sociology of ideas but instead a
sociology of the deployment of ideas in the position-taking of social agents – situating
agents and ideas in the competing fields of power and economics.
By the time of the publication of Homo Academicus (1984b), however, the text was
not simply an analysis which now recognized the relationship between agency and
structure within Parisian higher education (including Bourdieu’s reflexive recogni-
tion of his own position and agency). It was much more. The text was an instrument
of Bourdieu’s agency. Around the time of his appointment to the Chair of Sociology
at the Collège de France in 1981, Bourdieu had been aware that he was about to be
associated with an institution which already possessed recognized ‘institutional cap-
ital’ and that this association could affect him ambivalently. On the one hand, the
institution strengthened his formal authority and his capacity to hold influential
power but, on the other, the institution might symbolize an educational tradition
which would seem to be at odds with the view of education that Bourdieu had devel-
oped in his empirical research of the 1960s. The issue which Bourdieu explored in an
article of 1975 on fashion – ‘Le couturier et sa griffe’ (Bourdieu and Delsaut, 1975) –
was relevant to his own intellectual situation. He wanted to be able to harness the
power of the institution without forfeiting the convictions which arose from his per-
sonal habitus. From the mid-1980s, Bourdieu was acutely conscious of the same ten-
sion in the relationship between his international label (griffe) and the specific social
conditions which generated his research, his conceptual framework, and his pub-
lished findings. ‘The genesis of the concepts of habitus and field’ (1985) was an
attempt to apply reflexively to his own concepts the approach which he had accepted
in earlier articles such as ‘Genèse et structure du champ religieux’ (1971). If, as
Bourdieu argued in Le métier de sociologue (1968), concepts are tools, elements of an
ars inveniendi, what happens to them when they become severed from the conditions
in which they were instrumentally effective? What is the appropriate reaction to
their being used pragmatically for different purposes in different contexts?

Cultural Analyses within an Internationalizing ‘Field’

Bourdieu worried about this fundamental issue and his anxiety lay behind much of
his work between 1985 and 1995 by which time, it seemed, he almost decided that
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