Page 162 - Cultural Theory

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••• Framing Bourdieu •••

his griffe was beyond his personal control and that he could only still exercise the
kind of influence he wanted by direct social action and by adopting communicative
devices which would by-pass the global market of theoretical texts – the manage-
ment of the publishing venture, Liber: Raisons d’agir; participation in the production
of the film, La sociologie est un sport de combat; and active encouragement of European
social movements. Bourdieu’s concern manifested itself forcibly in the Preface to the
English Edition of Homo Academicus (1988) and in articles which discussed the mis-
representation of his work: ‘Concluding remarks: for a sociogenetic understanding of
intellectual works’ (1993), which outlined a framework for analyzing international
intellectual transmission: ‘Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des
idées’ (1990) and ‘Les ruses de la raison impérialiste’ (2000), which directly consid-
ered conceptual transfer such as most of the essays collected in Practical Reason
(1998b), and which reflected more generally on the international function or poten-
tial function of intellectuals: ‘Epilogue: on the possibility of a field of world sociol-
ogy’ (1991a) and ‘The corporatism of the universal: the role of intellectuals in the
modern world’ (1989).
Although La Distinction was manifestly about culture, therefore, Bourdieu did not see
himself as making a contribution to Cultural Studies or to the development of Cultural
Theory. Throughout the 1970s, Bourdieu was regarded in England as a sociologist of
education, as the French counterpart to Basil Bernstein. The New Left English theorists
who were responsible for the development of Cultural Studies had all come from intel-
lectual backgrounds in the Arts and Humanities and History. They had little to do with
the ‘new directions for the sociology of education’ which were launched by the book
edited in 1971 by M.F.D. Young entitled Knowledge and Control. It contained two arti-
cles by Basil Bernstein and two articles by Bourdieu – ‘Intellectual field and creative pro-
ject’ and ‘Systems of education and systems of thought’. These articles by Bourdieu
were reproduced several times in England during the 1970s within the field of the soci-
ology of education which flourished as a result of the establishment of the Open
University. It was the influence of Richard Nice that effected the transition of the recep-
tion of Bourdieu’s work from the field of education to the emerging field of Cultural
Studies. Nice translated two short articles by Bourdieu in 1977 when he was working at
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, in the same year as the publication of
his translation of Bourdieu’s La reproduction. Stuart Hall discussed Bourdieu’s work in
his On Ideology (1978) while the new journal Media, Culture and Society carried the first
translated extracts from La distinction in its second number (1980) with an introductory
article on Bourdieu written by Nick Garnham and Raymond Williams entitled ‘Pierre
Bourdieu and the sociology of culture’. Bourdieu had become a theoretical reference
point for those English radical literary critics and historians who colluded in a mécon-
naissance of their institutional position by transferring the capital associated with the
Humanities to the new field of Cultural Studies. The adoption of Cultural Studies was
a strategy of reconversion which sustained their institutional power. Bourdieu’s work
was received ‘theoretically’ in order to legitimize cultural analysis, and this occurred
without any reference to Bourdieu’s educational analyses or to the epistemology out-
lined in Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique.

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