Page 163 - Cultural Theory

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••• Derek Robbins •••

There was a reverse appropriation occurring at the same time. Bourdieu quoted
Williams’s Culture and Society several times in ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’ –
although it is clear that Bourdieu would have regarded Williams’s position in advocat-
ing the recognition of ‘structures of feeling’ in history as a form of soft structuralism.
Williams’s work provided Bourdieu with some analysis on which to base his post-
structuralist critique. Bourdieu ran a seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the
late 1960s out of which emerged his analyses of Flaubert and Manet. Bourdieu was
developing a sociology of culture rather than an analysis of the relations between
hypostatized ‘culture’ and ‘society’. At the same time, Passeron translated Hoggart’s
The Uses of Literacy as La Culture du Pauvre in 1970. Passeron’s introduction shifted
Hoggart’s work out of the English context of literary and cultural study into the
French field of social anthropology. Equally, this was the period in the early 1970s
when the French reception of the work of Basil Bernstein reinforced the association
between language codes, linguistic capital and educational achievement. Those
aspects of English thinking which were linking the sociologies of language, educa-
tion, and culture were absorbed within the Centre de sociologie européenne. When,
therefore, Bourdieu launched the Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1975, he
was able to appropriate the theorizing of the English New Left intellectuals on his
own terms before they began to appropriate him for their purposes. Close attention
to the publication of extracts from the work of Williams, Thompson, Hobsbawm and
Klingender in the Actes de la recherche of 1976, 1977, and 1978 would show that the
contextualization had the effect of situating the received texts in their socio-historical
contexts. Bourdieu’s endeavour had the effect of de-theorizing the texts of those
intellectuals who were beginning to look to Bourdieu to provide theoretical legiti-
macy for their unreflexive theorizing.

The Production and Reception of La Distinction as a
Case Study of Anglo-French Conceptual Exchange

The French production of La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (1979) and its
reception in the UK provides one case study of the tension in framing Bourdieu’s
work on culture. It is a tension which throws light on the trans-national and social
conditions of the struggle for dominance between the sociology of culture and
Cultural Studies.
Bourdieu’s text of 1979 consolidated an account which he had offered, with
Monique de Saint Martin, of an ‘anatomy of taste’, published in Actes de la recherche
in 1976. That text was based on empirical research originally undertaken in 1963 at
the same time as both the work which was separately used for articulating the notion
of ‘cultural capital’ in relation to the prior knowledge and tastes of students (pub-
lished in Les Héritiers, Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964) and the work deployed for the
analysis of the social uses of photography (published in Un Art moyen, Bourdieu et al.,
1965). The 1976 article also drew on further researches which had been carried out
in 1967–68. The thinking which led to the writing of La Distinction stood in relation
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