Page 164 - Cultural Theory

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••• Framing Bourdieu •••

to previous empirical research in rather the same way as did Homo Academicus
(1984b) to the sociological analysis of structures of knowledge in Paris on the eve of
the events of May 1968. In both cases, the later texts transformed the structuralism
which had influenced the earlier enquiries and sought to offer, instead, an account
of the dynamics of social position-taking. Whereas the earlier empirical research had
assumed that knowledge and tastes were reflections of class conditions, the later,
summative texts argued that the choices of acquired learning and taste are strategies
adopted by social agents in finding their ways through a constantly changing social
system. Between 1963 and 1976 Bourdieu had, in other words, rejected the kind of
analysis of culture offered in a Marxist tradition represented at the time in the work
of Lucien Goldmann, but he had equally resisted the alternative temptation to regard
cultural artefacts as somehow transcendent or beyond sociological scrutiny. Referring
deliberately to his article of 1972 entitled ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’,
Bourdieu began his Introduction to La distinction with the following sentence:

Il y a une économie des biens culturels, mais cette économie a une logique spé-
cifique qu’il faut dégager pour échapper à l’économisme. Cela en travaillant
d’abord à établir les conditions dans lesquelles sont produits les consommateurs
de biens culturels et leur goût, … [There is an economy of cultural goods, but
this economy has a specific logic which we must disentangle so as to avoid
economism. That needs to be done by first working to establish the conditions
in which the consumers of cultural goods and their taste are produced, … ]
(Bourdieu, 1979: i; my translation)

This, tacitly, was Bourdieu’s dismissal of Marxism while, at the same time, it antici-
pates his later rejection of neo-liberal economism. Equally, however, Bourdieu began
the first chapter in the following way:

Il est peu de cas où la sociologie ressemble autant à une psychanalyse sociale
que lorsqu’elle s’affronte à un objet comme le goût, … La sociologie est là sur
le terrain par excellence de la dénégation du social.
(Bourdieu, 1979: 9)
‘Sociology is rarely more akin to social psychoanalysis than when it confronts an
object like taste, … Here the sociologist finds himself in the area par excellence
of the denial of the social.’
(Bourdieu, 1984, 9: 11)

It was precisely this balance in Bourdieu’s work that appealed to the English New Left
which was seeking to secure an institutionalized academic identity through the
establishment of Cultural Studies. Volume 2, Number 3 of Media, Culture and Society,
July, 1980, edited by Nicholas Garnham, focused on the work of Bourdieu. The num-
ber contained an article by Garnham and Williams entitled: ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the
sociology of culture: an introduction’ as well as two extracts from La distinction pub-
lished in advance of the translation of the full text, and a translation of Bourdieu’s
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