Page 165 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-08.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 154

••• Derek Robbins •••

‘La production de la croyance: contribution à une économie des biens symboliques’
(1977). All the translations were made by Richard Nice who was a member of staff at
the time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham. Garnham wrote a short Editorial to the number which was headed by
a quotation from the last few sentences of Nice’s translation of Bourdieu’s Esquisse
d’une théorie de la pratique (1972), published as Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1977.
These sentences read:

The denial of economy and of economic interest, which in pre-capitalist soci-
eties at first took place on a ground from which it had to be expelled in order
for economy to be constituted as such, thus finds its favourite refuge in the
domain of art and culture, the site of pure consumption – of money, of course,
but also of time convertible into money. The world of art, a sacred island sys-
tematically and ostentatiously opposed to the profane, everyday world of pro-
duction, a sanctuary for gratuitous distinterested activity in a universe given
over to money and self-interest, offers, like theology in a past epoch, an imag-
inary anthropology obtained by denial of all the negations really brought about
by the economy.
(Bourdieu, 1977: 197, in Garnham, 1980: 207)

Garnham began his Editorial by seeking to relate Bourdieu’s work to the agenda for
Cultural Studies suggested by Stuart Hall in his ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’,
published in Issue 1, Volume 2 of the new journal. Hall had contended that neither
‘structuralism’ nor ‘culturalism’ would do ‘as self-sufficient paradigms of study’ but
that they did have ‘a centrality to the field which all other contenders lack because
between them they address what must be the core problem of Cultural Studies’.
Garnham continued to quote Hall’s account of this ‘core problem’, saying of Hall
that: ‘On the solution to this ‘core problem’ will turn the capacity of Cultural Studies
to supersede the endless oscillations between idealism and reductionism … They
continue to hold out the promise of a properly materialist theory of culture’
(Garnham, 1980: 207). Certainly Bourdieu was seeking to avoid both idealism and
reductionism but, as we have seen, this meant, for Bourdieu, recognizing the ‘econ-
omy’ of cultural goods without accepting economistic reductionsim. Bourdieu was
not seeking to ‘hold out the promise of a properly materialist theory of culture’ but,
rather, the promise of a properly sociological theory of culture which would have the
capacity to subject the economy of cultural production and consumption to socio-
logical analysis. It is perhaps significant that the opening sentence of La distinction
quoted above was curtailed in Richard Nice’s translation. Bourdieu’s bald: ‘Il y a une
économie des biens culturels, mais cette économie a une logique spécifique qu’il faut
dégager pour échapper à l’économisme.’ (Bourdieu, 1979: i) and the following half-
sentence are rendered by Nice in the following way: ‘There is an economy of cultural
goods, but it has a specific logic. Sociology endeavours to establish the conditions in
which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, …’
(Bourdieu, 1984a: 1). The explicitly adverse remark about economism is suppressed

• 154 •