Introduction
In his preface to the English-language edition of Distinction, Bourdieu (1989: xiii–xiv) writes that he is undertaking a task that ‘transgresses one of the fundamental taboos of the intellectual world, in relating intellectual products and producers to their social conditions of existence’. Moreover, and paradoxically, it is a task that has to be carried out with a singular regard for and compliance with intellectual propriety, ‘which condemn[s] as barbarous any attempt to treat culture, that present incarnation of the sacred, as an object of science’. The ‘immoderate ambition’ of Distinction is to provide
a scientific answer to the old questions of Kant’s critique of judgement, by seeking in the structure of the social classes the basis of the systems of classification which structure perception of the social world and designates the objects of aesthetic enjoyment.
The taboo to which Bourdieu refers is the attempt to locate, contextualize, analyse and explain high cultural texts and practices (art, literature, ballet) in terms of the logics, discourses and socio-cultural politics of the everyday world. More specifically, and much as he does with his book on Heidegger (Bourdieu 1991a), Bourdieu seeks to demonstrate how the claim to autonomy emanating from a discursive regime always and necessarily enacts and constitutes the opposite of that claim: the point is to endow the subject’s (the artist, the philosopher, the field of art) position, work and practices with a particular value within the socio-cultural world.
The efficacy of art-as-culture is tied, at least from the perspective of Kantian aesthetics, to its ‘disinterestedness’, which ‘to Kant means the lack of interference from desire…undisturbed, uninterfered with…by immediate utilitarian ends’ (Wellek 1981: 229–30). However, Bourdieu argues that this claim to disinterestedness is demonstrably ‘interested’—or, as Frow characterizes it, ‘socially functional’ (Frow 1995: 29). This functionality is an integral aspect of the operations that Bourdieu describes and analyses in his educational work (particularly Bourdieu 2013). In an earlier chapter, we dealt in detail with the relationship that he posits between pedagogical practices, the privileging and naturalizing of forms of culture as capital and the reproductive processes of symbolic power and domination. In Distinction, Bourdieu gives this study another point of focus, which involves identifying, analysing and explaining how regimes of cultural production, consumption and literacy dispose subjects to understand and view the world, and their place in it, in a manner that is commensurate with, and follows on from, the dictates and interests of the dominant. Rather than being separated off from the world and its mechanisms of alienation (various forms of economic relations) and power struggles (class conflicts, the naturalization and universalization of the arbitrary, the privileging of certain forms of cultural literacy), Bourdieu argues that, in actuality, art-as-culture turns away from the world in order to better intervene in it. Aesthetic culture and values
do not obey an autonomous aesthetic logic; they dispose distinctions of class into distinctions of taste, and thereby strengthen the boundaries between classes. But they also assert the right of the ruling class to legitimate domination over other classes. Bourdieu argues this through an economic metaphor: competence in cultural codes constitutes a ‘cultural capital’ which is unequally distributed among social classes (although it has the appearance of an innate talent, a ‘natural gift’). (Frow 1995: 29–30)
Bourdieu’s account of the field of high or ‘legitimate’ culture, understood as an embodiment of Kantian aesthetics, has four main points. First, the field-as-discourse is characterized by a set of values and dispositions informed by the imperatives, struggles and proclivities of time and place (classical versus romantic art) and across different activities (establishing a brand identity for the wines of Château Margaux). Second, as a discursive formation, it makes the world over in its own image, rather than simply describing it (by way of a preference for abstract rather than representational art, or stream-of-consciousness writing over didactic narratives). Third, it reproduces and naturalizes an aesthetic disposition-as-habitus manifested in objective practices (attendance at museums and art galleries). Finally, and following on from the previous two points, the aesthetic disposition functions as an apparatus-as-ethos (taste, disinterestedness) that facilitates, naturalizes, justifies and sustains power and symbolic domination.
For Bourdieu, the process begins with an interrogation of what is meant, or has been made to mean, by the word ‘culture’. In the Introduction to Distinction (1989), he proposes to subject the notion of culture as an aristocratic and privileged domain to a socio-cultural analysis. Culture-as-value and ethos is to be reconsidered in light of the concept, germane to anthropology and sociology, of culture as a set of categories, relations and codes whereby the natural and social worlds are imagined into existence and experienced as an interrelated set of meaningful entities. What Bourdieu proposes, in effect, is simultaneously to bring high culture and its activities and practices within the purview of the social sciences, and to extend the scientific understanding of culture and cultural practices by introducing into scientific analysis a recognition of the discursive effects of dominant modes of culture:
Sociology endeavours to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them, are produced, and at the same time to describe the different ways of appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a particular moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the constitution of the mode of appropriation that is considered legitimate. But one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture’, in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense. (1989: 1)
Prior to Distinction, Bourdieu—along with a number of collaborators—produced two studies (Bourdieu et al. 1990; Bourdieu, Chamboredon & Passeron 1991) of cultural values, codes, practices and forms of consumption using empirical methodologies associated with sociology. The first of these, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, uses study groups, questionnaires, surveys and statistics to uncover how, with regard to photography, ‘each group or class regulates and organizes the individual practice by conferring upon it functions attuned to their own interests’, so that ‘the meaning and function conferred upon photography are directly related to the structure of the group’ (1990: 8). The empirical evidence leads the authors to several conclusions: first, that there are a number of aesthetic codes that dispose subjects to understand what photography means to them, and what its legitimate or relevant functions are; second, that this experience and understanding of photography are linked to class positions; third, that for working-class groups photography is categorized and contextualized in terms of its use value; and finally, that the code that informs the function of photography also determines what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate photographic objects. These different aesthetic codes not only correspond to different class positions, but also mark out the limits or parameters of a particular class literacy and epistemology. A photograph that depicts a family wedding, or provides information about a news story, is explicable and legitimate within a working-class aesthetic partly because it corresponds with or is produced through familiar and naturalized categories of perception and perspective. Bourdieu argues that photographic practices and objects that are the product of a high cultural aesthetic—that is, for which there is no obvious point or utility, and which approach or render their subject in an indirect or less than literal manner—do not make sense to a working class demographic. He refers in Distinction (1989: 43) to the:
Refusal of the meaningless…image, which has neither sense nor interest, or of the ambiguous image means refusing to treat it as a finality without purpose, as an image signifying itself, and therefore having no other referent than itself. The value of photography is measured by the interest of the information it conveys, and by the clarity with which it fulfils this informative function, in short, its legibility, which itself varies with the legibility of its intention or function, the judgement it provokes being more or less favourable depending on the expressive adequacy of the signifier to the signified.
In The Love of Art (Bourdieu, Darbel & Schnapper 1990), Bourdieu and his co-authors extended their empirical research into the area of museum attendance, undertaking ‘a systematic survey of the European museum-going public’ in order to identify ‘its social and educational characteristics, its attitude to museums and its artistic preferences’ (1990: 5). The main theoretical issue at stake is the validity or otherwise of the proposition that, because high culture constitutes a form of value that is neither arbitrary nor reducible to specific temporal, spatial, social or demographic considerations, then it follows, first, that there is a natural and universally translational—if relatively rare—literacy regarding, and appreciation of, culture-as-art; and second, that possession of this facility marks out the subject as a member of an elite, elect and privileged community. The dictum that underpins Distinction, which is that ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1989: 6), is largely derived from and predicated upon the critique of the notion of a specific cultural literacy-as-universal value undertaken and accomplished in The Love of Art. It is extended in Distinction to take into account a range of cultural forms, not just those valorized and appreciated by the ‘self-legitimating imagination of the “happy few”’ (Bourdieu 1989: 31). Distinction both complements and extends Bourdieu’s educational and early cultural work through its analysis of the relation between symbolic power, class and cultural consumption, with specific regard to the concept of ‘taste’. The ‘happy few’ are distinguished by their ‘taste’, which can be defined as a recognized and recognizable disposition and literacy played out in practices of cultural evaluation and consumption. Whereas a text such as Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990) emphasizes how forms of knowledge and styles of self-presentation differentiate those who belong in the education system from those who don’t, in Distinction Bourdieu shows, by way of a lengthy empirical study, how the habitus associated with dominant groups or class positions produces dispositions that orient subjects towards the ‘right kinds’ of cultural literacy, appreciation, categorization and consumption.
Distinction follows on from, and develops, the work of Photography and The Love of Art in terms of the approach, breadth, complexity and ambition of its methodological and theoretical apparatus, which provides the empirical data that facilitates the mapping of social space in terms of the volume, forms and qualities of subjects’ cultural capital. This is not, as Bourdieu explains in Language and Symbolic Power (2005b) merely a question of establishing a correspondence between capital and social space, although it does allow for the construction of ‘a simplified model of the social field as a whole, a model which allows one to plot each agent’s position in all possible spaces of the game’ (2005b: 230). A number of other complicating factors need to be taken into account, such as the relationship between dynamics of the field of power and the individual cultural fields-as-games, each with its own discourses, logics, regimes of capital, and forms and categories of identity. More generally, there is also the question of the relation between cultural capital, class, and social factors and identity categories, including ethnicity, social geography and most particularly gender. Bourdieu claims, in Distinction (1989: 107), that ‘a class is defined in an essential respect by the place and value it gives to the two sexes and to their socially constituted dispositions’. Nevertheless:
On the basis of the knowledge of the space of positions, one can carve out classes in the logical sense of the word…sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who, being placed in similar conditions and submitted to similar types of conditioning, have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices and adopting similar stances. This ‘class on paper’ has the theoretical existence which belongs to all theories: as the product of an explanatory classification, one which is altogether similar to that of zoologists or botanists, it allows one to explain and predict the practices and properties of the things classified—including their propensity to constitute groups. It is not really a class, an actual class, in the sense of being a group, a group mobilized for struggle; at most one could say that it is a probable class, insofar as it is a set of agents which will place fewer objective obstacles in the way of efforts of mobilization than any other set of agents. (Bourdieu 2005b: 231–2).
For Bourdieu, classes are derived from the same empirical-theoretical nexus—and consequently have a similar objective status—as that of the habitus and cultural fields: the empirical methodology that Bourdieu employs in Distinction (and even more comprehensively in The State Nobility (1996)) is, as the above references to zoology and botany indicate, strongly mathematical, statistical and, by extension, scientific. The specific statistical technique that drives and organizes the analysis of data in Distinction is termed ‘multiple correspondence analysis’ (MCA), which is similar to factor analysis but more suitable for ‘categorical variables’ in that it ‘allows us to take a relatively high number of non-numerical variables and to derive from them a small number of numerical variables’ (Crossley 2008: 91). It allows the researcher, ‘using the level of…association between each variable and the other’ (2008: 92), to proceed from quantitative information derived from responses given in a questionnaire about forms and volumes of capital to qualitative and evaluative associations that are meaningful and predictive above and beyond the numerical status of those responses:
We might find, for example, that ‘having a degree’ is very strongly associated with the other cultural variables on our survey, achieving a score that is three times higher than ‘owning fifty or more books’. In that case, to simplify somewhat, survey respondents would score three points on our cultural capital scale for having a degree but only one point for owning fifty or more books. We might also find that some variables which we had assumed to be facets of cultural capital have very little positive association with others, such that we are persuaded to exclude them from our measure. (2008: 92)
The MCA maps and other methodological techniques that Bourdieu uses to identify socio-cultural objectivities are sophisticated, but ‘like many other statistical techniques’ are based upon ‘decisions and manipulations that affect outcomes…Bourdieu does not just ‘discover’ that social space consists of two key dimensions (volume and composition of capital)…This ‘discovery’…depends upon interpretation’ (Crossley 2008: 92).
This problematical aspect of the methodology carries over into the complex question of the relationship between different regimes of capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic) and Bourdieu’s account of the extent to and circumstances in which they are equivalent, commensurate, exchangeable or transferrable. John Frow (1995) argues, for instance, that Bourdieu’s failure to adequately theorize the relation between cultural and economic capital undermines his proposition that the dominant class is constituted of symbiotic groups that share socio-political functions (the naturalization of power, the furthering of their own interests), given that no explanation is advanced as to how and why, and on what evidence or basis, such symbiosis is effected and sustained. Intellectuals, for instance, are characterized as the dominated faction of the dominant because they are rich in cultural capital (but poor in economic capital). Their membership of the dominant class is predicated on a recognition (on the part of the field of power and the holders of economic capital) of the validity of their cultural capital, so that while ‘the structure of the distribution of economic capital is symmetrical and opposite to that of cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1989: 120), and the ‘two forms of capital are mutually exclusive’ (Frow 1995: 39), they are somehow ‘mutually convertible’ (1995: 40). However:
In the last instance symbolic and real capital are not equivalent, and this means that there is a real question about the class location of intellectuals…Bourdieu posits that possessors of economic and cultural capital constitute two asymmetrical (dominant/dominated) faction of the ‘same’ class. It is difficult, however—given that class is not defined in terms of functional identity—to know what establishes this sameness other than the assumed equivalence of the two forms of capital. Its effect is to bring about a systematically misleading conflation of the intelligentsia and its culture with the bourgeoisie and its culture—a conflation that is entirely the consequence of the initial methodological decision. (1995: 40)
These and other similar critiques were productive in the sense that, while Bourdieu frequently complained about the extent to which his critics had missed the point—‘Here I open a parenthesis,’ he writes in Practical Reason, ‘in order to dispel a frequent, yet disastrous, misunderstanding about the title Distinction’ (Bourdieu 1998c: 9)—they doubtlessly helped to bring about a reappraisal and reconsideration, in works such as In Other Words (Bourdieu 1990b) and An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), of important questions regarding the socio-political functions of the field of culture, the role of the field of power in determining and transforming regimes of capital, and the relationship between different forms of cultural literacy and the operations and mechanisms of symbolic power. They also led to the development of enhanced accounts of the field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993a; 1996), of the nature and extent of intellectual and scientific reflexivity (Bourdieu 2004) and of the relationship between economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 2005b). Finally, in Masculine Domination, Bourdieu extends his theorizing of the relationship between gender, class and distinction to take into account the relationship between gender-inflected fields and the field of power (2001: 105) and the role played by women, often within specific cultural fields such as fashion and art, in ‘the conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital within the domestic unit’ (2001: 101).
Distinction
In his introduction to Distinction, Bourdieu (1989: 2) claims that, ‘The definition of cultural nobility is the stake in a struggle which has gone on unceasingly, from the seventeenth century to the present day, between groups differing in their ideas of culture and to works of art.’ He argues that this struggle, which is in the first instance about what constitutes culture—or, more specifically, culture-as-universal value—is an integral part of the wider operations and mechanisms of symbolic power and domination, which are played out at the levels of class (broadly, dominant/dominated), gender relations, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age and social geography (in a French context, Paris as opposed to the provinces). The field of cultural production is the set of sites and spaces charged with producing, inflecting, organizing, disseminating, valorizing and explicating socio-cultural narratives, representations, discourses and meanings. Its main function, as characterized in Bourdieu’s work from the period of his educational sociology, up to and including the three cultural case studies (Photography, The Love of Art and Distinction), is to naturalize its own status, value and regime of capital vis-à-vis the field of power and the wider social field, while facilitating the operations of symbolic power and the right to rule of the dominant class (of which it is a dominated faction). In short, high culture attests to the aristocracies of socio-political class and aesthetic taste, twin ‘essentialisms’ that ‘set no intrinsic value on the deeds and misdeeds enrolled in the records and registries of bureaucratic memory’ (Bourdieu 1989: 24).
This continuity between cultural valorization and social reproduction and domination is played out, within social networks and relations, in the tacit but authorized presumption of a ‘pre-established harmony…between goods and taste’ (Bourdieu 1993b: 108). Taste is not simply a matter of knowing which cultural names, forms and genres to privilege; rather, it manifests as a naturalized ease and certainty in moving through cultural spaces, activities and performances, and knowing how and when to behave in specific contexts (polite applause during a break in a ballet performance, standing and clapping enthusiastically when the conductor motions the orchestra to rise at the end of an opera, observing a thoughtful and quasi-reverential silence standing in front of a Rothko painting). The ‘correct’ judgements, categorizations, responses, discourses and interests (opera over Canto-pop, tennis rather than rugby) constitute the elaboration of a code of symbolic belonging to which the key is having an aesthetic sympathy and disposition, manifested as a privileging of disinterestedness over enthusiasm, form over content and canonical rather than popular valorization:
tastes…emerge as choices among practices…and properties…through which taste, in the sense of the principles underlying these choices, manifests itself. In order for there to be tastes, there have to be goods that are classified, as being in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste, ‘distinguished’ or ‘vulgar’—classified and thereby classifying, hierarchized and hierarchizing—and people endowed with principles of classification, taste, that enable them to identify, among those goods, those that suit them, that are ‘to their taste’. In fact there can be taste without goods…in the sense of a principle of classification, a principle of division, a capacity for distinction…and goods without taste. (1993b: 108)
Distinction-as-taste, a recognizable and more or less universally valid form of cultural capital, attracts other forms of capital (professional positions, connections), and by extension helps to smooth the path of the subject through school and university, and across social, bureaucratic and business fields. By and through this process and regime of cultural performativity, like recognizes like, and the dominant reprise their domination. On the other side of the symbolic coin, the dominated disqualify themselves in a variety of ways, such as their bodily hexis, clothes, choice of sports and lack of discernment regarding fine wine and food, and are then disposed to treat their exclusion as a case of ‘not having the right stuff ’. In The State Nobility, a lengthy and empirically driven study of the French class system, Bourdieu extends this analysis to the nameless and invisible ‘aristocratic club’ that dominates French socio-cultural, educational, political, bureaucratic and business life, without any explicit discursive articulation or demonstration of power, purpose or privilege (Bourdieu 1996). The first principle in Bourdieu’s study of the logic of social domination
is the vexing yet obdurate relationship of collision and collusion, autonomy and complicity, distance and dependence, between material and symbolic power. As Weber noted well, in every structure of domination, ‘those privileged through existing political, social and economic orders’ are never content to wield their power unvarnished, and to impose their prerogatives naked. (Wacquant 1996: ix)
Bourdieu argues that this symbiotic (or, perhaps more correctly, parasitic) relationship has largely been consummated and consecrated, since the second part of the nineteenth century (Bourdieu 1989: 93), within the pedagogical regimes and practices of the cultural field of education. This complex of forces has been, and continues to be, subject to the dynamics of and shifts in the field of power. The struggles between the various factions of the dominant class to define, within educational contexts, the relation between culture, value and subjectivity constitute one of the complicating factors in attempts to analyse the dynamic of economic, educational and cultural capital. As Bourdieu writes, ‘It is…clear that the difficulty of analysis was due to the fact that what the very tools of analysis…educational level and social origin…designate is being fought out in struggles which have the objects of analysis…as their prize in reality itself ’ (1989: 92). He argues that the contemporary game of culture is played out
between those who are identified with the scholastic definition of culture and the scholastic mode of acquisition, and those who defend a ‘non-institutional’ culture and relation to culture. The latter, though mainly recruited from the oldest sector of the bourgeoisie, receive unquestioned support from writers and artists and from the charismatic conception of the production and consumption of art, of which they are the inventors and guarantors. Battles over authors and schools, which hold the limelight of the literary or artistic stage, conceal more important struggles, such as those which opposed teachers (from whose ranks, throughout the nineteenth century, critics were often recruited) and writers, who tend to be more closely linked, by origin and ‘connections’, to the dominant faction of the dominant class; or the endless struggles between the dominated factions as a whole and the dominant faction over the definition of the accomplished man and the education designed to produce him. (1989: 92)
By way of example, in England in the mid-nineteenth century, the public school emphasis on high culture (predominantly classical literature and aesthetics) gradually gave way to an increasing preoccupation with team games and physical pursuits such as football and rugby, which served as a means of accommodating and developing a notion of the subject and the body that had little in common with Greek athletics or the Renaissance courtly tradition of formal and technical exercises, both of which were widely associated with the effete pursuits of physical beauty, the harmonious configuration of body and spirit, and intellectual refinement. The point was to develop a form of character broadly understood as an amalgam of self-reliance, loyalty, endurance, teamwork and self-sacrifice. Games-as-sport supposedly equipped boys with a set of transferable skills and strengths that could be applied to important socio-political spheres such as government, business or colonial administration.
At one level, this was explicable in terms of the fairly conventional notion of the body being trained and learning to endure and overcome physical and psychological stress and pain for the greater benefit of the team. This neatly encapsulated the apparent contradiction that public school sport developed leadership by fostering a culture of self-abnegation. Victorian public school students embodied the strengths and virtues of the dominant class faction, and provided these leaders-in-waiting with a set of durable beliefs, dispositions, attitudes and a bodily hexis—a habitus—that served as a marker of socio-cultural distinction and reinforced, valorized and justified power differentials at the level of class, race, ethnicity, social geography, gender and sexuality. Boys would leave a public school secure in the belief, first, that they were English gentlemen and, second, that there was a necessary articulation between that identity and moral, physical and cultural superiority—and, further down the track, military, social, political and economic success. Immersion in this culture generated a series of performances that were strictly scripted, choreographed, assured and foreclosed. Moreover, practices weren’t judged on their results so much as their form: like a rugby player who tackles, chases and struggles long after the game has gone, the right kind of failure was heroic and especially laudable. This partly accounts for the strong anti-intellectual culture in public schools: determination, action, strength and endurance defined masculinity, while boys were taught that ‘most material forms of intelligence were slightly effeminate’ (Mangan 1981: 106).
Similar kinds of struggles are played out, in terms of the privileging or otherwise of values, discourses, lifestyles and regimes of capital, between different factions of the field of cultural production. This praxis effectively functions as an economy without economics, and as an inversion of the logics of classical capitalism: Bourdieu refers to the ‘competition for rare goods and practices, whose particularity no doubt owes more to the logic of supply…the specific forms of competition between the producers, than to the logic of demand and taste’ (Bourdieu 1989: 99–100). This set of relations is further complicated by factors such as the socio-cultural trajectories and literacies of subjects, the extent to which cultural capital is valorized within schools and academic institutions, the levels of symbolic capital associated with those institutions (manifested in the connections, accent, sense of aristocratic ease and the universality of capital that distinguishes an Oxbridge education from one acquired in a provincial university) and, following on from the previous points, the relation between and relative value of acquired and inherited cultural capital. As Bourdieu (1989: 80–1) explains, by way of a reflection on the difficulty of integrating these and other associated factors into the methodological and analytical apparatus utilized in Distinction:
the differences which the relationship to educational capital leaves unexplained, and which mainly appear in the relationship with social origin, may be due to the differences in the mode of acquisition of the cultural capital now possessed. But they may also be due to differences in the degree to which this capital is recognized and guaranteed by academic qualifications: a certain proportion of the capital actually owned may not have received academic sanction, when it has been directly inherited and even when it has been acquired in school…If the same volume of educational capital…may correspond to different volumes of socially profitable cultural capital, this is first because although the educational system…governs the conversion of inherited capital into educational capital, it does not have a monopoly on the production of cultural capital. It gives its sanction to inherited capital to a greater or lesser extent…because, at different moments…levels and in different sectors, what it demands is more or less identical to what the ‘inheritors’ bring in, and because it acknowledges…value in other forms of embodied capital…such as docility towards the institution itself.
The question of the relationship between educational regimes and institutions, and the valorization or otherwise of embodied capital is usually played out as a recognition of what is recognized: in other words, in terms of the privileging of specific forms of embodied capital such as the performance of a sense of natural aristocratic ease, or a literacy with regard to and demonstrated appreciation of obscure artists, canonical texts, cultural genres and aesthetic values, which are treated by schools and universities as markers of ‘belonging’. This continuity extends into and across other cultural fields and practices of cultural consumption, where it is accentuated and manifested as taste: in the first instance, as an ability to differentiate and distinguish between ‘the taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection’, and second as a disposition for ‘pure pleasure, pleasure purified of pleasure’ as opposed to ‘facile pleasure…a pleasure of the senses’ (Bourdieu 1989: 6). The observation that, ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (1989: 6) incorporates both aspects of the reciprocal (and circular) process whereby literacy with regard to what constitutes ‘the right kind’ of culture and cultural consumption and appreciation turns back to valorize the subject as a ‘truly human man’ (1989: 6), marked by ‘moral excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation’ (1989: 6). It is through this process that the capacity for and disposition with regard to disinterestedness take on a theological dimension: as Bourdieu writes, ‘The culture which results from this magical division is sacred’ (1989: 6).
Bourdieu makes reference to two related cases that demonstrate how taste-as-disinterestedness is played out at a discursive level. ‘Proof enough’ is found in two separate reviews, both published in Le Monde, which deal with nakedness on the ballet stage and in the musical production of Hair, and which ‘might almost have been written for the delight of the sociologist’ (1989: 6):
What struck me most is this: nothing could be obscene on the stage of our premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, sylphs, sprites or Bachae, retain an inviolate purity.
There are obscene postures, the stimulated [sic] intercourse which offends the eye…As for the nude scenes, what can one say…I will not say it as chaste or innocent, for nothing commercial can be so described…In Hair, the nakedness fails to be symbolic.
There are a number of discursive markers across both texts that reinforce the distinction between the body as a predominantly corporeal and sexual entity and as an aestheticized object. These are overlaid on a further distinction that is implied in the first account and stated in the second, which is that the intrusion of commercial logics and imperatives alienates both the body-as-object of the gaze, and potentially the gaze itself. While the description of the naked bodies in Hair as being ‘neither chaste or innocent’ seems to discursively reprise the reference to ‘obscenity’ (in the first account), and what presumably should have been translated as ‘simulated intercourse’ (in the second), and to damn the musical for bringing sexuality into a public place, what is perhaps more at stake is that the bodies in Hair have, in Arjun Appadurai’s (1988) terms, entered the commodity phase of their cultural lives. The two sets of bodies have passed in the opposite ontological direction: one is consecrated as pure value-of-itself, while the other is turned into things to be bought and sold in the market. The ballerinas are inviolate with regard to coarse meaning, while the dancers are stripped of any possibility of redemption-through-meaning (‘the nakedness fails to be symbolic’).
This denial, on the part of aesthetic culture, of the legitimacy of both the corporeal and the commercial gazes, and the imperatives and forms of enjoyment associated with them, ‘implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied…with the…distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane…and this is why art and cultural consumption…fulfil a social function of legitimating social difference’ (Bourdieu 1989: 7). Bourdieu argues that a sense of distinction simultaneously constitutes a regime of difference-as-value and a form of symbolic power that is put to work to naturalize the domination of classes and class factions. We will discuss the wider processes, forms, techniques and mechanisms of symbolic power in more detail in a later chapter; however, the singularly most significant and influential facet of symbolic domination and reproduction is the habitus. It can be characterized as a regime of naturalized values, categories and perspectives that both sees through subjects by way of the classificatory grids and categories that make the world explicable and meaningful, and that provides the basis of all calculations-as-extensions of the subject’s epistemological relation to and immersion in the world, particularly with regard to potential socio-cultural trajectories and lifestyles.
Conclusion
In the transition that Bourdieu makes from Outline of a Theory of Practice (1978) to The Logic of Practice (1990c), he focuses on the relation between the habitus and socio-cultural practices, and by extension the issues and problems attendant upon attempts to theorize, identify, objectify and explain the logics that inform or animate those practices. These problems are of an epistemological order: ‘The logic of practice,’ he writes, ‘can only be grasped through constructions which destroy it as such’ (1990c: 11). Consequently, these constructions ‘are only valid as long as they are taken for…logical models giving an account of the observed facts in the most coherent and economical way; and they become false and dangerous as soon as they are treated as the real principle of practices’ (1990c: 11). Bourdieu’s theory of the logic of practice insists that ‘the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and…that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus’ (1990c: 52). In the next chapter, we will provide an account of Bourdieu’s development and formulation of the notion of the habitus, and its relation and significance with regard to the production and naturalization of cultural values and practices.