Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (review)

As the title indicates, this collection is an effort to shift the discussion of Bourdieu’s work away from the more abstract theoretical questions that dominated his early reception in this country and towards a more practical application of his methods of cultural analysis. Accordingly, the volume is divided into two sections: first, a theoretically oriented section consisting of five essays concerned mainly with defending Bourdieu against the criticism that his work has received in America; and second, a section of six essays employing Bourdieu in various types of cultural analysis. The final essay in the volume contains Bourdieu’s own reflections on his reception in America.

This division between theory and practice notwithstanding, the essays in both sections tend to be organized around the same tensions within Bourdieu’s work. In their most general form, these tensions originate in the gap between Bourdieu’s demystifying account of various social practices and the various types of value commitment evident in his calls for social reform. Most famously, Bourdieu’s sociology reveals the ways in which ostensibly disinterested social behavior—gift giving, say, or the love of art—disguises both conscious and unconscious struggles for status and goods. It is precisely because Bourdieu’s work is so effective in calling various social practices into question that his readers are likely to wonder what kinds of values remain viable when the sociologist’s work is done. The contributors to this volume suggest a number of different and sometimes contradictory answers to this question. Some seem to view him primarily as a corrective to the utopianism of various kinds of Marxist criticism, while others claim that his theories only become workable when they are incorporated within a Marxist framework. Many of the contributors are content to take his denunciations of the aesthetic at face value, but at least one the essays defends his work as a defense of a kind of aestheticism. These differences of opinion reveal the broadening scope of Bourdieu’s appeal and indicate that the tensions that shape his work may be productive as well as problematic.

Two of the other contributors in the first section of the volume suggest sweeping theoretical bridges across the gap that separates the values inherent in specific cultural practices from the suspicious scientific neutrality of the sociologist. John Guillory, in the ambitious essay that opens the volume, suggests that despite his demystification of the consumption and production of art, Bourdieu remains committed to the importance of aesthetic value. Guillory bases this conclusion on an analysis of the role that both pre-capitalist social rituals and modern art play in refusing to acknowledge the primacy of self-interested rational calculation. Guillory claims that Bourdieu classifies all social activities according to whether they are able to resist this rational norm and the capitalist economy that it subtends. Art and pre-capitalist societies blur the distinction between labor and play, Guillory argues, while capitalism accentuates it. Guillory assumes but does not argue the fact that the disguised or unacknowledged status economy of art is superior to capitalism’s economy of rational calculation. The status game of art is superior despite the fact that we see through art’s pretenses, since, according to Guillory, life is necessarily a dialectical rhythm in which we vacillate between illusio and disillusio, belief and disbelief. Art establishes its province by negating or refusing the market, and sociology establishes itself by revealing the hidden market within art. In these negations, both activities achieve a kind of institutional autonomy that proves valuable in so far as it sanctions a moment of belief, however vulnerable that moment is to a dialectical disillusionment. This is a playful solution, but not Bourdieu’s, since it makes no room for either his meritocracy of science or the Kantian morality that he thinks should govern the public sphere.

By contrast, Jon Beasley-Murray offers a more familiar resolution to the problem in his proposal to reconcile Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital with Marx’s theory of economic...