During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the (...) study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably one of the twentieth century’s greatest socio-philosophical thinkers and his writings have much to offer anyone interested in the ways that people value, consume and produce architecture. Bourdieu spent much of his life attempting to understand cultural consumption and production through detailed empirical research that included studies of dwellings, art, museums, photography and aesthetics. This book introduces the architectural reader to Bourdieu’s key writings on culture and outlines the ways in which they offer powerful practical (...) tools and novel conceptual frameworks for understanding architectural value, taste, and practice. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume (...) is divided into four sections. The first section on ¿Taste and art¿, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ¿good taste¿, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ¿Taste making and the museum¿ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ¿Taste after Bourdieu in Japan¿ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ¿good taste¿, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ¿Taste, the home and everyday life¿ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ¿good taste¿ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ¿after Bourdieu¿. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making. (shrink)

This contribution has two main goals. First, Pierre Bourdieu’s later work is critically reviewed. The question is posed whether or not his recent critical work has to be interpreted as the result of what might be called a ‘political turn’. Second, in reviewing the critical content of this recent work, a clarification of the critical potential present in Bourdieu’s general methodological and theoretical presuppositions is given. It can thus be seen that Bourdieu’s analyses have always been critical, because of (...) their anti-essentialist relational logic, and that there is a definite continuity between his ‘older’ work and his more recent work. However, his analyses have become more harsh in tone. To conclude, then, the foundations of Bourdieu’s critique are critically examined. First, it is noted that his recent change in tone reveals a theoretical inconsistency between his earlier work and his recent writings. Second, a critique is given of the theoretical basis of all of Bourdieu’s work: relational logic. It is argued that his anti-essentialism is founded on – in Putnam’s words – a ‘God’s eye point of view’, which seems to be incompatible with precisely this anti-essentialist analysis. (shrink)

This paper investigates the implications of Pierre Bourdieu’s recent reformulation of his social theory as a critique of ‘scholarly reason’. This reformulation is said to point towards a definition of social theory as a sociologically informed version of the Kantian concept of ‘critique’. It is argued that, by this means, Bourdieu is able to extend and develop the critique of ‘intellectualism’ in the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty and, furthermore, to ground this critique by showing how the intellectualist error (...) arises from a failure to reflect on the ‘social conditions of possibility’ of reason. The three forms of the critique of scholarly reason (pertaining to the theoretical, the moral-practical and the aesthetic forms of reason) are then briefly presented. In the final section, the critique of scholarly reason is shown to provide the basis for a convincing response to critiques of Bourdieu’s work from critical theorists drawing on Habermas’s conception of discursive rationality. In particular, it is argued that critical theorists influenced by Habermas typically confuse ‘practical reflexivity’ with ‘intellectual reflection’ - the standpoint of ‘scholarly reason’. Finally, it is shown that Bourdieu’s own account of the unity of theory and practice is nonetheless deficient, and must be supplanted with an account centred on the idea of existential clarification. Key Words: Bourdieu • critical theory • Habermas • intellectualism • reflexivity. (shrink)

This book takes its point of departure from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose book 'Distinction' is considered a classic work of sociological analysis. The topics dealt with are shown in the table of contents below. The book is distinctive in that it offers discussions of four methodologies/theories used in discussing taste: semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory and Marxist theory and then applies these theories in the second part of the book to a variety of (...) topics involving taste, such as yogurt, dogs, the singer Celine Dion, ocean cruises, brands, smartphones, men's facial hair, and so on. Readers of the book will learn four methodologies they can use in analyzing taste and see how these methodologies were applied. (shrink)

Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension.

Against the many critics who have argued that Pierre Bourdieu favored a deterministic view of human experience and conduct, I argue that his social praxeology is, indeed, a theory of agency. I describe his work as a semiotic phenomenology of habitual discourse. My analysis extends this thinking, converging Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and C. S. Peirce on field, habitus and body. A theory of agency emerges that is a unique interpretation of the process of semiosis and embodied event of communication. (...) My central theme is a critique of the concept of clarity in discourse. (shrink)

Against the many critics who have argued that Pierre Bourdieu favored a deterministic view of human experience and conduct, I argue that his social praxeology is, indeed, a theory of agency. I describe his work as a semiotic phenomenology of habitual discourse. My analysis extends this thinking, converging Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and C. S. Peirce on field, habitus and body. A theory of agency emerges that is a unique interpretation of the process of semiosis and embodied event of communication. (...) My central theme is a critique of the concept of clarity in discourse. (shrink)

The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages (...) of his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added. The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained. The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan--a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his. Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (...) . In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research--that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit. Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces. A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology. (shrink)

Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was (...) concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence. (shrink)

The philosophical implications of the sciences of complexity suggest that complex systems (such as society) function according to a dialectic of chance and necessity, multidimensionality, non-linearity and circular causality. It is argued that one could employ aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory in order to establish a consistent theory of social self-organization. Bourdieu describes society in epistemological terms as consisting of mutual relationships of subjectivity/objectivity, individual/society, homogeneity/diversity, freedom/necessity, externalization of internality/internalization of externality, embodiment/objectification, modus operandi/opus operatum. The concept of the (...) habitus is a means of explaining the re-creation/self-organization of social systems in terms of human beings as permanent creators and permanently created results of society. (shrink)

The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural works is something more and something else than a simple methodological reversal.1 It implies a true conversion of the ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in the representation of intellectual work as a “creation” and which excludes as the expression par excellence of “reductionist sociology” the effort to subject the artist and the work of art to a (...) way of thinking that is doubly objectionable since it is both genetic and generic.It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate “an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer.” In fact, because they accept the ideology of the “man of genius” they are committed, in their own terms, to “one of the oldest and best-established methods of literary study”—which seeks the explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in isolation .2 In fact, this explanatory principle resides in the relationship between the “space” of works in which each particular work is taken and the “space” of authors in which each cultural enterprise is constituted. Similarly, when Sartre takes on the project of specifying the meditations through which society determined Flaubert, the individual, he attributes to those factors that can be perceived from that point of view—that is, to social class as refracted through a family structure—what are instead the effects of generic factors influencing every writer in an artistic field that is itself in a subordinate position in the field of power and also the effects specific to all writers who occupy the same position as Flaubert within the artistic field. 1. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” trans. Sian France, Social Science Information 8 : 89-119; originally published as “Champ intellectual et projet créateur,” Les Temps moderns no. 246 : 865-906. See also Bourdieu, “Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectual et habitus de classe,” Scolies 1 : 7-26, and Bourdieu, “The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field,” trans. Channa Newman, Sociocriticism no. 2 : 11-24.2. René Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature p. 69. Pierre Bourdieu holds the chair of sociology at the Collège de France and is director of the Centre de Sociologie européenne at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his most recent works are Distinction , Homo Academicus , and Choses Dites. (shrink)

Examines recent changes in technology and social organization and shows how social theory can inform the construction of social organization and help provide avenues of future social development.

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Le;vi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu’s lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not (...) an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu’s theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time—including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir—as well as Bourdieu’s own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria. (shrink)

Editor’s Introduction The following text was prepared by Pierre Bourdieu for delivery at a conference on his work held at Duke University, April 21–23, 1995. Entitled “Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture,” the conference was sponsored by the Duke Graduate Program in Literature and included such well‐known literary scholars as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jonathan Culler, and Fredric Jameson. Bourdieu, of course, was the invited guest of honor, but was uncertain as to whether he should make the effort of attending, (...) particularly since he was recovering from a short period of poor health. As I too had been invited , Bourdieu discussed the question with me in Paris.He was rather concerned about wrongheaded, trendy applications of his theories by American literary scholars, who often misunderstand his work because they simply do not know the intellectual landscape to which it relates. Reading such conference paper titles as “Cross‐Dressing for Success: The Scramble for Symbolic Power in Tabitha Sweeney’s Female Quixotism,” Bourdieu confessed his fear of being taken as simply the French intellectual flavor of the month, one whose theory is used simply as grist for the American academy’s industrious mills of literary interpretation.He ultimately decided to send the following text to be read at the conference in his absence. It treats, with polite frankness, his worries about being misinterpreted through importation into the American theoretical field with its peculiar conception of French philosophy; Bourdieu’s paper situates these particular worries within a more general account of “allodoxic”distortions caused by the international travel of theory; but it also tries to prevent further misunderstanding by offering a brief contextualization of his theory and a brief summary of his method of analysis through fields. The translation of Bourdieu’s text was prepared by Loïc Wacquant, and is presented here with only minor adjustments. (shrink)

PIERRE BOURDIEU OR A CON-ARTIST'S SOCIOLOGY It seems daring, even pretentious — and perhaps useless — to attempt to show how limited are Pierre Bourdieu's ...

Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, "Lonely Woman" dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional realization of her concept of "loneliness.".

Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought - the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs - have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical (...) discourse. Though Heidegger is aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues (in his references to canonic authors, traditional problems, and respect for academic taboos), Bourdieu points out that the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellentual dimensions - political thought and academic thought - intersect. Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the 'conservative revolution', of which nazism is but one manifestation. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought--the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs--have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Though Heidegger is (...) aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues, Bourdieu points out that the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellectual dimensions--political thought and academic thought--intersect. Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the "conservative revolution," of which Nazism is but one manifestation. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu has developed a philosophy of social science, grounded in the phenomenological tradition, which treats knowledge as a practical ability embodied in skilful behaviour, rather than an intellectual capacity for the representation and manipulation of propositional knowledge. He invokes Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following as one way of explicating the idea that knowledge is a skill. Bourdieu’s conception of tacit knowledge is a dispositional one, adopted to avoid a perceived dilemma for methodological individualism. That dilemma requires either the explanation (...) of regularities in social behaviour as the result of the tacit representation of procedural rules (‘legalism’) or the self-conscious representation of behavioural goals (‘voluntarism’) by individuals. After explaining the apparent dilemma, I then argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule following actually undermine, rather than support, a dispositional solution. Nonetheless, the philosophy of social science can survive without a dispositional account of knowledge. Such a social science needs, firstly, to embrace one horn of the dilemma, voluntarism, provided that the relevant regularities can be explained as unintended consequences of agents’ self-represented intentions. Secondly, such a social science should treat theorists’ interpretations as unifying generalizations, not hypotheses about the acquisition of tacit knowledge. Finally, where appeal to cognitive psychology can distinguish otherwise equivalent theories in social science, social science should incorporate the data of cognitive psychology concerning tacit mental processes. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical-sociological investigations presupposed and, at (...) the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory, and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”. (shrink)

Le discours philosophique, comme tout autre forme d'expression, est le résultat d'une transaction entre une intention expressive et la censure exercée par l'univers social dans lequel elle doit se produire. Ainsi, pour comprendre l'oeuvre de Heidegger dans sa vérité inséparablement philosophique et politique, il faut refaire le travail d'euphémisation qui lui permet de dévoiler en les voilant, des pulsions ou des phantasmes politiques. Il faut analyser la logique du double-sens et du sous-entendu qui permet à des mots du langage ordinaire (...) (Fürsorge par exemple) de fonctionner simultanément dans deux registres savamment unis et séparés. Mettre en forme philosophique, c'est aussi mettre des formes politiquement - c'est présenter sous une forme philosophiquement acceptable, en les rendant méconnaissables, les thèmes fondamentaux de la pensée des - révolutionnaires conservateurs. C'est donc à condition de reconstruire les différentes variantes de la vision du monde qui s’exprime crûment chez les essayistes de l'Allemagne de Weimar et la logique inséparablement intellectuelle et sociale du champ philosophique qui est le véritable opérateur de la transmutation de l'humeur völkisch en philosophie existentielle, que l'on peut comprendre l'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger sans opérer les clivages trop commodes entre le texte et le contexte, ou entre le recteur nazi et le 'berger de l'Être'. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of (...) perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis. (shrink)

This article locates Bourdieu’s sociology within the lasting controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences, with a special focus on the classical problem surrounding the alleged compatibility between these procedures. First, it is argued that Bourdieu’s praxeological and relational perspective on the social universe leads him not only to join the ‘compatibility field’ of the debate, but to sustain, more radically, the identity between explanation and understanding. Second, the article defends the view that (...) this methodological proposal is tied to a distinction often ignored among the commentators of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, namely that between objectivism, a mode of knowledge of the social which he intends to integrate and overcome in his structural praxeology, and determinism, adopted by the author as a fundamental scientific principle and, at the same time, a potentially emancipatory ethico-political tool bequeathed by his reflexive sociology. While basically sympathetic to Bourdieu’s perspective, the article concludes in a more critical vein, by defending the need to bridge the gap between the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that marks his portrayal of the reflexive capabilities of the lay agent, on the one hand, and the ‘optimism of the will’ infused in the critical program of reflexive sociology, on the other. (shrink)

As a means to challenge and diminish the hold of mainstream curriculum's claim of being a colorblind, politically neutral text, we will address two particular features that partially, though significantly, constitute the hidden curriculum in the United States—race and class—historically studied as separate social issues. Race and class have been embedded within the institutional curriculum from the beginning in the US; though rarely acknowledged as intertwined issues. We illustrate how the theoretical and interpretive structure of French philosopher and sociologist (...) class='Hi'>Pierre Bourdieu can productively subsume the insights of critical race theory into its framework in a way that provides a more robust understanding of how race and class continue to be socially reproduced in schools. To perform this task we examine, through Bourdieu's constructs of habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence and misrecognition, the ways in which race, in general, and whiteness, specifically, influences pedagogical and curricular existence within the institutional superstructure of school. (shrink)

The sociology of language has been concerned primarily with the use of language in everyday interactions, resulting in important theoretical contributions, particularly to conversation analysis. In responding to Simon Susen’s “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, which emphasizes the inherent “sociality” of symbolic forms, this article directs attention to an important location of language, namely to its role in public rituals or liturgies. Looking at the history of the Book of Common Prayer within the framework (...) of symbolic violence, this article examines the power struggles over public rituals that over time came to shape the very notion of “Englishness” through shared, if contested, liturgical worship. (shrink)

Key contemporary sociological theorists, such as Foucault or Habermas rarely explicitly discussed gender in their studies. This fact has not caused a lack of interest in the critical examination of the theoretical systems of these authors within a feminist perspective. During the 1990?s feminists? attention was drawn to Pierre Bourdieu?s social theory. French sociologist?s study Masculine Domination deals with issues of gender dynamics and its reproduction. In this study the persistence of the asymmetric distribution of social power between women (...) and men is explained by concepts of habitus and symbolic violence. As this article will show, social change cannot be explained by Bourdieu?s concept of habitus, as a key link between social structure and action, due to its reduction of actors to socialized bodies, which are practically deprived of any true action potential. On the other hand, with regard to social activism as a permanent feature of feminist theory, this paper seeks to examine whether critical examination of Bourdieu?s conceptual apparatus achieves to provide the means to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the theoretical system of French sociologist. In other words, this article seeks to answer the question whether such a modification of habitus is possible, which will allow for actors whose action is truly structured and structuring, and lead to possible change of existing power relations. Kljucni mislioci savremene socioloske teorije, poput Fukoa ili Habermasa, u svojim studijama su, uopsteno govoreci, retko kad eksplicitno razmatrali pitanja drustvenog polozaja zena ili roda. Ova cinjenica nije uslovila izostanak interesovanja za kriticko preispitivanje teorijskih sistema ovih autora unutar feministicke perspektive. Tokom devedesetih godina proslog veka paznju feministicke teorije privlaci delo Pjera Burdijea. Francuski sociolog se pitanjima rodne dinamike i njene reprodukcije bavi u svojoj studiji Masculine Domination. Na tom mestu istrajavanje asimetricne raspodele drustvene moci kojom raspolazu zene, odnosno muskarci, objasnjeno je, pre svega, pojmovima habitusa i simbolickog nasilja. Kao sto ce ovaj tekst pokazati, Burdijeovim konceptom habitusa, kao kljucnom sponom izmedju drustvene strukture i delanja, nije moguce objasniti drustvenu promenu usled svodjenja aktera na kruto socijalizovana tela, prakticno lisenih istinskog delatnog potencijala. Sa druge strane, s obzirom na drustveni aktivizam kao trajne odlike feministicke teorije, nastoji se ispitati da li je kriticko preispitivanje Burdijeovog konceptualnog aparata uspelo da pruzi sredstva za prevazilazenje pomenutih nedostataka teorijskog sistema francuskog sociologa. Drugim recima, ovim tekstom se pokusava dati odgovor na pitanje da li je moguca takva modifikacija pojma habitusa koja ce omoguciti postajanje aktera cije je delanje istinski strukturisano i strukturisuce, cime moze voditi promeni postojecih odnosa moci. (shrink)

This e-special issue explores the reception of Bourdieu’s work in one journal, Theory, Culture & Society, which commenced at about the same time that Bourdieu was beginning to acquire an international reputation. It offers a case-study of the English representation of Bourdieu’s work through almost 40 years and focuses on the role of the journal in carrying Bourdieu’s work across cultural boundaries. It introduces the scope of that work but, primarily, it is designed to encourage reference to his texts in (...) the contexts of their production and reception in order to invite new reflection and new evaluation in relation to contemporary problems. (shrink)

The paper examines Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive writings on the production of scientific knowledge. The study shows that Bourdieu offered not one but two - significantly different - approaches to scientific knowledge production, one formulated in his theoretical, or programmatic, writings on the subject, the other developed in his empirical writings. Addressing the question as to the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for science studies, the analysis argues that the former of these two approaches is at once very visible in Bourdieu’s (...) work but characterized by limitations from the standpoint of scholarship in STS, whereas the latter approach is less conspicuous but of broader empirical value. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and use it to locate and examine dispositions in a larger constellation of related concepts, exploring their dynamic relationship within the social context, and their construction, manifestation, and function in relation to classroom mathematics practices. I describe the main characteristics of habitus that account for its invisible effects: its embodiment, its deep and pre-reflective internalization as schemata, orientation, and taste that are learned and yet unthought, (...) and are subsumed by our practices, which we understand as something that “goes without saying.” I also propose that, similarly to Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic habitus, a math habitus is made up of a complex intertwining of collective and individual histories that turn into “nature,” which structure all individual and collective action and inform mathematical classroom practice. I suggest that individual math dispositions may be liable to reconstruction through the reconstruction of the collective math habitus, which follows from opening spaces for dialogue, problematization and reconstruction of the unthought categories of the doxa. This requires that students acquire new concrete and symbolic means with which to challenge their current sense of mathematics as a discipline, and mathematical practice tout court. Finally, I argue that community of inquiry, employed as a pedagogical model, provides an avenue for both: for opening those spaces for reflective dialogical inquiry into concepts and questions whose meanings and references have so far been taken for granted, and for acquiring critical thinking and dialogical skills and dispositions that are a necessary means for participating in such reflective inquiry that offers significant promise for reconstructing individual and collective habitus in school settings. (shrink)

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’. Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as (...) a staged suspension of connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking. (shrink)

This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as (...) the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectivelysynchronizedacross fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements. (shrink)

This paper is the product of a roundtable discussion held at the international conference Horizons of Engagement: Eternalizing Bourdieu, organized by the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of Belgrade, Serbia, the Centre for Advanced Studies of The University of Rijeka, Croatia, the?cole Normale Sup?rieure of Paris, France, and the French Institute in Serbia. The event was planned on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of one of the world?s leading sociologists - Pierre Bourdieu. The greatest (...) indicator of the scope of Bourdieu?s influence is the fact that he has become the world?s most cited sociologist, ahead of?mile Durkheim, and the world?s second most cited author in social sciences and the humanities, after Michel Foucault and ahead of Jacques Derrida. As part of this discussion, we address the subject of?Bourdieu and Politics?, politics - broadly constructed. We evoke Pierre Bourdieu?s involvement in public affairs during the 1990s, while taking into account the concept of the collective intellectual that Bourdieu introduced into social sciences by giving it a specific meaning. (shrink)

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later 'post-structuralist' phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based 'logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses (...) of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—'intuitions' and 'concepts—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct 'logics' with different forms of 'negation'. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically. (shrink)