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SOCIOLOGY IN QUESTION Theory, Culture & Society Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It will also publish theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements. EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, University o/Teesside SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD Roy Boyne, University of Northumbria at Newcastle Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen Scott Lash, University of Lancaster Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University Recent volumes include: Changing Cultures Feminism, Youth and Consumerism Mica Nava Globalization Social Theory and Global Culture Roland Robertson Risk Society Towards a New Modernity Ulrich Beck Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture Ralph Schroeder Postmodernity USA The Crisis of Social Modernism in Postwar America Anthony Woodiwiss The Body and Social Theory Chris Shilling Symbolic Exchange and Death Jean Baudrillard Economies of Signs and Space Scott Lash and John Urry Religion and Globalization Peter Beyer Baroque Reason The Aesthetics of Modernity Christine Buci-Glucksmann SOCIOLOGY IN QUESTION Pierre Bourdieu translated by Richard Nice SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi Hr ( , . I .:: ]613 I r 1 r . English translation ((j Sage Publications 1993 First published in English 1993 Originally published in French as Queslions de Sociologie by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, © Les Editions de Minuit 1984. This translation is published with financial support from the French Ministry of Culture. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. Published in association with Theory, Cu/1ure & Sociely, School of Hum an Sciences, University ofTeesside. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash - I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Bourdieu, Pierre Sociology in Question. - (Theory, Culture & Society Series) I. Title II. Nice, Richard JII. Series 301 ISBN 0-8039-8337-9 ISBN 0-8039-8338-7 pbk Library of Congress catalog card number 93-86215 Typeset by Megaron, Cardiff, Wales. Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wiltshire. CONTENTS Prologue Vil I The Art of Standing Up to Words 2 A Science that Makes Trouble 8 3 The Sociologist in Question 20 4 Are Intellectuals Out of Play? 36 5 How Can 'Free-floating Intellectuals' Be Set Free? 41 6 , For a Sociology of Sociologists 49 1) The Paradox of the Sociologist 54 8 What Talking Means 60 /9 Some Properties of Fields 72 10 The Linguistic Market 78 \,/11 Censorship 90 12 'Youth' is Just a Word 94 13 Music Lovers: Origin and Evolution of the Species 103 14 The Metamorphosis of Tastes 108 15 How Can One Be a Sportsman? 117 16 Haute Couture and Haute Culture 132 17 But Who Created the 'Creators'? 139 18 Public Opinion Does Not Exist 149 19 Culture and Politics 158 20 Strikes and Political Action 168 21 The Racism of 'Intelligence' 177 Index 181 PROLOGUE The texts that follow are all transcripts of oral answers and talks, addressed to non-specialists; it would be incongruous to preface them with a long written preamble. But I should at least say why it seemed both useful and legitimate to bring together some discussions of various themes that, for some readers, have already been developed elsewhere at greater length and no doubt more rigorously, 1 presenting them here in a more approachable but less thoroughly argued form. Sociology differs in one respect at least from the other sciences: it is required to be accessible in a way that is not expected of physics or even semiology or philosophy. To deplore obscurity is perhaps also a way of showing that one would like to understand or to be sure of understanding things that one feels are worthy of being understood. In any case, there is probably no area in which the 'power of experts' and the monopoly of 'competence' is more dangerous and more intolerable; and sociology would not be worth an hour of anyone's time if it were to be merely an expert knowledge reserved for experts. It should hardly need to be pointed out that no other science more obviously puts at stake the interests, sometimes the vital interests, of social groups. That is what makes it so very difficult both to produce sociological discourse and to transmit it. And one would hardly expect employers, evangelists or journalists to praise the scientific quality of research that uncovers the hidden foundations of their domination, or to strive to publicize its findings. Those who are impressed by the certificates of scientificity that the powers that be, whether temporal or spiritual, choose to award should recall that, in the 1840s, the industrialist Grandin, speaking in the French Chamber of Deputies, thanked the 'genuine scientists' who had proved that employing children was often an act of generosity. Our Grandins and our 'genuine scientists' are still with us today. Equally, the sociologist can expect little help in his effort to make known what he has learned, from those whose job it is, day by day and week by week, to produce - on all the required subjects of our time, 'violence', 'youth', 'drugs', the 'revival of religion', and so on - the not-even-untrue discourses which become ritual essay subjects for high-school pupils. Yet he has a great need of being helped in that task. For truth has no intrinsic capacity to prevail, and scientific discourse is itself caught up in the power relations that it uncovers. The transmission of that discourse is subject to the very laws of cultural diffusion that it sets out. Those who VIII PROLOGUE possess the cultural competence needed to appropriate that discourse are not those who would have most interest in doing so. In short, in the struggle against the loudest voices in our societies - politicians, editorialists and commentators - scientific discourse has all the cards stacked against it: the difficulty and slowness of its construction, which means that it generally arrives after the battle is over; its inevitable complexity, which tends to discourage simplistic or suspicious minds or, quite simply, those who do not have the cultural capital needed to decipher it; its abstract impersonality, which discourages identification and all forms of gratifying projection; and above all its distance from received ideas and spontaneous convictions. The only way to give some real force to that discourse is to accumulate upon it the social force that enables it to impose itself; and this, by an apparent contradiction, may require one to agree to play the social games of which it exposes the logic. The suspicion that one is compromising has to be accepted in advance. When I try to describe the mechanisms of intellectual fashion in an interview with a journal that is a beacon of intellectual fashion, or when I use the tools of intellectual marketing to make them convey exactly what they normally mask, in particular the function of those tools and of their customary users, or when I try to define the relationship between the Communist Party and French intellectuals in the pages of one of the Party journals intended for intellectuals. I am seeking to turn the weapons of intellectual power against intellectual power, by saying the thing that is least expected, most improbable, most out ofp lace in the place where it is said. This represents a refusal to 'preach to the converted', which abandons the ordinary discourse that is so well received because it tells its audience only what they want to hear. Note In each case I give references at the end of the chapter. so that the reader may go further if he or she wishes. 1 THE ART OF ST ANDING UP TO WORDS Q. Bourgeois discourse about culture tends to present interest in culture as disinterested- whereas you show that this interest, and even its apparent disinterestedness, yield profits. A. Paradoxically, intellectuals have an interest in economism since, by reducing all social phenomena, and more especially the phenomena of exchange, to their economic dimension, it enables intellectuals to avoid putting themselves on the line. That is why it needs to be pointed out that there is such a thing as cultural capital, and that this capital secures direct profits, first on the educational market, of course, but elsewhere too, and also secures profits of distinction - strangely neglected by the marginalist economists -which result automatically from its rarity, in other words from the fact that it is unequally distributed. Q. So cultural practices are always strategies for distancing oneself from what is 'common' and 'easy' - what you call 'strategies of distinction'? A. They may be distinctive, distinguished, without even trying to be so. The dominant definition of 'distinction' calls 'distinguished' those be haviours that distinguish themselves from what is common and vulgar, without any intention of distinction. They are the ones that consist in loving what has to be loved, or even 'discovering' it, at every moment, as if by accident. The profit of distinction is the profit that flows from the difference, the gap, that separates one from what is common. And this direct profit is accompanied by an additional profit that is both subjective and objective, the profit that comes from seeing oneself - and being seen - as totally disinterested. Q. If every cultural practice is a means of'creating distance (you even say that Brechtian 'distanciation' is a distancing of the people), then the idea of art for all, access to art for all, has no meaning. That illusion of 'cultural communism' has to be denounced. Interview with Didier Eribon in liberation, 3-4 November 1979: 12-13, after the publication of Distinction 2 SOCIOLOGY IN QUESTION A. I have myself shared in the illusion of 'cultural (or linguistic) communism'. Intellectuals spontaneously understand the relationship to a work of art as mystical participation in a common good, without rarity. My whole book argues that access to a work of art requires instruments that are not universally distributed. And consequently that the possessors of those instruments secure profits of distinction for themselves, and the rarer these instruments are (such as those needed to appropriate avant-garde works), the greater the profits. Q. If all cultural practices, and all tastes, classify one as being at a particular place in the social space, then it has to be acknowledged that the counterculture is a distinguishing activity like others? A. We'd first have to agree on what we meant by counterculture. And that, by definition, is difficult or impossible. There are countercultures, in the plural. They are everything that is marginal, outside the 'establishment', external to official culture. At once it can be seen that this counterculture is defined negatively by what it defines itself against. I'm thinking, for example, of the cult of everything that is outside 'legitimate' culture, such as strip cartoons. But that's not all. You don't get out of culture by sparing yourself the trouble of an analysis of culture and cultural interests. For example, it would be easy to show that ecological discourse - freewheeling, rambling in sandals, barefoot theatre and so on - is full of disdainful allusions to the 'nine-to-five routine' and the 'sheep-like' holiday-making of 'the average petit-bourgeois'. (We need to use quotation marks every where, not to mark the prudent distance of official journalism but to signify the gap between the language of analysis and ordinary language, in which words are all instruments of struggle, weapons and stakes in the struggles of distinction.) Q. So don't marginal groups and protest movements shake up the established values? A. Of course I always start by twisting the stick the other way and pointing out that these people who see themselves as being on the fringe, outside the social space, are situated in the social world, like everyone else. What I call their 'dream of social flying'1 is a perfect expression of an uncomfortable position in the social world - the one that characterizes the 'new autodidacts', those who stayed in the educational system until a fairly advanced age, long enough to acquire a 'cultivated' relation to culture, but without obtaining qualifications, or not all those which their initial social position promised them. Having said that, all movements that challenge the symbolic order are important inasmuch as they call into question what seemed to go without saying - what is beyond question, unchallenged. They jostle the self evidences. That was true of May '68. It's true of the feminist movement, which isn't disposed of by labelling it 'middle-class'. If these forms of