14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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France mourns Pierre Bourdieu
Only in France, perhaps, did news of the death of Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist, professor at the Collège de France and tireless combatant of market values, make the front pages of the papers as well as the television news. France is, after all, a country that takes its intellectuals very seriously. Yet, Bourdieu, who died in Paris on 24 January, was very much more than a campus star, as press discussion of his work since his death has revealed. In special editions of magazines and newspapers devoted to his work, French writers and intellectuals, but also members of the unemployed, trade unionists, anti-globalisation activists and others, have spoken of Bourdieu's impact on them in terms revealing the controversy surrounding the work of a writer who began his career by studying colonial and post- colonial Algeria before going on to be one of the most celebrated thinkers of his generation.Born in 1930, the son of a provincial civil servant, Bourdieu attended the best Paris schools before arriving in Algeria in 1958, a junior faculty member at the University of Algiers. In Paris, he had been a student at the Ecole normale superièure, a kind of intellectual forcing house attended by the brightest of French youth: among his contemporaries there were Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. He graduated in philosophy, but his experience in Algeria at the height of that country's struggle for independence from France turned him decisively towards the study of sociology, at the time an academic poor relation and a discipline that he did much to develop over the years that followed.
Bourdieu's public fame started early. Having written three books on the sociology of Algeria, which strongly criticised the French colonial regime, in 1964 he published Les Héritiers (The Inheritors), a study of French education co- written with J.-C. Passereon. This book, like La Reproduction (Reproduction) that followed it in 1970, introduced the notion of "cultural capital", one of Bourdieu's favourite ideas and one that found a receptive audience in the 1960s. In France, as in most countries, higher education at this time was being opened up beyond the elites that had traditionally benefited from it, yet the same people seemed to be profiting from the newly egalitarian institutions, causing many to ask why this should be the case.
Bourdieu thought that a full answer to this question would involve both the study of the institution, in other words of the "field", as well as of the internalised attitudes, or habitus, of those who attended it. Some of these attitudes could be understood in terms of the "symbolic domination" by the fortunate of the less so, others by the "cultural capital" that the fortunate brought with them. Cultural capital, an idea modeled on other types of asset, such as financial capital, could also help explain the functioning and value ascribed to other "symbolic," or cultural, institutions aside from schools. Museums, first examined in L'Amour de l'art: les musées d'art européens et leur public (The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, 1966), first suggested themselves, as did journalism and, eventually, television.
In what are probably his best-known books, La Distinction: Critique social du jugement (Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement, 1979) and Homo academicus (Academic Man, 1984), Bourdieu turned his attention to, respectively, artistic taste and, once more, higher education. The 18th Century German philosopher Kant had supposed that "taste", people's perceptions of the beautiful, was a universal human faculty, like reason, and that it just needed accurately to be described for everyone to be able to accept and enjoy it. Why then, asked Bourdieu in La Distinction, were tastes unequally distributed, functioning differently across social groups and correlated with social class? In Homo academicus, Bourdieu turned a similarly objective eye to the functioning of another prized French institution, intellectuals and academic life. Drawing up "hit parades" of intellectuals and writers had long been a feature of the French media and French life, having something of the appeal of the hierarchies of artists set out in museums, but any institution draped in such reverence deserved closer examination as to its actual functioning, and this Bourdieu set out, often humorously, to do.
Reaction in France to Bourdieu's death has been loud, but various. For Roger- Pol Droit, writing in Le Monde, the sociologist's work can be reduced to a single set of questions: "who am I, who are we, what do I know?" Bourdieu's career, he says, can best be understood by seeing in it an attempt "to understand how a given individual is produced, where his tastes come from, together with his sense of himself and his way of coping with life." Bourdieu, he remarks, saw sociology as a "powerful instrument for self-analysis, allowing each individual better to understand the social conditions that had shaped him and the position he occupies in the social world."
Thus, the trademark concepts that Bourdieu developed -- "cultural capital", sociological "field", habitus and "symbolic domination" -- all came from this attempt at clarification, which, in another one of Bourdieu's favourite notions, was also one of "objectification." Having had his curiosity piqued by certain tell-tale social oppositions, such as that which opposed "the world of art to that of everyday life in a relation of the sacred to the profane", or the "disinterested" discourse on culture and learning that filled school classrooms to the fact that academic success was actually correlated with "cultural capital," Bourdieu, Roger--Pol Droit writes, wanted to use sociological investigation as a tool to "denaturalise" apparently natural institutions.
Many writers in the French press have dwelt on the controversy, as well as the wider public fame, that enveloped Bourdieu during the last decade of his life. In 1993, La Misère du monde appeared (The Weight of the World), in which Bourdieu and a team of researchers "objectified" the true extent of poverty in France through countless interviews with workers and unemployed alike. From 1996 on, a series of pamphlets, Raisons d'agir (reasons to act), started to appear on newsstands and in bookstores, some by Bourdieu, some by other writers sympathetic to his views.
Sur la télévision (Television, 1996) criticised the increasing triviality of French media and television, born, Bourdieu said, of a submission to market values. Contre-feux (Counter-fire, 1998) and Contre- feux 2 (2001), collections of articles designed to combat "the neo-liberal invasion" and to promote a "Europe-wide social movement" in response to it, went naturally with Bourdieu's increasing public identification with strikers and social movements of all kinds, from the railwaymen whose strike in 1995 had brought down the Juppé government, to the sans- papiers (illegal immigrants) and the Conféderation paysanne (farmers' movement), known for its protests against the MacDonaldisation of France.
For the editorialists in Le nouvel Observateur, house journal of la gauche caviare (champagne socialism), not to speak of other papers unsympathetic to Bourdieu's views, these last years were wasted on mistaken campaigns dishonestly carried out. Jean Daniel, the magazine's editor, wrote that Bourdieu's "Manichean vision of the world, in which there are only dominated and dominators ... masters and servants, guilty and innocent, drains it of its complexity." Why, if education was really structured in the way that Bourdieu had suggested, had he himself done so well out of it? For another writer, Bourdieu had been partly responsible for "the ridiculous spectacle we witnessed in 1968, when professors and students demonstrated in the streets, beating their breasts, and proclaiming: 'We are the agents of the ruling class'".
However, for Bourdieu himself, as quoted in Le Monde, "what I defend is the possibility and necessity of criticism. There can be no real democracy without criticism, and intellectuals are important providers of it."
David Tresilian
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