Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.

Unless saved by exceptional talent, he necessarily pays a price for clarity.

In the case of sociology however, we are always walking on hot coals, and the things we discuss are alive, they're not dead and buried

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

Femininity is imposed for the most part through an unremitting discipline that concerns every part of the body and is continuously recalled through the constraints of clothing or hairstyle.

While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don’t have any choice to make. Bertrand Russell

To subject to scrutiny the mechanisms which render life painful, even untenable, is not to neutralize them; to bring to light contradictions is not to resolve them. But, as skeptical as one might be about the efficacy of the sociological message, we cannot dismiss the effect it can have by allowing sufferers to discover the possible social causes of their suffering and, thus, to be relieved of blame.

Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

The radical questionnings announced by philosophy are in fact circumscribed by the interests linked to membership in the philosophical field, that is, to the very existence of this field and the corresponding censorships.

As if femininity were measured by the art of 'shrinking'... women are held in a kind of invisible enclosure (of which the veil is only the visible manifestation) circumscribing the space allowed for the movements and postures of their bodies (whereas men occupy more space, especially in public places). This symbolic confinement is secured practically by their clothing by their clothing which (as was even more visible in former times) has the effect not only of masking the body but of continuously calling it to order.

Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural.” —Pierre Bourdieu1

I have analyzed the peculiarity of cultural capital, which we should in fact call informational capital to give the notion its full generality, and which itself exists in three forms, embodied, objectified, or institutionalized.

Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the “active aspect” of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.

Le néo-libéralisme reprend les plus vieilles idées du patronat, sous un message chic et moderne. C'est une "révolution" conservatrice qui veut imposer un retour à une forme de capitalisme sauvage et cynique, qui organise l'insécurité et la précarité, qui se réclame du progrès mais qui glorifie l'archaïque loi du plus fort.

The science called ‘economics’ is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed.

We need some heterodoxy in social science in order for them to avoid death by suffocation under dogmatism.

The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden." Pierre Bourdieu

Historical anthropologist Francois Richard finds it helpful to use a term coined by the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calling Goree a site of 'sincere fiction.

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

[W]hen habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a "fish in water": it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted could, to make sure that I am well understood, explicate Pascal's formula: the world encompasses me (me comprend) but I comprehend it (je le comprends) precisely because it comprises me. It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident.

But her email signature includes a quote from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one she lives: “My goal is to contribute to preventing people from being able to utter all kinds of nonsense about the social world.

And another effect of the scholastic illusion is seen when people describe resistance to domination in the language of consciousness - as does the whole Marxist tradition and also the feminist theorists who, giving way to habits of thought, expect political liberation to come from the ‘raising of consciousness’ - ignoring the extraordinary inertia which results from the inscription of social structures in bodies, for lack of a dispositional theory of practices. While making things explicit can help, only a thoroughgoing process of countertraining, involving repeated exercises, can, like an athlete’s training, durably transform habitus.

The field as a whole is defined as a system of deviations on different levels and nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or discourses they produce, has meaning except relationally, by virtue of the interplay of oppositions and distinctions.

everything conspires to make us forget the socially constructed, and hence arbitrary and artificial, character of investment in the economic game and its stakes: the ultimate reasons for commitment to work, a career or the pursuit of profit in fact lie beyond or outside calculation and calculating reason in the obscure depths of a historically constituted habitus, which means that, in normal circumstances, one gets up every day to go to work without deliberating on the issue, as indeed one did yesterday and will do tomorrow.)

fast-thinkers ... think in cliches, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about--banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem.

As Pierre Bourdieu signalled as long as two decades ago, coercion has by and large been replaced by stimulation, the once obligatory patterns of conduct by seduction, the policing of behaviour by PR and advertising, and normative regulation by the arousal of new needs and desires.

what I defend above all is the possibility and the necessity of the critical intellectual, who is firstly critical of the intellectual doxa secreted by the doxosophers. there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical powers. the intellectual is one of those, of the first magnitude. that is why I think that the work of demolishing the critical intellectual, living or dead - marx, nietzsche, sartre, foucault, and some others who are grouped together under the label pansee 68- is as dangerous as the demolition of the public interest and that it is part of the same process of restoration. of course I would prefer it if intellectuals had all, and always, lived up to the immense historical responsibility they bear and if they had always invested in their actions not only their moral authority but also their intellectual competence- like, to cite just one example, pierre vidal-naquet, who has engaged all his mastery of historical method in a critique of the abuses of history. having said that, in the words of karl kraus, 'between two evils, I refuse to choose the lesser.' whole I have little indulgence for 'irresponsible' intellectuals, I have even less respect for the 'intellectuals' of the political-administrative establishment, polymorphous polygraphs who polish their annual essays between two meetings of boards of directors, three publishers' parties and miscellaneous television appearances.

In sociological literature, meritocracy is widely recognized as a system for sorting, selecting, and then differentially rewarding people; it is a system for legitimizing the process and outcomes of sorting, based on narrow notions of what is worth rewarding and what is not. And it works well when there is, what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “misrecognition.” Misrecognition happens when we think that a system is based on a certain set of principles when it really works on the basis of another, when we think it rewards each individual’s hard work when in reality it rewards economic and cultural capital passed on from parents to children.

Why did I revive that old word? Because with the notion of habitus you can refer to something that is close to what is suggested by the idea of habit, while differing from it in one important respect. The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. So the term constantly reminds us that it refers to something historical, linked to individual history, and that it belongs to a genetic mode of thought, as opposed to essentialist modes of thought (like the notion of competence which is part of the Chomskian lexis). Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a property, a capital. And indeed, the habitus is a capital, but one which, because it is embodied, appears as innate.

In order fully to transcend the artificial opposition that tends to be established between structures and representations, one also has to break away from the mode of thought that Cassirer calls substantialist and which leads people to recognize no realities except those that are available to direct intuition in ordinary experience, individuals and groups.

Le coup de foudre est la rencontre miraculeuse entre une attente et sa réalisation.

Habitus is the link not only between past, present and future, but also between the social and the individual, the objective and subjective, and structure and agency.

O pedante compreende sem sentimento profundo, enquanto o mundano usufrui sem compreender.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

Pour les fils de paysans, d'ouvriers, d'employés ou de petits commerçants, l'acquisition de la culture scolaire est acculturation.

Habitus thereby brings together both objective social structure and subjective personal experiences: “the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality

El cuestionamiento de las formas de pensamiento vigentes que efectúa la revolución simbólica y la originalidad absoluta de lo que engendra tiene como contra partida la soledad absoluta que implica la transgresión de los límites de lo pensable. Este pensamiento que así se ha convertido en su propia medida no puede esperar en efecto que mentes estructuradas según esas mismas categorías que cuestiona puedan pensar este impensable.

For the rest of us—members of that peculiar, prosaic species classified by Pierre Bourdieu as homo academicus9—dwelling poetically could mean gauging the dimensions of our own habits and mindfully inhabiting the rhythms of our writing lives: taking pride in a beautifully crafted sentence, lingering in the hallway for a friendly chat with a colleague, and working with our neighbors to rebuild our academic habitus into a place of possibilities.

Habitus conceptualizes the relation between the objective and subjective or “outer” and “inner” by describing how these social facts become internalized. Habitus is, Bourdieu states, “a socialized subjectivity” and “the social embodied

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess.

Saya sudah menunjukkan secara panjang lebar dalam La distinction di mana cinta itu juga bisa dideskripsikan sebagai bentuk dari amor fati, bahwa mencintai sampai titik tertentu selalu berarti mencintai seseorang sebagai cara lain untuk memenuhi takdir sosialnya sendiri.

Symbolic power is a power of creating things with words. It is only if it is true, that is, adequate to things, that a description can create things. In this sense, symbolic power is a power of consecration or revelation, a power to conceal or reveal things which are already there.

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects.

A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence.

Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

As for the women, it is true to say, with Erikson, that male domination tends to "restrict their verbal consciousness" so long as this is taken to mean not that they are forbidden all talk of sex, but that their discourse is dominated by the male virtues of virility, so that all reference to specifically female sexual "interests" is excluded from this aggressive and shame-filled cult of male potency.

Pernyataan Sartre bahwa Marxisme adalah filsafat yang tidak bisa dilampaui di zaman kita jelas bukan ucapan paling cerdas dari seorang tokoh yang sangat cerdas. Mungkin saja ada filsafat yang tidak bisa dilampaui, tetapi tidak ada ilmu yang tidak bisa dilampaui. Berdasarkan definisinya, ilmu pengetahuan dibangun untuk dilampaui. dan Marx memang sedemikian rupa mengklaim dirinya ilmuwan yang ilmiah, maka penghargaan yang layak buat dia adalah memakai dan memanfaatkan apa yang telah dia lakukan, dan apa yang telah dilakukan orang lain terhadapa apa yang dia lakukan, dan dengan begitu melampaui apa yang dia kira sudah dia lakukan

Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.

If I had to characterize my work in two words, that is, as is the fashion these days, to label it, I would speak of constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructivism, taking the word structuralism in a sense very different from the one it has acquired in the Saussurean or Lévi-Straussian tradition. By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representation. By constructivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notable those we ordinarily call social classes.

Bourdieu posits the notion of a “feel for the game”, one that is never perfect and that takes prolonged immersion to develop. This is a particularly practical understanding of practice – highlighted by Bourdieu’s use of terms such as “practical mastery”, “sense of practice” and “practical knowledge” – that he claims is missing from structuralist accounts and the objectivism of Lévi Strauss. Bourdieu contrasts the abstract logic of such approaches, with their notion of practice as “rule-following”, with the practical logic of social agents. Even this notion of a game, he warns, must be handled with caution: You can use the analogy of the game in order to say that a set of people take part in a rule-bound activity, an activity which, without necessarily being the product of obedience to rules, obeys certain regularities . . . Should one talk of a rule? Yes and no. You can do so on condition that you distinguish clearly between rule and regularity. The social game is regulated, it is the locus of certain regularities. To understand practice, then, one must relate these regularities of social fields to the practical logic of social agents; their “feel for the game” is a feel for these regularities. The source of this practical logic is the habitus.

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural.

Ei riitä pelkästään se, etteivät ihmiset useinkaan tiedä juuri mistään juuri mitään. Jo pelkkä omien uskomusten keskinäisen johdonmukaisuuden ja ristiriidattomuuden vaatimus tuntuu nykyään olevan monille aivan liian vaativa. Aikamme kuva on huippu-urheilija, joka osallistuu hyväntekeväisyyskeräykseen lastensairaalaa varten, jonka rahoituskriisin hän on itse osaltaan aiheuttanut pakenemalla Suomen veroja ulkomaille. Samoin aseistakieltäytyjä, jolla on paidassaan Che Guevara, jonka ihanneihminen oli "tehokas, väkivaltainen, valikoiva ja kylmä tappokone". Samoin Vihreät, jotka kannattavat Suomen vaalijärjestelmän uudistusta, joka aikoinaan olisi estänyt heiltä itseltään nousun eduskuntaan. Samoin oikeistodemari, joka haluaa Suomen Natoon, koska "Suomi kuuluu samaan arvoyhteisöön kuin muut Nato-maat", mutta ei halua Turkkia EU:hun, koska tämä keskeinen Nato-maa "ei kuulu samaan arvoyhteisöön kuin muut EU-maat". Samoin sosiologi Pierre Bourdieu, jonka kulttuurisosiologiassa ihmiset ovat kahmivia ja kähmiviä juonitelijoita, jotka pyrkivät koko ajan kampittamaan toisiaan omanvoitonpyynnin merkeissä, mutta jonka poliittisessa retoriikassa he ovat kaikille vain hyvää haluavia, lämminsydämisiä ja sosiaalisia olentoja, joita raaka uusliberalismi hyppyyttää tahdottomasti. Samoin ympäristöaktivistit, jotka matkustavat mannertenvälisillä lennoilla jopa useita kertoja vuodessa mutta ovat vaatineet esimerkiksi minua vähentämään omaa matkailuani, vaikka en ole koko elämäni aikana ollut kahtatuhatta kilometriä kauempana kotoani. Samoin Helsingin kaupunginjohtaja Jussi Pajunen, joka kannattaa huumeille nollatoleranssia, joka aikoinaan olisi katkaissut hänen oman uransa useiden huumetuomioiden vuoksi. Samoin syyskuun 11. päivän kaappaajat, jotka vetivät kännit ja kävivät stripparibaarissa ennen kuin tekivät terroritekonsa luodakseen ääri-islamilaisen yhteiskunnan, jossa heidät olisi siitä hyvästä tapettu. Samoin ne, jotka julistavat marxilaisuuden olevan vain naurettava, vanhentunut muinaisjäänne, mutta taistelevat samaan aikaan sen puolesta, että kapitalismi mahdollisimman hyvin vastaisi juuri Marxin siitä maalaamaa synkkää kuvaa.

As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it’s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.

Le langage quotidien (tout comme le langage des images) est de part en part traversé par des rapports de force, par des rapports sociaux (de classe, de sexe, d'âge, de race, etc.), et c'est dans et par le langage (et l'image) que se joue la domination symbolique, c'est-à-dire la définition - et l'imposition - des perceptions du monde et des représentations socialement légitimes. Le dominant, comme le dit Pierre Bourdieu, est celui qui réussit à imposer la manière dont il veut être perçu, et le dominé, celui qui est défini, pensé et parlé par le langage de l'autre et/ou celui qui ne parvient pas à imposer la perception qu'il à de lui-même. Seules les périodes de crise sociale, culturelle, ou au moins l'irruption de mobilisations politiques ou culturelles, peuvent permettre une mise en question de cet ordre symbolique des représentations et du langage dont al force principale est de se présenter comme ressortissant aux évidences d'un ordre naturel, immuable, et sur lequel on ne s'interroge pas ou sur lequel on s'interroge faussement pour mieux le réaffirmer dans son arbitraire en le présentant comme ayant toujours existé. La mobilisation politique, l'action politique, sont toujours des batailles pour la représentation, pour le langage et les mots. Ce sont des luttes autour de la perception du monde. La question qui s'y joue est de savoir qui définit la perception et la définition d'un groupe et la perception et la définition du monde en général. La mobilisation, l'action politique, consistent souvent, pour un groupe, à essayer de faire valoir, d'imposer la manière dont il se perçoit lui-même, et d'échapper ainsi à la violence symbolique exercée par la représentation dominante. Mais il convient de préciser qu'il n'y a pas, pour les gays, encore moins pour les « gays et lesbiennes », une manière d'être et de se penser soi-même qui préexisterait et qu'il conviendrait de découvrir et de manifester au grand jour, et encore moins une seule et unique manière d'être et de « se percevoir », ce qui constitue toute la complexité du mouvement gay et lesbien et explique le fait, si souvent souligné, que les définitions qu'il peut donner de lui-même ne sont que des constructions provisoires, fragiles et nécessairement contradictoires entre elles. (p. 117-118)

[Et] la philosophie pratique du corps masculin comme une sorte de puissance, grande, forte, aux besoins énormes, impérieux et brutaux, qui s’affirme dans toute la manière masculine de tenir le corps, et en particulier devant les nourritures, est aussi au principe de la division des nourritures entre les sexes, division reconnue, tant dans les pratiques que dans le discours, par les deux sexes. Il appartient aux hommes de boire et de manger plus, et des nourritures plus fortes, à leur image. Ainsi à l’apéritif, les hommes seront servis deux fois (et plus si c’est fête) et par grandes rasades, dans de grands verres (le succès du Ricard ou du Pernod tenant sans doute pour beaucoup au fait qu’il s’agit d’une boisson à la fois forte et abondante – pas un « dé à coudre »), et ils laisseront les amuse-gueule (biscuits salés, cacahuètes, etc.) aux enfants et aux femmes, qui boivent un petit verre (« il faut garder ses jambes ») d’un apéritif de leur fabrication (dont elles échangent les recettes). De même, parmi les entrées, la charcuterie est plutôt pour les hommes, comme ensuite le fromage, et cela d’autant plus qu’il est plus fort, tandis que les crudités sont plutôt pour les femmes, comme la salade : ce sont les uns ou les autres qui se resserviront ou se partageront les fonds de plats. La viande, nourriture nourrissante par excellence, forte et donnant de la force, de la vigueur, du sang, de la santé, est le plat des hommes, qui en prennent deux fois, tandis que les femmes se servent une petite part : ce qui ne signifie pas qu’elles se privent à proprement parler ; elles n’ont réellement pas envie de ce qui peut manquer aux autres, et d’abord aux hommes, à qui la viande revient par définition, et tirent une sorte d’autorité de ce qui n’est pas vécu comme une privation ; plus, elles n’ont pas le goût des nourritures d’hommes qui, étant réputées nocives lorsqu’elles sont absorbées en trop grande quantité par les femmes (par exemple, manger trop de viande fait « tourner le sang », procure une vigueur anormale, donne des boutons, etc.), peuvent même susciter une sorte de dégoût.

Cultural capital does not include material goods. Rather, it belongs to those people who have access to, and understand the meanings of, cultural goods (museums, philosophical debates, movies, etc.), which they can translate into educational success and social mobility. This conceptualization of cultural capital became one of the most widely adopted concepts in Bourdieu’s work.

I have never accepted the separation between the theoretical construction of the object of research and the set of practical procedures without which there can be no real knowledge. I have combated untheoretical empiricism* vigorously enough to be also able to reject the unempirical conceptualization of the pure ‘theorician’.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Struggle for Symbolic Order

Bourdieu was conscious of the criticisms advanced against structuralist theories of human action: (1) while practices change through time, structuralism does not account for change; (2) structuralists are not interested in how structure is played out in real life; and (3) they may just be imagining structures where there might well be nothing but practice.

Bourdieu challenged and modified the ideas of his contemporaries rather than dismissing or accepting them. He synthesized them and came up with a third way that was more than a mere continuation of, or opposition to them.

His book should not be read as an attempt to generate another theoretical body of ideas, but as a theory as embodied in practice.

Une des difficultés de la lutte politique aujourd'hui, c'est que les dominants, technocrates ou épistémocrates de droite ou de gauche, ont partie liée avec la raison et l'universel : on se dirige vers des univers dans lesquels il faudra de plus en plus de justifications techniques, rationnelles, pour dominer et dans lesquels les dominés, eux aussi, pourront et devront de plus en plus se servir de la raison pour se défendre contre la domination, puisque les dominants devront de plus en plus invoquer la raison, et la science, pour exercer leur domination. Ce qui fait que les progrès de la raison iront sans doute de pair avec le développement de formes hautement rationalisées de domination [...], et que la sociologie, seule en mesure de porter au jour ces mécanismes, devra plus que jamais choisir entre le parti de mettre ses instruments rationnels de connaissance au service d'une domination toujours plus rationnelle ou d'analyser rationnellement la domination et tout spécialement la contribution que la connaissance rationnelle peut apporter à la domination.

The French theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s landmark work Distinction made the point that not all currency is conspicuous in the way, say, owning a McMansion or a yacht is now. Something he called “cultural capital” can be a form of currency. For example, attending a prestigious university or becoming a subscriber to the symphony can give you cultural capital, even if you do not possess actual capital—you’re a broke grad student, say, or you spent your last paycheck on concert tickets.

All four of Pierre Bourdieu's forms of capital play a role in social reproduction, as capital is passed from generation to generation and keeps people in the same social class as their parents before them. This keeps reproducing inequality through the system of social stratification.[1] The four types of capital are: Economic capital: the income and wealth of a person, which may well come along with one's inheritance of cultural capital. Cultural capital: the shared outlook, beliefs, knowledge, and skills that are passed between generations, which may in turn influence human capital. Human capital: the education and job training a person receives, and which contributes to the likelihood that one will acquire social capital. Social capital: the social network to which one belongs, which can largely influence one's ability to find opportunities, especially employment.

L’œuvre d’art ne prend un sens et ne revêt un intérêt que pour celui qui est pourvu du code selon lequel elle est codée. [...] Le spectateur dépourvu du code spécifique se sent submergé, «noyé», devant ce qui lui apparaît comme un chaos de sons et de rythmes, de couleurs et de lignes sans rime ni raison.

interconnected vision for sociology as science and sociology as political engagement is not well understood,

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness—indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer—definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says.

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

optimism absent feedback from school suggests world view differences across social lines in the nature of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus (1990; Swartz 1977). Here it is the sense that “schooling is not for the likes of us.

Pierre Bourdieu once noted that, if the academic field is a game in which scholars strive for dominance, then you know you have won when other scholars start wondering how to make an adjective out of your name

Parece necessário interrogar-se sobre essa ausência de interrogação.

A comunicação é instantânea porque, em certo sentido, ela não existe.

Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus tells the extraordinary story of Musa Shanib from Abkhazia, the leading intellectual of this turbulent region whose incredible career passed from Soviet dissident intellectual through democratic political reformer and Muslim fundamentalist war leader up to respected professor of philosophy, his entire career marked by the strange admiration for Pierre Bourdieu's thought. There are two ways to approach such a figure. The first reaction is to dismiss it as local eccentricity, to treat it with benevolent irony - "what a strange choice, Bourdieu - who knows what this folkloric guy sees in Bourdieu...". The second reaction is to directly assert the universal scope of theory - "see how universal theory is: every intellectual from Paris to Chechenia and Abkhazia can debate his theories..." The true task, of course, is to avoid both these options and to assert the universality of a theory as the result of a hard theoretical work and struggle, a struggle that is not external to theory: the point is not (only) that Shanib had to do a lot of work to break the constraints of his local context and penetrate Bourdieu - this appropriation of Bourdieu by an Abkhazian intellectual also affects the substance of the theory itself, transposing it into a different universe. Did - mutatis mutandis - Lenin not do something similar with Marx? The shift of Mao with regard to Lenin AND Stalin concerns the relationship between the working class and peasants: both Lenin and Stalin were deeply distrustful towards the peasants, they saw as one of the main tasks of the Soviet power to break the inertia of the peasants, their substantial attachment to land, to "proletarize" them and thus fully expose them to the dynamics of modernization - in clear contrast to Mao who, in his critical notes on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (from 1958) remarked that "Stalin's point of view /.../ is almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants." The theoretical and political consequences of this shift are properly shattering: they imply no less than a thorough reworking of Marx's Hegelian notion of proletarian position as the position of "substanceless subjectivity," of those who are reduced to the abyss of their subjectivity.

EXISTIR PARA LA MIRADA MASCULINA: LA MUJER EJECUTIVA, LA SECRETARIA Y SU FALDA Entrevista Con El Sociólogo Francés Pierre Bourdieu

Everything economic science posits as given, that is, the range of dispositions of the economic agent which ground the illusion of the ahistorical universality of the categories and concepts employed by that science, is, in fact, the paradoxical product of a long collective history, endlessly reproduced in individual histories, which can be fully accounted for only by historical analysis: it is because history has inscribed these concomitantly in social and cognitive structures, practical patterns of thinking, perception and action, that it has conferred the appearance of natural, universal self-evidence on the institutions economics claims to theorize ahistorically; it has done this by, among other things, the amnesia of genesis that is encouraged, in this field as in others, by the immediate accord between the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’, between dispositions and positions, between anticipations (or hopes) and opportunities. Against the ahistorical vision of economics, we must, then, reconstitute, on the one hand, the genesis of the economic dispositions of economic agents and, especially, of their tastes, needs, propensities or aptitudes (for calculation, saving or work itself) and, on the other, the genesis of the economic field itself, that is to say, we must trace the history of the process of differentiation and autonomization which leads to the constitution of this specific game: the economic field as a cosmos obeying its own laws and thereby conferring a (limited) validity on the radical autonomization which pure theory effects by constituting the economic sphere as a separate world. It was only very gradually that the sphere of commodity exchange separated itself out from the other fields of existence and its specific nomos asserted itself – the nomos expressed in the tautology ‘business is business’; that economic transactions ceased to be conceived on the model of domestic exchanges, and hence as governed by social or family obligations (‘there’s no sentiment in business’); and that the calculation of individual gain, and hence economic interest, won out as the dominant, if not indeed exclusive, principle of business against the collectively imposed and controlled repression of calculating inclinations associated with the domestic economy. The

Unlike sociology, a pariah science that is always under suspicion for its supposed political leanings, and from which the powerful expect nothing but a minor, generally somewhat ancillary knowledge of techniques of manipulation or legitimation, and which, as a result, is less exposed than other disciplines to demands likely to threaten its independence, economics is always more of a state science and is, as a result, haunted by state thinking: being constantly preoccupied with the normative concerns of an applied science, it is dependent on responding politically to political demands, while at the same time defending itself against any charge of political involvement by the ostentatiously lofty character of its formal, and preferably mathematical, constructions. It

Robert Zion, the social psychologist, once described cognitive psychology as ‘social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero’. The point he was making is that humans are a deeply social species (which may mean that research into human behaviour or choices in artificial experiments where there is no social context isn’t really all that useful). In the real world, social context is absolutely critical. For instance, as the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu observes, gift giving is viewed as a good thing in most human societies, but it only takes a very small change in context to make a gift an insult rather than a blessing; returning a present to the person who has given it to you, for example, is one of the rudest things you can do. Similarly, offering people money when they do something you like makes perfect sense according to economic theory and is called an incentive, but this does not mean you should try to pay your spouse for sex.*

Le Zola « engagé », « édifiant », voire « missionnaire » que la tradition militante, relayée par la dévotion scolaire, a inventé de toutes pièces masque que le défenseur de Dreyfus est le même qui défendait Manet contre l’Académie, le Salon et le bon ton bourgeois, mais aussi, et au nom de la même foi dans l’autonomie de l’artiste, contre Proudhon et ses lectures « humanitaires », moralisantes et socialisantes, de la peinture : « J’ai défendu M. Manet comme je défendrai toute ma vie toute individualité franche qui sera attaquée. Je serai toujours du parti des vaincus. Il y a une lutte évidente entre les tempéraments indomptables et la foule. » Et plus loin : « J’imagine que je suis en pleine rue et que je rencontre un attroupement de gamins qui accompagnent Édouard Manet à coups de pierres. Les critiques d’art – pardon, les sergents de ville – font mal leur office ; ils accroissent le tumulte au lieu de le calmer, et même, Dieu me pardonne ! il me semble que les sergents de ville ont d’énormes pavés dans leurs mains. Il y a déjà, dans ce spectacle, une certaine grossièreté qui m’attriste, moi passant désintéressé, d’allures calmes et libres. Je m’approche, j’interroge les gamins, j’interroge les sergents de ville ; je sais quel crime a commis ce paria qu’on lapide. Je rentre chez moi, et je dresse, pour l’honneur de la vérité, le procès-verbal qu’on va lire23. » C’est un tel procès-verbal que dressera le « J’accuse ».

qui, ayant troqué un statut, souvent de second ordre, dans le champ intellectuel contre une position dans le champ politique, rompent plus ou moins ostentatoirement avec les valeurs de leur univers d’origine et, soucieux de s’affirmer en hommes d’action, sont souvent les plus enclins à dénoncer l’idéalisme ou l’irréalisme des « théoriciens » pour mieux s’autoriser à trahir les valeurs inscrites dans les théories.

La lutte libérale contre la Restauration et l’ouverture faite aux hommes de lettres dans la période orléaniste avaient favorisé, sinon une politisation de la vie intellectuelle, du moins une sorte d’indifférenciation de la littérature et de la politique, comme en témoigne la floraison des politiciens littérateurs et des littérateurs politiciens, Guizot, Thiers, Michelet, Thierry, Villemain, Cousin, Jouffroy ou Nisard. La révolution de 1848, qui déçoit ou inquiète les libéraux, et surtout le second Empire renvoient la plupart des écrivains dans une sorte de quiétisme politique, inséparable d’un repliement hautain vers l’art pour l’art, défini contre l’« art social ». On se rappelle Baudelaire fulminant contre les socialistes : « Crosse religieusement les omoplates de l’anarchiste21 ! » Ou Leconte de Lisle faisant la leçon à Louis Ménard resté fidèle à ses idéaux politiques : « Vas-tu passer ta vie à rendre un culte à Blanqui qui n’est ni plus ni moins qu’une sorte de hache révolutionnaire, hache utile en son lieu, je le veux bien, mais hache enfin ! Va ! Le jour où tu auras fait une belle œuvre, tu auras plus prouvé ton amour de la justice et du droit qu’en écrivant vingt volumes d’économie22. » Mais l’expression la plus typique de ce désenchantement se trouve chez Flaubert, Taine ou Renan qui, réfugiés dans leur œuvre, gardent le silence sur les événements politiques.

du roman n’entretient pas une relation avec l’apparition, dans le champ, d’une pluralité de perspectives concurrentes).

Mais, dans leur lutte contre l’Académie, les peintres (et en particulier les « refusés ») pouvaient s’appuyer sur tout le travail d’invention collectif (commencé avec le romantisme) de la figure héroïque de l’artiste en lutte, rebelle dont l’originalité se mesure à l’incompréhension dont il est victime ou au scandale qu’il suscite. Mais ils ont aussi reçu le soutien direct des écrivains, depuis longtemps affranchis de l’autorité académique qui, dès le XVIIe siècle, leur avait assuré une identité reconnue mais en leur assignant une fonction limitée, et, en tout cas, définie du dehors. Les écrivains ont renvoyé aux peintres une image exaltée de la rupture héroïque qu’ils étaient en train d’accomplir et, surtout, ils ont porté à l’ordre du discours les découvertes que les peintres étaient en train de faire en pratique, en matière d’art de vivre notamment.

sanctifier l’art, considéré comme le second créateur. Associant l’élitisme et l’anti-utilitarisme, l’artiste se moque de la morale conventionnelle, de la religion, des devoirs et des responsabilités et méprise tout ce qui pourrait évoquer l’idée d’un service que l’art aurait à rendre à la société.

de Robert Macaire ou de M. Prudhomme. Et personne n’a sans doute plus contribué que Baudelaire, dont les premiers écrits connus sont les Salons de 1845 et 1846, à édifier l’image de l’artiste comme héros solitaire qui, à la façon de Delacroix, mène une existence d’aristocrate indifférent aux honneurs et tout entier tourné vers la postérité25, et aussi comme un personnage saturnien voué au guignon et à la mélancolie.

de s’affranchir de l’emprise des écrivains.

brute du « langage reportage », discours purement dénotatif, naïvement orienté vers un référent.

que les peintres – Manet notamment – se sont accordée en affirmant ce que Joseph Sloane26 appelle la « neutralité du sujet », c’est-à-dire le rejet de toute hiérarchie entre les objets et de toute fonction didactique, morale ou politique, n’a pu qu’exercer un effet en retour sur les écrivains qui, bien qu’ils fussent libérés depuis longtemps des contraintes académiques, étaient, comme utilisateurs du langage, plus directement soumis à l’exigence du « message ».

Marx inspired Bourdieu’s understanding of society as the embodiment of concrete relationships rather than separate, abstract entities, like individuals and rules. Weber had formulated concepts such as domination, which Bourdieu developed as unconscious internalization of relations of subjugation. Ernst Cassirer* wrote about violence, power, and capital as “symbolic forms,” which is very similar to the symbolic capital conceptualized by Bourdieu. From Durkheim, as much as from structural linguistics, Bourdieu borrowed the notion of structure and its reproducing mechanisms

epistemological

Bourdieu also noted that, like all actors, social scientists are always part of the practice that they observe. As a consequence, they influence it with their observation and therefore cannot be unbiased. This is an example of how the definition of social phenomena,* rather than being either objective or subjective, depends on interactions.

Anthony King* argued that the concept of habitus did not resolve the opposition between subjectivity* and objectivity* in social sciences. Still, King admits that “despite the failings of the habitus,” Bourdieu “offers a way out of the structure-agency problem without relapsing into either subjectivism* or objectivism.”*2

thinking with Bourdieu is more fruitful and rewarding than dismissing it.

Pierre Bourdieu clearly expressed his challenge in the following sentence: “all of my thinking started from this point: how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?

Ils ne voient pas que l’interrogation rituelle sur le lieu et le moment de l’apparition du personnage de l’artiste (opposé à l’artisan) se ramène en fait à la question des conditions économiques et sociales de la constitution progressive d’un champ artistique capable de fonder la croyance dans les pouvoirs quasi magiques qui sont reconnus à l’artiste.

et de son œuvre que par le fait de le constituer en personnage mémorable, digne du récit historique, à la

La dualidad de las estrategias matrimoniales evidencia la dualidad de los criterios que el grupo utiliza para calibrar el valor de un individuo.

El dominio del grupo sobre los intercambios se afirmaba en la restricción del tamaño del mercado matrimonial medido en distancia geográfica y, sobre todo, en distancia social.