Bourdieu,Wharton and Changing Culture in The Age of Innocence

Although critics often attribute the failure of Edith Wharton's characters to achieve happiness to dichotomous, even mutually exclusive causes - that is, to deficiency of character or to force of circumstance - the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu help to illuminate the more complex cultural and literary project at the heart of Wharton's work. Bourdieu's notions of field, habitus and capital speak to the dynamic rather than static nature of social relations in The Age of Innocence, Wharton's penultimate novel about conflict between stultifying social conventions and imagined but seldom realized escapes from such restrictions. Bourdieu's work helps us to see how Wharton embraces fluid rather fixed notions of culture in both her fiction and life. Vacillating throughout the novel between love for May Welland and for Ellen Olenska, Newland Archer stands at a crossroads between the fields of marriage and romance - between social convention and individual desire. Pulled by the competing demands of these fields, he progressively loses capital in both. Wharton documents the process by which Archer becomes constrained by a habitus shared with May; she also demonstrates - through multiple examples of cultural transformation - the degree to which he creates his own experience of having missed ‘the flower of life’. Archer's problem, then, is not only the field in which he operates but his acceptance of the narrowness of this field. In contrast, through the character of Ellen Olenska as well as minor figures such as Catherine Mingott, Bob Spicer, Julius Beaufort, Emerson Sillerton and Dallas Archer, Wharton affirms the processes of social change and shows that, although one cannot help replicating social hierarchies and taste, one can participate in the constructing one's social destiny.     

Bourdieu, Smith and disinterested judgement

The paper presents a sympathetic critique of Bourdieu7rsquo;s work in terms of the tension between its critical intentions and its leanings towards sociological reductionism. Although Bourdieu argues against such reductionism in his methodological pronouncements, his empirical studies tend to reduce actors' putative disinterested judgements to functions of their habitus in relation to the social field and to unconscious strategies of distinction. Further, his concept of (non-monetary) forms of capital occludes the difference between use-value and exchange-value and the corresponding distinction between the pursuit of goods and the pursuit of distinction, which are vital for both explanation and critique. Moreover his suspicion of normative judgement on the part of social science and his concealment of his own normative standpoint subvert his critiques. Thus in relation to Bourdieu's analysis of the role of mis-recognition in social life I argue that this requires a delineation of the extent of justified recognition. In developing the argument I draw upon Adam Smith's analysis of moral sentiments and his critique of undeserved recognition and the pursuit of distinction. Where Bourdieu is dismissive about moral issues, Smith treats moral sentiments as irreducible to interest or instrumental action and as a significant element in the reproduction of social order. The paper concludes with some implications for the nature of critique in social theory.     

Portrayal and betrayal: Bourdieu, photography and sociological life

Through an examination of Bourdieu's Algerian fieldwork the article raises general questions regarding the place of photography in sociological research. In the midst of a colonial war Bourdieu used photography to make visual fieldnotes and record the mixed realities of Algeria under colonialism. Bourdieu also used photography to communicate to the Algerians an ethical and political commitment to their cause and plight. It is argued that his photographs do not simply portrayal or communicate the realities of Algeria. They are, paradoxically, at the same time full of information and mysterious and depthless. In order to read them it is necessary to ethnographically situate them in their social and historical context. It is suggested that the photographs can also be read as an inventory of Bourdieu's attentiveness as a researcher, his curiosity and ultimately his sociological imagination. They betray his concerns as a researcher but also can be used to raise ethical and political questions beyond Bourdieu's own attempts at reflexive self-analysis. The article concludes with a discussion of how Bourdieu's sociological life might contribute to the craft of sociology today.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

Bourdieu,ethics and symbolic power

This article critically discusses Pierre Bourdieu's views on ethics and normative evaluations. Bourdieu acknowledged that people hold ethical stances, yet sought to show that these stances are – unconsciously – conducive to obtaining symbolic power and legitimizing hierarchy. The first part of the article looks at this argument and charts the shifts it went through particularly in the early 1990s. The second part discusses ontological and empirical critiques of the ethics as ideology argument and suggests the latter to be more salient, as Bourdieu proposed his argument as an empirical rather than as an ontological point. The reason why he nevertheless found the ethics as ideology explanation fitting to nearly all the cases he studied, as the third part argues, is not simply that reality ‘obliged’ him to do so, but his circular definition of symbolic capital as qualities that are worthy of esteem. This definition makes his argument of ethics as ideology unfalsifiable and impedes him from distinguishing between cases when legitimate power is the aim of ethics and between those when it is merely their side effect. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which Bourdieu's work can be fruitfully incorporated into the study of ethics once the tautology is resolved.     

Bourdieu, International Relations, and European security

This article takes the failure to grasp fully the paradigmatic case of European security after the Cold War as an example of how International Relations (IR) would benefit from reformulating not only its empirical research questions but also several of its central conceptual building blocks with the aid of Bourdieusian sociology. The separation between theory and practice and the overemphasis on military power and state actors blind IR from seeing the power struggles that reshaped European security. Instead, a Bourdieusian reformulation adds new types of agency, focuses on the social production of forms of power, and stresses the processual rather than the substantive character of social reality.     

Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and collective emotions in contentious politics

We aim to show how collective emotions can be incorporated into the study of episodes of political contention. In a critical vein, we systematically explore the weaknesses in extant models of collective action, showing what has been lost through a neglect or faulty conceptualization of collective emotional configurations. We structure this discussion in terms of a review of several “pernicious postulates” in the literature, assumptions that have been held, we argue, by classical social-movement theorists and by social-structural and cultural critics alike. In a reconstructive vein, however, we also lay out the foundations of a more satisfactory theoretical framework. We take each succeeding critique of a pernicious postulate as the occasion for more positive theory-building. Drawing upon the work of the classical American pragmatists–especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead–as well as aspects of Bourdieu's sociology, we construct, step by step, the foundations of a more adequate theorization of social movements and collective action. Accordingly, the negative and positive threads of our discussion are woven closely together: the dismantling of pernicious postulates and the development of a more useful analytical strategy.     

Revealing habitus, illuminating practice: Bourdieu, photography and visual methods

Having taken taking as one of its starting points a concern to avoid fetishising method – or employing any form of method for its own sake – this paper then argues that visual methods of research may be particularly helpful in investigating areas that are difficult otherwise to verbalise or articulate. These include Bourdieu's understanding of habitus; our predisposed ways of being, acting and operating in the social environment that Bourdieu himself suggests are 'beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit' ( Bourdieu, 1977 : 94). Having outlined what Bourdieu means by habitus and considered some of the difficulties surrounding its operationalisation, the paper goes on to consider Bourdieu's own use of photography and understanding of photographic practice. It is then argued that we can move beyond Bourdieu's position by employing visual methods specifically to uncover and illuminate aspects of habitus. Where research participants are directly involved in this process this also means that visual methods can be potentially transformative, allowing for the development of forms of critical self-awareness amongst research participants of the sort that Bourdieu attributes to 'socioanalysis' ( Bourdieu, 1999 : 611).     

A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the book Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized - that is, either cultivated or popular - ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture.     

Eating heritage: caste,colonialism, and the contestation of adivasi creativity

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, ‘creativity is in India’s DNA.’ This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure inter-state political systems of development planning and post/colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning’s compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench caste-based definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre’s decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures inter-state systems of violence, policies, and discourses.     

Bourdieu, Flaubert, and the Sociology of Literature

In The Field of Cultural Production and The Rules of Art , Pierre Bourdieu offered a highly suggestive reading and analysis of Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education . Bourdieu's approach has been extraordinarily influential in recent years in both the sociology of culture and, increasingly, literary criticism. Yet, his treatment of Flaubert's work, this article argues, despite its indisputable insight is problematic in several ways. This article has two objectives in this connection: (1) to show how the weaknesses in Bourdieu's treatment of the novel point to certain key weaknesses in his broader social theory, and (2) to use a parallel reading of the same novel both to demonstrate said weaknesses and to embark on a discussion of the future possibilities of the sociology of literature, arguing that though we should not simply engage in Bourdieuian readings of literary texts, a consideration of the late sociologist's work could inspire a renewed, vigorous research program in this area.     

Entanglements of colonialism,social class,and Unequal Englishes

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the “return” of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. Thus, this paper aims to, first, tackle the general erasure of class in intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades, then second, demonstrate how such erasure in fact involves the decoupling of class and colonialism through the example of the politics of Englishes in the Philippines, before introducing the concept of colonially induced Unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015; Tupas & Salonga, 2016) as a way to address directly such politics.