Habitus clivé: Aesthetics and politics in the work of Pierre Bourdieu

New Literary History

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 201-228

  Bennett, Tony ^a,b  

^a Open University

^b UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42449148894     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2007.0013     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris: Éditions Raisons D'Agir, 2004), 127
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984) (hereafter cited in text and notes as D)
3. These aspects of my discussion develop further a vein of criticism begun in Bennett, "The Historical Universal: The Role of Cultural Value in the Historical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu," British Journal of Sociology 56 (2005): 141-64
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 8
5. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 85
6. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 77-78
7. See Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
8. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 160
9. Bernard Lahire, La culture des individus: dissonances culturelles et distinctions de soi (Paris: Éditions la découverte, 2004), my translation (hereafter cited in text as C)
10. Bernard Lahire, "De la théorie de l'habitus à une sociologie psychologique," in Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu: Dettes et critique, ed. Lahire (Paris: Éditions la découverte, 2001), 121-52
11. and "From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual," Poetics 31 (2003): 329-55
12. For an example of an endorsement with reservations of Bourdieu's account of the habitus, see Nick Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, Identity, and Desire (London: SAGE, 2001), chap. 6
13. Bourdieu's work is most vulnerable to criticism here by feminist challenges to the centrality he accords class as the source of the unity of the habitus. See, for example, Lisa Adkins, "Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender?" in Feminism after Bourdieu, ed. Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)
14. and Elizabeth Silva, "Distinction through Visual Art," Cultural Trends 15 (2005): 175-92. However, my aim is to show that class will not serve this purpose even discounting the complicating effects of gender or ethnicity
15. Grenfell and C. Hardy include Renaissance art and impressionism among what they characterize as a rearguard formation (yesterday's most consecrated art) and the consecrated avant-garde respectively, while classifying examples of what we defined as modern art as an avant-garde still struggling for legitimacy. Greenfell and Hardy, "Field Manoeuvres: Bourdieu and Young British Artists," Space and Culture 6 (2003): 19-34
16. For a full account of the methods used to construct this space, see Modesto Gayo-Cal, Mike Savage, and Alan Warde, "A Cultural Map of the United Kingdom, 2003," Cultural Trends 15 (2006): 213-38
17. It might seem that the literature on omniverousness initiated by R. A. Peterson and A. Simkus is also concerned with dissonance, at least for the omnivore who is said to "graze" across legitimacy divisions. But this is not so. As Lahire notes in relation to Peterson's work and later studies modelled on it, the omnivore thesis depends on being able to demonstrate omniverousness on the part of individual members of elite groups. However, owing to the nature of the data he works with and the methods of analysis he deploys, all Peterson is able to demonstrate is omniverousness at the group level. But all this establishes is variations between individuals rather than variations within the taste profiles of individuals as the omnivore thesis requires. Work on our own data suggests that "the omnivore" is a mythic construction, which, when considered more closely, breaks down into a number of different omnivore types - a position closer to Lahire's than to Peterson's. See R. A. Peterson, "Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore," Poetics 21 (1992): 243-58
18. and Peterson and A. Simkus, "How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups," in Cultivating Differences: Sympbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michelle Lamont and Marciel Fournier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Alan Warde and David Wright, "Understanding Cultural Omniverousness, or the Myth of the Cultural Omnivore, "internal working paper for the CCSE project
19. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 189 (hereafter cited in text as P)
20. See Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (London: Pluto, 1998)
21. See Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l'esthétique (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2004)
22. and Jean-Phillipe Uzel, "Kant et la socialite du gout," Sociologie et Société 36 (2004): 1-12
23. See John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Public" (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986)
24. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
25. Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
26. Mary Poovey, "Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge," in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 79-105
27. and Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
28. See Christian Wolffe, The Real Happiness of a People under a Philosophical King (London: Cooper, 1750)
29. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 294-95
30. See Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)
31. Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989)
32. and Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
33. See Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting
34. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), 2 (hereafter cited in text as PA)
35. Jacques Rancière, "The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy," New Left Review 14 (2002):134 (hereafter cited in text as AR)
36. See Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)
37. See Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996)
38. See Tony Bennett, "Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organisation of Vision," in Companion to Museum Studies, ed. S. MacDonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 263-81
39. and "The Multiplication of Culture's Utility," Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 859-89
40. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
41. Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995)
42. See Eduardo de la Fuente, "Max Weber and Charles Ives: The Puritan as Cultural Modernist," Journal of Classical Sociology 4 (2004): 191-214
43. and Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 146-60
44. Nicholas Thoburn suggests a helpful qualification to this position by showing how, when Marx does allow the working class to act in its own right, this is only via the production of the lumpenproletariat as a position of absolute negation from which the working class can distinguish itself. "Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnameable," Economy and Society 31 (2002): 434-60
45. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)
46. Pierre Bourdieu, "What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups," Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987): 1-17 (hereafter cited in text as WM)
47. Brian C. J. Singer, "Méditations Pascaliennes: The Skholè and Democracy," European Journal of Social Theory 2 (1999): 294