Abstract
Few theoretical traditions dominate the sociological study of culture as does that of the late Pierre Bourdieu. Yet the Bourdieu that dominates is not the only Bourdieu there is, for Bourdieusian sociology is comprised of two incompatible philosophical strands—naturalism and interpretivism. In turn, the first goal of this essay is to make the case that cultural sociologists are wrong to give primacy to naturalist Bourdieu, as we so often do. And in order to accomplish this, I advance a critique of naturalist Bourdieu using the theoretical and normative resources afforded by interpretivist Bourdieu. However, this critique is only the first part of a larger project of theoretical translation and reconstruction. Despite the substantial sociological insights contained in interpretivist Bourdieu, for explanatory, ethical, and political reasons, I maintain that a superior critical cultural theory ultimately requires an alternative theoretical vocabulary. “Naturalism and interpretivism” presents brief accounts of naturalism and interpretivism. In “The two Bourdieus: naturalist versus interpretivist,” I flesh out how they manifest in Bourdieu’s sociology, presenting, in ideal-typical form, the basic outlines of what I call naturalist Bourdieu and interpretivist Bourdieu. In “Moving beyond Bourdieu,” I argue that, although the latter is far superior to the former, its economistic vocabulary is parasitic on the normative vision animating Bourdieu’s project. So, in order to bring Bourdieu’s cultural theory more in line with his political ambitions, I propose replacing the language of “capital,” “distinction,” and “fields” with the anti-naturalist language of “goods,” “traditions,” and “spheres.” In “A post-Bourdieusian cultural theory,” I bring together the work of Taylor, MacIntyre, Walzer, and others to sketch the outlines of a post-Bourdieusian cultural theory.
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Notes
Although the “reproduction Bourdieu” that today dominates cultural sociology holds a lot in common with what I call “naturalist Bourdieu,” they are not identical. For instance, in Bourdieu’s work naturalism and interpretivism are less classifiable by time periods than by contrasting dimensions of his selfsame theoretical project. Moreover, it would be mistaken to suppose that “interpretivist Bourdieu” cannot account for social reproduction (or that “naturalist Bourdieu” cannot account for social change). Indeed, this is why I think it important to shift our focus from the reproduction/transformation dichotomy to that of naturalist/interpretivist. At the end of the day, the key distinction is fundamentally philosophical or meta-theoretical—yet no less consequential for being so.
I largely agree with Fowler (2011) that Bourdieu was an “unorthodox Marxist.”
Thus, “naturalist” could sensibly be replaced by the terms “scientistic,” while “interpretivist” could reasonably be substituted for “humanist” (although I don’t see them as perfect synonyms).
It should be noted, therefore, that I do not mean to equate “naturalist Bourdieu” with naturalism per se.
In this sense, the theory outlined here is best conceived as “post-Bourdieusian” (Beljean et al. 2016), insofar as it is erected upon the theoretical foundation afforded by interpretivist Bourdieu (this is what makes it Bourdieusian), while simultaneously drawing from and synthesizing an array of normative-cum-interpretivist thought that afford a more adequate theoretical vocabulary to explain and critique social life (this is what makes it post).
As Papineau (2021) notes, “naturalism” holds many meanings, some of which radically conflict with the account presented here. Thus, I want to stress that my critical discussion of this philosophical paradigm is limited to this account.
That is, naturalist sociologists tend to see the most important disagreements as chiefly methodological in character.
Although the vocabulary I employ may reflect my own unique conception, the account of interpretivism presented here is intended to be inclusive and broad enough to be fully compatible with theoretical approaches as diverse as hermeneutics, phenomenology, pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, social constructivism, post-structuralism, and strong program cultural sociology (or at least those iterations of these approaches that recognize the relative autonomy of meaning (see Kane 1991)). In “A post-Bourdieusian cultural theory” I present the specific type of interpretivism upon which I seek to construct a post-Bourdieusian cultural theory—what I call, following Bevir and Blakely (2018), anti-naturalism.
A limiting principle of interpretivist sociology, then, is that “we study the same kinds of beings that we are” (Bellah 2006, p. 397).
Thus, as we might expect from Bourdieu, the naturalist and interpretivist dimensions of his thought do not hold equal status, but rather exist in a conflictual and hierarchical relationship to one another.
Transcendence would amount to something like rejecting the entire semantic field within which these conceptual distinctions make sense. Consequently, unlike Fuchs (2001), I do not think we should strive to get “Beyond Agency.”
In this sense, Bourdieu’s sociology contains (to use his terminology) a “double truth.”
Hence, Lizardo (2011) interprets Bourdieu as a “post-cultural theorist.”
“The more scientific sociology becomes, the more politically relevant it becomes” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 51).
I therefore agree with Santoro and Solarli (2016, p. 50) that, as regards his interpretivist mode, there exist many “spaces of potential convergence and mutual strengthening between Bourdieu’s social theory of culture and Alexander’s self-claimed ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology.”
Even if we understand naturalist Bourdieu as a “methodological structuralist” (Lizardo 2010), for whom objectivism is merely a useful scientific heuristic, to the extent that this heuristic enables the sociologist to claim a superior epistemic authority to that of ordinary agents (as naturalism would imply), this critique still applies.
I have come to think that Bourdieu’s sociology is as “cleft” as was his own habitus (see Bourdieu 2007, p. 100), and that his attempt at synthesis and reconciliation in the former should be seen as, at least in part, a theoretical reflection of the same project of reconciliation that he strove for in his personal life—striving to unite the various aspects of his self (powerless rural-working class Béarnaise, powerful and prestigious Parisian academic), which, for reasons both personal and sociological, he ultimately could not.
In the 1990s, Bourdieu moved away from speaking in terms of “interest” and instead embraced the language of “illusio” (see Bourdieu 1998a), while also revising his conception of the gift (see Silber 2009). I read this shift as an attempt (if ultimately unsatisfactory one) to grant more authority to what I am calling interpretivist Bourdieu.
In other words, if we accept the philosophical anthropology of naturalist Bourdieu (a derivative of what Alexander (2006) calls the tradition of Thrasymachus), democracy as an ideal becomes unrealizable.
These are what Gaus (2000) calls “political concepts”—which is to say, imbued with different meanings by different ethical and political traditions.
In an insightful piece, Brubaker (1993, p. 218) describes Bourdieu as striving, above all, “to convert” and “to proselytize” his readers into a shared mode of perceiving and evaluating the social world (i.e., intellectual habitus).
Reading Bourdieu as an interpretivist further helps to make sense of his frustratingly strategic writing style, which leads Brubaker (1993, p. 217) to sympathetically remark that his work does not lend itself to “conceptualist, theoretical, logocentric reading[s].” When interpretivist Bourdieu uses hyperbole, contradictory rhetoric, or outright polemic to push back against what he sees as a dominant ideology or viewpoint—what he often referred to as “twisting the knife in the other direction”—he is implicitly acknowledging the extent to which subjectivity can never be excised from social interpretation (for Bourdieu’s invocation of this Maoist slogan is hardly compatible with naturalism; one struggles to imagine a physicist making a similar claim). Thus, in his interpretivist mode, Bourdieu basically admits that his social theory is very much a product of (although not reducible to) his own habitus, forged under circumstances (at boarding school) that provoked in him extreme despair and anger, and (at Lycée Louis-le-Grand and École Normale Supérieure) feelings of inadequacy and shame, which fuelled, among other things, an anti-institutional disposition as well as, in his words, “a sort of quasi-sacrificial will to repudiate the specious grandeurs of philosophy” (Bourdieu 2007, p. 40).
Elsewhere I have argued that, for this very reason, sociologists should be wary of talking about “neoliberal subjects” (Watts 2022c).
See also Blakely (2016).
Although the term “anti-naturalism” is novel, I do not believe this to be true of its underlying tenets. I place Bevir and Blakely’s project in a tradition of interpretivist social thought that views social inquiry as a form of moral inquiry. This tradition includes (but is not limited to): Bernstein (1976), Rabinow and Sullivan (1979), Walzer (1983, 1987), Tipton (1982), Bellah et al. (1983, 1985, 1991), Taylor (1985a, b, 1995, 2016), Kögler (1997), Smith (2003), Alexander (2006), Bellah (2006), Selznick (2008), MacIntyre ([1983] 2007), Watts (2022a).
Or what Lizardo (2017) refers to as “declarative” and “nondeclarative” modes.
All of this said, anti-naturalists recognize that normativity is often a matter of degree – dependent on the extent to which a social interpretation is theory-laden (see Reed 2011).
I believe anti-naturalist social science is best thought of as a kind of “social science as public philosophy” (Watts 2022b).
That some non-human animals can also be said to also dwell in a space of strong evaluation is, as I see it, entirely possible. But for the purposes of this essay, I will consider this a distinctive feature of human life.
This is what Bourdieu meant when he wrote, “Habitus is a socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 126).
Relatedly, to speak economistically of “reproduction strategies” ignores the fact that such strategies may be motivated, less by an (unconscious) desire to secure class distinction, than by the desire (both conscious and unconscious) to raise children who—given a family’s traditions—embody and exemplify the virtues, ethics, and vision of the good the family espouses. In other words, in order to make sense of class reproduction one need not presuppose a priori an unconscious desire for distinction, but simply recognize that parents are often highly motivated to equip their children with the resources—cultural and material—to become the types of persons that they themselves respect and admire. Needless to say, even if this is correct, it does not change the fact that the latent function of this process is to entrench social inequality. Nor does it alter the fact that some social traditions and practices may be irrational, harmful, or plain unjust.
And there are also reasons to think that Bourdieu overestimated the extent to which classes in 1960s France were the sole locus of shared traditions and practices, for even his own data suggest that there existed considerable overlaps in taste across classes (see Friedland 2009).
From an anti-naturalist perspective, it is not demographic variables that explain traditions, but rather the opposite: what we call demographic variables (e.g., sex, gender, race, etc.) are the residual and institutionalized by-products of pre-existing traditions and practices, which encode the material properties of bodies with historically contingent meanings.
Even proponents of dual process models have recently remarked, “Riders can—and do—train elephants” (Vaisey 2014, p. 153).
Frankfurt’s (1988) term for this is a “second-order volition.”
For an insightful Taylorian account of Weber which hews a similar line of argument as the one I advance here, see Raza (2022).
This is not, however, because developing certain competencies necessarily involves “making a virtue of necessity” (Wacquant and Bourdieu 1992, p. 254), or suffering “sunk costs” (Lizardo 2014). Rather it’s because being a certain kind of person with particular competencies entails leading one’s life in accord with certain visions of the good, the loss, or abandonment of which can engender a crisis of meaning and identity. In other words, it is less a matter of making a “virtue out of necessity” than making necessity out of virtue.
This helps us to see the potentially emancipatory role of sociology: sociological (re-)interpretation provides individuals and groups with the symbolic resources to form higher-order desires, enabling them to alter or reform their (collective) self-interpretations (Bourdieu 2000a, p. 123).
While Bourdieu may have popularized field theory within sociology, this approach was first developed in Germany (Martin 2003, p. 20).
I recognize that “field theory” remains a vibrant area of scholarship that is not limited to the tradition popularized by Bourdieu (for instance, American organizational sociologists have developed their own approach) (for a useful overview see Krause 2017). Thus, my critical discussion is limited to Bourdieusian field theory.
As Martin (2003, pp. 20–21) notes, Bourdieu’s field theory was actually inspired by Weber’s theory of differentiated value spheres. So one could plausibly argue that in making this move, I am simply returning to the source.
One reason I prefer the language of “spheres” is because the term “field” suggests a transparently mappable space with hard and clear boundaries, whereas spheres, at least as I understand them, have comparatively soft and porous boundaries.
I’m inclined to think that while a sphere is born of a specific tradition, upon becoming a sphere, it morphs into something more like a meta-tradition (comprised of multiple traditions all oriented toward a single ultimate value).
Or, put in concrete terms, academics become academics because they care about intellectual inquiry, artists become artists principally because they care about art, while stockbrokers become stockbrokers because they care about money. Of course, this is not to suggest that artists, academics, and stockbrokers don’t also care about other goods (artists and academics may also value money, while stockbrokers may value art and intellectual inquiry). It simply means that participation in a sphere presupposes a shared commitment to, and care for, the goods produced by that sphere (i.e., Bourdieu’s illusio).
My account of internal and external goods is inspired by that of MacIntyre (1995, 2007). Many associate MacIntyre with a naturalist Thomist-Aristotelianism, which is quite at odds with the anti-naturalist perspective developed here. But as Blakely (2020) makes clear, MacIntyre’s earlier work was fundamentally interpretivist. Needless to say, it is this interpretivist MacIntyre that I am indebted to.
In their critique of Bourdieu, Fligstein and McAdam (2011 p. 20) contend Bourdieu fails to adequately theorize the emergence of fields.
Should readers question this comparative method, recall that for Bourdieu (1990, p. 176): “one of the most fundamental properties of sociology as I conceive of it: all the propositions that this science enunciates can and must be applied to the subject who practices this science.”
Of the early period in his academic career, Bourdieu (2007, p. 70) writes: “The recognition I was granted by a small ‘invisible college’ was sufficient for me and I did not suffer at all from my relative obscurity.”
Think, for instance, of the virtuoso musician who comes to hate playing music because they’ve become solely motivated by external, rather than, internal goods. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this example.
One virtue of this account is that it permits us to make sense of the significant presence of play and intrinsic satisfaction within spheres (Benzecry 2011; Hennion 2015; Pagis and Summers-Effler 2021). It is because participants are not all unconsciously interested in maximizing their prestige, status, and authority, but are actually invested in the sphere’s traditions and practices—and the goods internal to them—that spheres are littered with both amateurs and enthusiasts, who pursue and enjoy sphere-specific excellences, all while happy to live with the fact that they are not “the best.”
For this reason, although some individuals may enter and participate in a sphere purely for the external goods one can accrue by doing so, too much of this can be fatal, as the survival of a sphere being what it is critically depends upon participants being committed to the goods internal to it.
I write “partially” because I think hierarchies of legitimacy are far less stable, uncontested, and unidimensional than much Bourdieusian sociology suggests.
For instance, the Bourdieusian tradition would not exist were it not for Sartrean subjectivism and Lévi-Straussian structuralism, which were the two reigning intellectual traditions in French academia when Bourdieu began his academic career. Furthermore, the account developed here would be unthinkable were it not for the current dominance of the Bourdieusian tradition.
In Fligstein and McAdam’s (2001 p. 20) rendering, this is the strategic (collective) action of groups within a field.
On the civil sphere, see Alexander (2006).
It is on this basis that my approach differs from that of French neo-pragmatism (e.g., Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Boltanski 2011). I do not think sociologists must limit their normative interpretations to those espoused by their informants, for institutional spheres, as institutionalized matrices of (normative) meaning, contain within them distributive principles which the social critic can invoke.
One reason why I am reluctant to endorse the Bourdieusian language of “universal” is because it seems too closely bound up with naturalist Bourdieu’s quest for objective truths that transcend history. While I do believe some traditions and practices are of a higher quality, and thus more “objective” than others, I also think the human conversation is ongoing, such that what we take to be of the highest quality is always limited by the horizon of significance implicit in the (current) social background.
Perhaps an illustrative example will help: it is likely the case that not all sociologists agree that Bourdieu, and the tradition he pioneered, deserve the significant prestige, status, and authority presently granted them. But this fact alone does not undermine the relative consensus (embodied in the institutionalization of Bourdieusian thought) that exists within the sociological sphere—which reflects, I would argue, a legitimate recognition of the contributions he and his tradition have made to the sociological sphere.
Or, to use Wright’s (2012, p. 6) terms, complex equality provides us with the necessary criteria for a “moral audit of any specific institution, social structure, or even entire society.”
Indeed, Bourdieu’s hermeneutic skill is even on display in the work that most exemplifies naturalist Bourdieu—Distinction. Readers often overlook the rich ethnographic detail he provides in describing the taste-profiles of different classes (e.g., the taste for necessity, the taste for freedom, etc.), and the immense interpretive achievements these hermeneutic reconstructions reflect.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dick Houtman for a series of rousing conversations that helped inspire this paper. Thanks, also, to members of the cultural sociology reading group at KU Leuven for taking the time to read and comment on an earlier draft. I owe a debt of gratitude to Patrick Baert for inviting me to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to present this essay to his reading group; I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and learned much from it. A special thanks to Sebastian Raza and Mischa Dekker for reading an earlier version of this paper with care and offering insightful remarks. Thanks also to Jason Blakely for useful recommendations on an earlier draft. Finally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Jeff Alexander and the AJCS anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful feedback and suggestions. Needless to say, for all errors and omissions contained herein, I take full responsibility.
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This project has been generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO).
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Watts, G. Capital and distinction or goods and traditions? Toward a post-Bourdieusian cultural theory. Am J Cult Sociol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-023-00196-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-023-00196-3