Tag Archives: Bourdieu

Remembering Pierre Bourdieu

Posted on by

A little more than ten years after his death, The Guardian takes a look at the influence Pierre Bourdieu has had on sociology and other academic fields:

Ten years after the death of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we seem a long way from the days when he severely criticised the world of politics and the media. Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.

Bourdieu is also the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault, but ahead of Jacques Derrida, according to the ranking produced by Thomson Reuters (previously the Institute of Scientific Information), which counts citations. “Bourdieu has become the name of a collective research undertaking which disregards borders between disciplines and countries,” says Loïc Wacquant, a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley…

Could another Bourdieu appear now? Certainly not, says Noiriel: “No single thinker could exert so much influence. Sociological research has gone global, whereas it was only just taking shape in France when Bourdieu established his position.”…

“Bourdieu rarely spoke out on issues with which he was not familiar,” says the sociologist Franck Poupeau, who edited his Political Interventions. From social deprivation to industrial action, his commitment was linked to “a profound understanding of these issues”. So, he believes, “another Bourdieu would be possible now, but he would take a different form, that’s all.”

Despite Bourdieu’s standing in sociology and other academic disciplines, how many Americans have heard of him? Have any major US policies or programs been based on Bourdieu’s work? Of course, perhaps these are silly questions as sociologists tend not to exert the same influence in the United States nor do we have as much space for public intellectuals. Additionally, measuring sociologists in pragmatic terms (how did they tangibly improve society) might be an American sort of question.

A related point: I have a hard time imagining any major US newspaper writing a story like this about a sociologist who had passed away ten years earlier. One explanation for this could be that Bourdieu was heads above many or all other sociologists of his generation and there is no American who could match his theories or breadth. Another is that many journalists have little knowledge about sociology or sociologists. Hence, people who write about society can be labelled a sociologist.

The builder behind Lego’s architecture series

Posted on by

Perhaps you have seen them in the store: Lego kits that allow you to build the White House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and many other buildings. Here is some background on the man who designs these kits:

Tucker is a serious sort, with a vaguely brooding air — not impolite, but not comfortable with niceties. He does not flinch from saying that he is an artist and that the Lego is a real medium. “I have zero interest in this as a toy,” he said, holding up a brick. He did not seem like the type who sets out on a Lego-based career path. And he wasn’t. He’s 40 now, but five years ago he was designing high-end residential homes until the real estate market started going stagnant, he said, and clients started drifting away and canceling new projects. He and his business partner split up, and so, rudderless, he moved back in with his parents.

“Six months into my hiatus, I sat down and wrote up a list of everything I wanted to do in this life,” he said. “Didn’t matter what it was — race car driver, dentist, architect. Then I looked at the list and refined it, and through a process of elimination I realized I wanted to work with my hands and I wanted to be my own boss — because I don’t take authority figures especially well. Also, I wanted to do something with architecture. The thing is, how could I be an inspiration to others if I was working in a medium most people can’t do?”

Here’s what he did: He drove to a Toys R Us in Highland Park and loaded eight shopping carts with Lego kits. He then came home, sat on the floor, spread the pieces out at his feet and, because he hadn’t played with Legos since he was a kid, reacquainted himself. He built samples and took them to a Lego convention in Washington, where he caught the eye of Lego brass.

He found Lego at the right time: After going through a rough patch in the late ’90s, the company was ready to refocus on design, and by 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, sales were up 40 percent, making it the rare company that not only weathered the recession but didn’t feel it. Tucker, meanwhile, rounded up licensing agreements with building owners. “I got a sense he didn’t have many contacts, so I set him with the people in other important buildings,” remembered Randy Stancik, the general manager of the Skydeck at Willis Tower, where Tucker’s Willis Tower kit has long been the most popular tchotchke in the building’s gift shop.

Tucker’s relationship with Lego is complex. He is not a Lego employee. With his wife, Brittny, he runs Brickstructures, which has a long-term contract that says he can only design kits for Lego. He also distributes the Architecture series in North America himself, using Lego’s warehouse in Wood Dale (though Lego distributes the series internationally). When I asked who owns the rights to the kits, he said it’s a gray area.

Is this a success story from the new American economy? Alas, it seems like there is only one such job available…

Some additional thoughts:

1. I’ve wondered this for a long time as a Lego fan: why are these sets so expensive?

2. Does Lego have a larger goal of helping people understand the world’s great architecture? If not, why not bill these as educational products? Then you might really see these fly off the shelves.

3. If I had to guess, I would say these sets are bought primarily by highly educated people. Perhaps we can apply Bourdieu to this: lower-class people buy them because they are fun to play with and make a nice decorative piece while the middle- and upper-classes appreciate the aesthetics (squared off as they may be) and knowing about great architecture.

4. Are Lego creations considered art by the broader art community?

In discussion of Occupy Wall Street, McMansions seen as part of the culture war

Posted on by

As part of a larger fascinating discussion about who the members of Occupy Wall Street actually are (the almost-elite versus the elite?), Megan McArdle suggests McMansions are part of the larger culture war in the United States:

Orwell goes on to point out that it is the anxious lower-upper-middle-class who have the most venom towards those below them–precisely because to preserve their status, they have to keep themselves sharply apart from the workers and tradesmen. And I think that that does apply here as well, at least to some extent. One of the interesting things about going back to my business school reunion earlier in the month was simply the absence of the sort of cutting remarks about flyover country that I have grown used to hearing in any large gathering of people. I didn’t notice it until after the events were over, because it was a slow accumulation of all the jokes and rants I hadn’t heard about NASCAR, McMansions, megachurches, reality television, and all the other cultural signifiers that make up a small but steady undercurrent of my current social milieu, the way Polish jokes did when I was in sixth grade.

Some of my former classmates now live in flyover country, of course, but mostly, I think, they just didn’t care. No one seemed very interested in the culture war.

So why does that same culture war seem so important to so many of the people that I know in New York and DC? (“The intellectuals”, as one of my classmates laughingly called us, when I started dropping statistics in the middle of cocktail chitchat, and then lamely explained that this is kind of what passes for fascinating small talk in DC.)

It’s not entirely crazy to suspect, as Orwell did, that this has something to do with money. Specifically, you sneer at the customs of the people you might be mistaken for. For aside from a few very stuffy conservatives, no white people I know sneer at hip-hop music, telenovelas, Tyler Perry films, or any of the other things often consumed by people of modest incomes who don’t look like them. They save it for Thomas Kinkade paintings, “Cozy cottage” style home decoration, collectibles, child beauty pageants, large pickup trucks***, and so forth.

It is fascinating to think about the comments that McArdle describes: in some circles, there is a different set of profane objects while such objects barely rate as topics among “average” people in middle America. Being in academia also leads to hearing more of such comments. I would add Walmart in as another significant “cultural signifier” in these conversations.

McMansions is an interesting addition to this group. There is often quite a bit of scorn intended when using this term. Of course, most people in flyover country don’t own McMansions (though perhaps they aspire to own them) but many communities allow them. I have found that the use of the term McMansion is often tied to sprawl, another issue that can separate the big cities from flyover country. McMansions are often seen as a part of the larger package of sprawl which includes an emphasis on cars, big houses, a waste of natural resources, and a lack of beauty and quality.

I don’t know if she knows it but it sounds like McArdle is making Bourdieu’s argument: those with more education look at aesthetics and a deeper understanding of objects while those with more money purchase for functionality. Take a McMansion: someone with more education might note its lack of quality, its contribution to sprawl, and wish for an architect-designed home. Someone with more money might note that you can have eight family members easily fit in the home and each can have their own bedroom, bathroom space, and play space.

A side note: I did have to laugh when McArdle suggests that dropping statistics into conversation is also a signifier. If so, I am guilty…

(A caveat: these sorts of flyover country/big city or red vs. blue state dichotomies are always more complex than they are commonly presented in public discourse. But just because they are broad terms describes tens of millions of people doesn’t mean that there isn’t necessarily some truth to them.)

McMansions don’t represent progressive home design

Posted on by

Here is a suggestion that McMansions are not in the best tradition of modern American architecture:

McMansions

In the past American design was modern and the emerging architectural vernacular reflected that, from the Farnsworth to LA’s Case Study houses (such as the one pictured above) or to Eichler’s industrialisation of modernism, for the masses.

But now this has been replaced by a new version of the old, from McMansions to Pottery barn, Victorian design represents regression in the form of aspiration to a pre-industrial age, America’s current design prudery is a form of technological regression that is so pervasive, we should be very thankful for the brilliant exceptions such as Apple.

In this critique, the McMansion is simply recycled architecture, an example of our “design prudery.” I will grant that McMansions may borrow from older designs and may even do a poor job of combining multiple styles.

But, I think there could be a larger argument made here: Americans have been fairly resistant to modernist home designs. The functional and simple ranch may be the most modern home most Americans would consider. (Was there a historical point where home design really took a great leap forward or where it took a great leap back?) Thinking in Bourieu’s terms, are Americans more concerned with the functionality of homes rather than their aesthetic value?

This quick description of McMansions also leaves out another element: home design is also about status for homebuyers and residents. Older or established styles can confer a sense of permanency, history, and grandeur. Do Americans not like more modern home designs because it paints them in a negative light by suggesting they are elitist or too individualistic?

How recorded music might limit social action

Posted on by

iPod headphones are ubiquitous on college campuses and many other places. What effect such devices and more broadly, recorded music, might have on modern society is explored in this essay that includes references to sociologists Sudhir Venkatesh and Pierre Bourdieu:

Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was the iPod: “In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants. Congrats Mr. Jobs for impeding social change.” Venkatesh’s suggestion was glib, tossed off—yet it was also a rare reminder, from the quasi-left, of how urban life has been changed by recording technologies.

Later in the essay, Bourdieu is presented as the anti-Adorno, the sociologist who argued that music doesn’t help prompt revolutionary action but rather is indicative (and helps reinforce) class differences:

In the mid-1960s, [Bourdieu] conducted a giant survey of French musical tastes, and what do you know? The haute bourgeoisie loved The Well-Tempered Clavier; the upwardly mobile got high on “jazzy” classics like “Rhapsody in Blue”; while the working class dug what the higher reaches thought of as schmaltzy trash, the “Blue Danube” waltz and Petula Clark. Bourdieu drew the conclusion that judgments of taste reinforce forms of social inequality, as individuals imagine themselves to possess superior or inferior spirit and perceptiveness, when really they just like what their class inheritance has taught them to. Distinction appeared in English in 1984, cresting the high tide of the culture wars about to hit the universities. Adorno had felt that advanced art-music was doing the work of revolution. Are you kidding, Herr Professor? might have been Bourdieu’s response. And thus was Adorno dethroned, all his passionate arguments about history as expressed in musical form recast as moves in the game of taste, while his dismissal of jazz became practically the most famous cultural mistake of the 20th century.

This is an interesting analysis. Sociologists of culture have been very interested in music in recent decades. One line of research has insights into “omnivore” behavior, those high-status people who claim to like all sorts of music. (See an example of this sort of analysis here.)

But this essay seems to tap into a larger debate about technologies beyond just recorded music: do computers, laptops, iPods, cell phones and smart phones, Facebook memberships, and other digital technologies serve to keep us separated from each other or do they enhance and deepen human relationships?

Americans, upward mobility, elitism

Posted on by

Anne Applebaum at Slate thinks about a common tactic in this election season: decrying “elites” or “elitism.” Why exactly are some political figures derided for taking advantage of America’s meritocracy?

Despite pushing aside the old WASP establishment—not a single WASP remains on the Supreme Court—these modern meritocrats are clearly not admired, or at least not for their upward mobility, by many Americans. On the contrary—and as Bell might have predicted—they are resented as “elitist.” Which is at some level strange. To study hard, to do well, to improve yourself—isn’t that the American dream? The backlash against graduates of “elite” universities seems particularly odd given that the most elite American universities have made the greatest effort to broaden their student bodies.

These ideas about elites and elitism do seem tied to particular colleges and settings, like Ivy League schools. Could a political candidate attack make an effective charge of elitism versus someone who had done really well with an advanced degree from a state school?

Another problem could be anti-intellectualism. Leaders who were able to work their way through top schools may be regarded differently than leaders who worked their way up through the business or political ladder. The intellectual is not as prized in America (think of the attention “public intellectuals” receive in American life compared to other groups of people) and may not be seen as the same kind of “self-made person.” Perhaps this could be tied into Bourdieu’s ideas about the differences among those with lots of capital: there is a split between those with educational capital and those with economic capital.