Structural models as such suffer the weakness that they must
reify their own structural distinctions and categories, and endow
them with collective agency (e.g. social class, gender). Bourdieu
is better than most in this respect, since his view of social
class (see _Distinction_) allows in principle for people to
occupy different class positions along different dimensions of
'distinction' (say, economic vs educational capital, or taste in
clothes vs taste in politicians). B sees it as an empirical
matter how much consistency there is among these dimensions in a
particular society. Applying the same principle to
gender/sexuality, one could imagine individuals who counted as
masculine in some respects, feminine in others, neuter in some;
and one could even multiply possible sorts of masculinities (for
different age groups, in different cultures, for different
classes, etc.). I've explored this a bit in chapter 5 of _Textual
Politics_ (see discussion of B in chapter 2). I actually think B
is less of a structuralist that might seem, or at least at the
most flexible pole of structural models. His notion of habitus
links structure to individual dispositions, and vice versa, so
that there is no one-way causality, and the issue of agency is
less vexsome. Personally, however, I believe notions of self-
organization are needed to resolve these tensions more
satisfactorily (_Textual Politics_ ch6).
B does, however, seem to fit the shoe of conflict-centered
models. He has a rather 'hard-nosed' (i.e. masculinist) view of
the centrality of the 'field of power' to the organization of all
other fields of human activity. This is where he most resembles
Marx, though he is a bit broader in his notions of the sources of
power, but ultimately it seems to come down to control of
material resources (including strength, force, violence, though
these remain, as usual in the background -- a middle-class
intellectual bias, perhaps). The key idea here is that those who
control the field of power are in a position to dictate the value
of 'goods' in all the other 'markets' (e.g. which forms of
language gain more social profit, which genres, what sorts of
curricula and educations, what knowledge, etc.). Personally I
think he goes way too far in this, though he does acknowledge
that each field also has a degree of 'autonomy'. The problem is
that in their autonomy, the fields of human activity are
disconnected from one another, and only in their subordination to
the field of power are they integrated. I think the fields are
integrated in many other important ways as well.
Like early social Darwinism (or much modern sociobiology), these
agonistic models have trouble according a central role to
altruism, cooperation, the habit of being helpful. They cannot
solve the problems posed by a calculus of profit and loss when
there are different levels of organization: individuals,
institutions, communities, etc. involved. They reason about
social categories or castes too much as if they were
'individuals' on another level (which they are not). B is
probably the best modern sociologist, but there's a lot more to
the dynamics of ecosocial systems and networks than his models
(or anyone's) encompass so far. JAY.
"Practice, Politique, Postmodernism." A review of Pierre
Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant's _An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology_. Postmodern Culture [PMC-LIST on
Listserv who-is-at listserv.ncsu.edu. Get PMC-LIST REVIEW-4.993]. 1993.
Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. London: Taylor &
Francis. 1995.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU