Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002) Bourdieu agrees with Bachelard: every science worthy of the name is concerned with what

remains hidden from ordinary view. The task of a science that takes society as its object is to expose the normally repressed mechanisms that perpetuate and disguise as natural or spontaneous those relations of domination and privilege that underlie any given social order. In each of his varied fields of enquiry, from his studies undertaken in the late 1950s of ritual tradition and colonial rule in Algeria through to his analyses of education and cultural consumption in the 1960s and 70s, of art and philosophy in the 1980s, and of economic and political issues in the 1990s, Bourdieus guiding concern has been to reveal the forms of symbolic violence through which social actors are differentiated and regulated in such a way as to ensure the dominance of the ruling class. What distinguishes Bourdieus approach from more conventional Marxist alternatives is, negatively, his relative lack of interest in the precise economic basis of class struggle, and positively, the care with which he strives to avoid the dualisms that often beset militant social analysis between theory and practice, context and individual, structure and agency, and so on. All of these dualisms refer back to the most fundamental and most ruinous of the oppositions dividing social science, the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism. The subjectivism that Bourdieu associates with Sartre and existentialism isolates individual freedom from its enabling conditions; the objectivism he associates with Althusser and structuralism almost ignores the individual altogether. It was to avoid this dichotomy that Bourdieu developed his two most distinctive concepts, those of habitus and field. Habitus refers to the set of dispositions that individuals internalise over the course of their upbringing and which then serve to orient their interests, tastes and expectations. Habitus varies mainly according to the urgency of immediate material necessity: the more privileged or leisured the individuals, the more their habitus will encourage them to take an interest in impractical practices like intellectual abstraction, aesthetic distance, scientific detachment, formal refinement, theoretical speculation, etc. Bourdieus work on the French education system (The Inheritors [1966]; Reproduction [1970]) demonstrates how it is systematically skewed to favour those with privileged dispositions of this kind, just as Distinction [1979] explores the myriad ways in which those with cultivated tastes differentiate themselves from the vulgar masses who prefer function over form and matter over manner (a hearty meal rather than nouvelle cuisine, familiar representation rather than art for arts sake, conventional narrative rather than avant-garde experimentation...). Social differentiation proceeds in distinct spheres or fields. If habitus is a way of describing that feel for the game which distinguishes social players in terms of confidence and finesse, then the rules that govern competition in any particular game cultural, scientific, legal, journalistic, etc. are defined through its constitution as a semi-autonomous field. For example, in the seventeenth century science begins to emerge as a distinct field when, thanks to the development of particular kinds of reasoning, experimentation and accreditation, the criteria that allow for the clear distinction of scientific statements from unscientific (religious, magical, commonsensical...) statements become relatively independent of other modes of socio-cultural evaluation. As described in Bourdieus major work in the sociology of art (The Rules of Art, 1992), the literary field likewise emerges as semi-autonomous when, in the age of Flaubert and Baudelaire, competition among producers of literature a competition

which distinguishes the proponents of a pure style of writing purged of any constituent relation to the object of description or narration from the advocates of a socially subversive realism on the one hand and the defenders of bourgeois norms on the other becomes partially independent of the constraints (of patronage or commercialisation) that had previously tied literature to the fields of political or economic power. Again, in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1988), Bourdieu reads Heideggers work as an instance, conditioned by the specific limitations and sophistications of the philosophical field, of that conservative revolution which swept through the German academy in the 1920s and which also found expression in the writings of Jnger, Spengler and the ideologues of National Socialism. Since Bourdieu is chiefly interested in the opaque if not secret tendencies that structure individual behaviour and that are themselves profoundly resistant to change, he has often been criticised, for instance by Rancire and Latour, for failing to allow sufficient scope for deliberate innovation or disruption. Partly in response to such accusations, in the last decade of his life Bourdieu became increasingly preoccupied with more overtly political issues. The Weight of the World (1993) is concerned with the contemporary mechanics of destitution and social exclusion; several of Bourdieus last publications raise searching questions about the responsibilities of intellectuals and the media. Especially in the wake of the December 1995 strikes in France, Bourdieu became a vocal critic of neo-liberal globalisation and a still more vocal champion of groups or movements seeking to politicise, in alliance with progressive trade unions and a strengthened confederation of European nation states, issues relating to employment, poverty and discrimination.
Peter Hallward