David Gartman

Culture as Class Symbolization or Mass Reification? A Critique of Bourdieu's Distinction

Pierre Bourdieus theory of culture as a system of symbols furthering a misrecognition of class is critically compared to the Frankfurt schools theory of culture as reifying cimmodities furthering an unrecognition of class. Because of their approaches to history, both theories recognize only part of the complex reality of modern capitalist culture. Bourdieus ahistorical structuralism fails to grasp the historical changes produced in culture by capitalism, while critical theorys essentialism fails to specify the concrete factors mediating the historical effects of capitalism on culture. As a corrective to both, a neo-Marxist theory is developed that grasps the totality of capitalist culture by grounding the effects of class on culture in concrete, historical class struggle.

Book ReviewsCulture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.By David Swartz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. viii+333.

Of all contemporary European sociological theorists, only Pierre Bourdieu has yet to find his definitive American interpreter. Partly because of the fragmented nature of our disciplinary field, Bourdieu’s complex corpus has been appropriated largely in bits by specialists who are unaware of or unconcerned about the integral whole. So in a manner reminiscent of the Indian folk tale of the blind men and the elephant, there are many American Bourdieus: an anthropologist of Algeria, a sociologist of education, an analyst of art and culture, a researcher of stratification. Bourdieu has contributed to this fragmentary appropriation by adamantly refusing to “theorize,” that is, present his general concepts and ideas in a form abstracted from his empirical research. This faulty American reception of Bourdieu’s sociology will hopefully change with the publication of David Swartz’s new book, which is the first successful and accessible overview of Bourdieu’s entire corpus. Culture and Power puts all the parts of the elephant back together, revealing not merely the power and breadth of the animal but the warts and wrinkles as well. Swartz is in the right position to accomplish this sympathetic but probing treatment. As a student at the Sorbonne in the 1970s, he attended Bourdieu’s seminars but did not become a disciple. Familiar with the Parisian intellectual field, yet viewing it from the remove of the American university, Swartz achieves a felicitous balance between insider and outsider. The result is a book unsurpassed in the breadth and depth of its comprehension of this major sociological theorist. But readers looking for a mere introduction to Bourdieu’s work had best look elsewhere, for this is a highly sophisticated work that presents a wealth of details, complexities, and nuances. Before diving into his exposition of Bourdieu’s basic concepts, Swartz gives us an enlightening chapter on his career and position in France’s intellectual field. Bourdieu’s relentless criticism of the role of culture in general and education in particular in reproducing social inequalities is explained by his own origins as a petit-bourgeois outsider who, despite his remarkable upward mobility, has always felt marginalized by the upper-class culture of France’s grandes écoles. Bourdieu’s concepts and research are insightfully interpreted as strategic moves against competitors in this complex and contentious Parisian intellectual field. Swartz then moves on to explicate the general concepts that inform all of Bourdieu’s research. His utmost objective is to extend the notion of self-interested action usually associated with economics to cultural practice. For Bourdieu, all social action is motivated by the pursuit of profits

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important in explaining political outcomes; or, different factors (corporate mobilization, institutional legacies of past policy, activist political organization) are emphasized at different points in the narrative of an event without adequate theoretical integration at the end. A more serious problem is the disjunction between the theoretical project of the book and the empirical evidence presented. There is much useful information about conflicting interests of various parties and differential benefits of major legislation. But there is little discussion of the actual decision-making processes of policy formation (e.g., corporate lobbying tactics, links between policy planning groups and the state, the rationale of committee chairs and other key officials). This is all the more frustrating because the authors spend a whole chapter on a quantitative analysis of the role of bank political action committee (PAC) contributions in passing Garn–St. Germain. While a relatively useful contribution to the PAC literature, the findings are statistically weak and ambiguous. Further, the authors seem unaware that the “population analytic” methodology of this chapter may be at odds with their own “contingency” framework and can shed little light on causal processes in comparison to “mere historical description” in an historical case study like this one. In short, Corporate Welfare Policy does not resolve the theoretical debates over the capitalist state. But it does provide an interesting and timely historical account of key legislation affecting the most important sector of the U.S. economy.

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cal theory is to escape being a message in a bottle futilely awaiting the arrival of a nonexistent revolutionary subject and if it is ever to have any chance of realizing its aspiration to be more than another hyperspecialized academic subdiscipline, it must confront he issue of the public and the relation of theoretical criticism to important public discourses. In this regard, reappropriation of Deweys thought could help critical theorists determine whether their original goal of participating in and facilitating the creation of radical democracy is really possible.2