Pierre Bourdieu: Consumption, taste, decoding culture

Consumption as classification

We ‘distinguish ourselves by the distinctions [we] make’
Taste classifies the classifier (Bourdieu, 1984, Distinction, p.6). Our actions locate/positions us within the structures of taste and hence social structure. Parallels with Giddens' recursiveness of action.

Whilst consumption refers to material means it also implies social dispositions and taken for granted assumptions about quality, taste, what is good etc.

The habitus - A set of dispositions or skills which enable us to negotiate and reproduce group culture. It includes taste and knowledge of classification codes people use. Combines agency and structure as our improvisations/reflexivity reproduce out positions in the social structure and hence also the habitus itself is reproduced

Taste is something we learn through the norms of family life and educational formation. It is collective (the group’s) and it inculcates ...

Codes – we distinguish what is good taste based on these norms. Our ability to do this is a way of reading the culture. Mental maps or schemas within the habitus enable us to read the invisible social rules

Cultural Capital- our ability to read the culture around us and interact successfully with a range of others depends on how much cultural capital we possess

Legitimate Culture- our closeness to the cultural norms of the middle classes will determine our futures. Culture is a means of domination. Those who are not part of legitimate culture will be in subordinate groups. Symbolic domination and symbolic violence: the power exerted by dominant agents through their symbolic presence- style of language, dress codes, possessions etc. which devalues the cultural identities of less powerful groups, makes them feel 'out of place' in encounters with symbolically powerful agents (the 'fish out of water')

Cultural Intermediaries- some media –based groups in the middle classes perform the function of cultural transmission. This
(a) conveys street/popular culture to the middle classes- rock music, comics, football
(b) conveys high culture to the lower middle and working class- Music for Pleasure, Pavarotti, Classic FM, Jane Austen and BBC country house costume drama

The impact of this is to renew legitimate culture by absorbing possibly oppositional or countercultural trends e.g. Punk becomes New Wave, rock musicians ‘sell out’ to commercial demands etc. George Michael against Sony (‘Listen Without Prejudice’), Mark E. Smith (The Fall -see YouTube) as resisting the trend.
Both of these trends (a and b) represent forms of cultural goodwill- the acceptance of the dominant (middle class) culture as legitimate and therefore supporting cultural (and social) reproduction

Giddens: lecture 2, The analysis of strategic conduct

In his discussion of the Willis study Giddens brackets structure so to look at agency (structure recedes into the background, is taken for granted here) and practical/discursive forms of consciousness involved in classroom strategies

Giddens examines the goal-oriented conduct of the Lads; generalised motivations

Negotiation: the Lads change the teaching process- undermine the formal structure, curriculum

Team members or isolated agents: Archer argues that agency is individual agency and hence we can’t understand what the structure does as we are outside it. Hence no knowledgeable agents re structural factors/properties of social life.

Anthony King’s criticism of Archer: her agents are always isolated individuals, not team members (King, A., 2010, 'The odd couple:Margaret Archer, Anthony Giddens and British social theory', British Journal of Sociology )

Archer’s points against Giddens:
1. structures have emergent properties that agents don’t have- e.g. I can’t cure myself but the NHS can
2. structures (following Durkheim) pre-exist agents e.g. institutional roles pre-exist the agents who fill them… a temporal gap, hence structures cause, bring about agency here.
Possible replies Giddens could make:
To point 1: only works if we see agency as individual agency rather than, e.g. team agency that works through individuals
To point 2: roles are created in the anticipation that there are agents who can fill them hence the agents influence the roles. Following Strauss agents always influence, negotiate the way roles are done in reality i.e. not as they appear on formal or contractual documents


Other Criticisms of Giddens

He seems to make the mistake of regarding agents as in some sense outside structure -the reverse of Archer but with the same consequences, reducing duality to dualism. Their very knowedgeability or practical consciousness means they see life as understandable and negotiable….. structure as a resource as well as rules, e.g. for the counter culture’s sabotage of lessons.
A subsequent piece of research showed that the Lads regretted not taking opportunities… hence not so knowledgeable

Merleau-Ponty- all agency has a blind spot and thus the structure operates through us in ways we don’t grasp. If we take it for granted then we go with its flow rather than seeing what it’s doing to us etc. Hence here structure is working through us, so it is not something we act on and therefore it must be a constraint on us i.e. it does something to us, we don't do something to it. Ambiguity of agency…who’s speaking –us or the structure? (Signs). This point about the ambiguity of agency canbe used to criticses Giddens although M-P himself died before Giddens produced structuration theory

The Problem of Ideology- whilst Archer sees structure as an external thing as with Durkheim and Parsons’ functionalism, Giddens argues that in everyday life we do not make this kind of mistake (reification) we always grasp our relation to a situation as we draw on our experiences to understand it, see situations as not separate from us but continuous with our past experiences.. .and therefore familiar

Functionalism: The recursive nature of action means agents always reproduce the situations which are the context of their actions, hence leaving society just as it was- stabilising it, not changing it, despite their improvisations ( negotiated order).

Alternative view of daily life as everyday life (Lefebvre- Everyday Life in the Modern World) threat to the fabric of everyday life, its routine, secure structure etc. leads to revolt. Everyday life and its routines are always on the point of being undermined by processes of modernisation but the modern world also depends on the stability of everyday life as a basis for modernisation….paradox.
E.g. changes to work- deindustrialisation, speed ups, flexible
working. Part time, shift work, zero hours contracts,
casualisation. The Facebook revolt. Poll Tax. Globalisation
and international conflict (Iraq, Afghanistan)

Giddens: Lecture 1

Eclecticism: Weber- routinisation (Goffman- time frames, Garfinkel- trust, Laing –ontological security, Heidegger- time-space links, Bergson life cycles- duree, rhythms of life, the everyday in the modern world)
Durkheim- social reproduction
Marx- self-creation

Recursive nature of action
Actions reproduce the conditions (structure) in which they can be repeated
Therefore
Structure is both the medium and the outcome of action. It is the context in which action takes place and the actions reproduce that context e.g. Willis study...Lads fail at school and reproduce the class structure (unskilled labour in this case)

Time –space distantiation- we are influenced by events in other times and places. We can both bracket and draw upon this experience in situations where it is useful as a set of coping skills, know-how

Micro- macro split. Giddens: small scale events and processes reproduce large scale events and processes, therefore no split…the small is always part of the large…agents as part of structure. See Alan Dawe- ‘The Two Sociologies’, BJS, 1970

Duality/Dualism
Duality- action and structure are two sides of the same coin (e.g. Giddens, Crompton)
Dualism- e.g. Margaret Archer, David Lockwood. Archer gives two examples:
(a) Action is separate from and external to structure e.g. job vacancies in the occupational structure exist without agents to fill them. They precede in time (temporally) the agents who fill them
(b) structures or systems have emergent properties which are not attributable to agents alone e.g. I can't cure myself but the NHS might

In dualism the structure is often seen as an external threat by agents in their everyday lives and dualist sociologists don't really have an answer to the question of how we can influence, experience or know structure because it is beyond, outside the agent ( hence in popular culture dualism can mean the monstrous, barely imaginable forces…’the market’, the system, the state, foreign immigrants, the Communist threat, muggers, welfare claimants etc.- stereotypical imaginings)
In the case of duality we’d have to see these forces as part of ourselves e.g. when we go to work this is internalised as rendering us abstract functionaries, worth so many hours pay, units of labour power etc. ….this represents the system within us. When we go home we bracket this, but can draw upon these experiences also

How does the agent ‘do’ structure’? Practical consciousness/reflexivity
Agents draw on the bracketed, distantiated reality which is part of their cultural experience to enable them to understand and negotiate everyday life. This reality is drawn upon spontaneously as lived experience rather than in a conscious, thought-through way. (see Giddens on ‘the Lads’, who in coping with the classroom draw upon their neighbourhood, parental workplace and peer group subcultures for instance)

HF 01.03.2010