Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture

Pierre Bourdieu

Culture and Education Series Series Editors: Henry A. Giroux, Pennsylvania State University Joe L. Kincheloe, Pennsylvania State University

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Pierre Bourdieu Fieldwork in Culture

edited by NICHOLAS BROWN

and IMRE SZEMAN

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Oxford

ROWMAN & LITTLEFEELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford 0X2 9JJ, England Copyright © 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pierre Bourdieu : fieldwork in culture / edited by Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman. p. cm. — (Culture and education series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8476-9388-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8476-9389-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2. Culture—Philosophy. I. Brown, Nicholas, 1971n. Szeman, Imre, 1968m. Series. HM479.B68 P54 1999 306'.01— 29-73, and RA, 214-77, for his specific explication of cultural fields. 4. On "unity of opposition" of individuals of divergent social origin see FCP, 66. 5. See DiMaggio (1982, 1991) and Levine (1988). 6. See Lopes (1994) and DiMaggio (1991) on the dissemination of the classical high art music paradigm. 7. See DiMaggio (1982), Levine (1989), and Lopes (1994) on eclecticism of popular music. 8. The importance of the oligopoly can be seen in the fact that following its collapse in the early 1950s, American music saw the advent of a whole new set of musical genres— rhythm *n' blues, rock 'n' roll, and modem jazz. See Peterson and Berger (1975), Ryan (1985), and Lopes (1992, 1994) on the importance of the oligopoly. 9. See Ogren (1989) and Leonard (1962) on elite response to jazz in the 1920s. 10. In addition, jazz critics were important in generating the paradigm. See Lopes (1994).

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11. See FCP, 37-40 and RA, 215-23 on these three subfields. 12. For examples of music critics' expression of this "struggle" between bourgeois art music and restricted art music, see Horowitz's (1987) lament of bourgeois art music and Pleasants' (1955) lament of restricted art music. 13. See Berger (1947) on the social status of jazz. 14. It must be remembered that the industry's claim of jazz not being commercially viable was a self-fulfilling prophecy, since they refused to allow it to prove itself in the market. 15. See Lopes (1994) and Harvey (1967) on the class and educational background of 1950s jazz musicians. 16. One could argue that the orientation to American pop music and classical music was a refraction of the less acknowledged associative qualities of this music as "white" culture. 17. See FCP, 97. 18. See FCR 74-76; RA, 215-16.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Howard S. "The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience." American Journal of Sociology 57 (1951): 136-44. Berger, Morroe. "Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture Pattern." The Journal of Negro History (October 1947). Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. . The Rules of Art. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Crane, Diana. The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts. London: Sage, 1992 DiMaggio, Paul. "Social Structure, Institutions, and Cultural Goods: The Case of the United States." In Social Theory for a Changing Society, edited by P. Bourdieu and J. S. Coleman. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1991: 133-55. . "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston," Media, Culture and Society 4 (1 and 2) (1982): 33-50, 303-22. Erenberg, Lewis A. "Things to Come: Swing Bands, Bebop, and the Rise of a Post War Jazz Scene." In Recasting America: Politics and Culture in the Age of the Cold War, edited by L. May. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Harvey, Edward. "Social Change and the Jazz Musician." Social Forces 46 (1967): 34-42. Horowitz, Joseph. 1987. Understanding Toscanini. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Jones, Leroi. Blues People. New York: Morrow Quill, 1963. Lastnicci, Carlo L. "The Professional Dance Musician." Journal ofMusicology 3 (winter 1941): 168-72. Leonard, Neil. Jazz and the White Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. . "Jazz and American Culture." Journal of American Folklore (1989).

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Lopes, Paul. "Innovation and Diversity in the Popular Music Industry, 1969-1990." American Sociological Review 57 (1992): 56-71. . "The Rise of a Jazz Art World and the Modern Jazz Renaissance." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1994. Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Peterson, Richard A. "A Process Model of the Folk, Pop, and Fine Art Phases of Jazz." In American Music: From Storyville to Woodstocky edited by C. Nanry. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1972. Peterson, Richard A. and David G. Berger. "Cycles in Symbolic Production: The Case of Popular Music." American Sociological Review 40 (1975): 158-73. Pleasants, Henry. 1955. The Agony of Modern Music. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Ryan, John. The Production of Culture in the Music Industry. New York: University Pres of America, 1985.

10 Romancing Bourdieu: A Case Study in Gender Politics in the Literary Field

Marty Hipsk

How can Bourdieu*s cultural theory illuminate literary history? There are a number of possible answers to this question; given the ambitious scope and depth of Bourdieu's theoretical work in culture,1 we might do wellfirstto consider what the term "literary history" currently connotes. In the wake of new historicist and cultural studies-inspired projects in literary criticism, it is important to condition our understanding of the term "literary history" with the reminder that any such history is, if not a text per se, "inaccessible to us except in textual form" (Jameson, 35). In the field of literary and cultural studies, of course, conceptions of textuality have broadened to include signifying practices of all kinds, including any number of extra- or nonliterary discourses, depending on the time and place in question. From the outset, then, we perceive that Bourdieu comes in at a somewhat oblique angle to much current intellectual work in literary history, informed as such literary history is by such a multitude of complex theories of textuality; for after all, as Toril Moi asserts, "insofar as his is not a theory of textuality at all, a purely Bourdieuian reading is unthinkable" (1040). Bourdieu's is not a theory of discourse or textuality, that is, in the Bakhtinian, Derridean, or Foucauldian senses; an important dimension of his work has been to analyze both the social and the individual determinants of agency and subjectivity in cultural production, without being delimited by any theory of discourse or epistemology that takes language (in whatever sense, with whatever emphases) as its final horizon. Yet if, as Moi asserts, a purely Bourdieuian interpretation of texts is "unthinkable," it may nonetheless be his insistent focus on the particular social practices surrounding the production, distribution, and reception (or consumption) of liter-

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ary works that makes his theoretical apparatus a salutary complement to the ideological-discursive focus of much literary history currendy being written. I believe this to be the case with respect to literary criticism in, for example, the area of Victorian studies. A number of superb studies centrally concerned with mid- to late nineteenth-century fiction have demonstrated that feminist, psychoanalytic, and discourse-theoretical approaches can be productive and compelling in their heterogeneous explorations of their literary objects' discursive terrains and ideological layerings.2 We might partly attribute this recent critical engagement with, above all, issues of gender and class to the fact that no traditionally delimited literary period lends itself better to contemporary theoretical applications—whether because Victoriana offer such sheer volume and diversity of material (much of it still tempting terra incognita to literary scholars), or because many of the features of modernity that have precipitated twentieth-century sociocritical theory took early form in Victorian Britain, or even because certain of the thinkers in whose works we find the genesis of critical and literary theory—Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure—were formed intellectually during the mid- to late nineteenth century. Whatever the broader reasons, more theoretically minded scholars of recent years have broken open the formerly functional and regulative discourses of traditionally professionalized, humanistic scholarship on Victorian culture generally, and Victorian literature in particular. While most of us do still look upon Jane Eyre and Middlemarch as great art, we are, with the literary-theoretical illuminations of the best of the newer scholarship, less likely to see such classics as the ornate repositories of statically conceived humanistic values, as revered Grecian urns high on the shelf of the Great Tradition. Nonetheless, we might also suspect that precisely the above critical methodologies, the fresh approaches that have so productively complicated our understandings of Victorian literature, also run the risk of retrofitting their historical object with conceptual models so powerfully motivated by the intellectual contests of our own moment that—especially in the case of Foucault-inspired, discursively focused theoretical reading—this work may potentially fall prey to a kind of poststructuralist idealism, reading the texts in question exclusively for symptoms of discursively constituted historical structures, forces, or pressures: gender construction, national or colonial projects, the consolidation and maintenance of hegemonic regimes of power, and so on.3 While offering useful correctives to literary history as the story of the leading Great Authors or as the Hegelian unfolding of the history of ideas, such accounts may also tend to underplay the idiosyncratic historical agencies of individuals and groups, and to refigure these irreducible contingencies as the marionettes—much like Walter Benjamin's chess automaton—of sociohistorical forces that are only ever accessible to us via discourse. Moreover, although such accounts properly acknowledge the overdetermination behind concrete shifts, evolutions, and novelties in cultural practice, they nonetheless may tend to overemphasize more abstract causes—this or that form of broadly conceived power or desire—at the expense of exploring the specificities

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of really existing, simultaneously discursive and extra-discursive agents of change: in the case of Victorian literature, the writers, agents, publishers, and others who acted both individually and through formal and informal institutions. Bourdieu's theorized dialectic between the subject's habitus and the objective conditions of the cultural field,4 sometimes known as "genetic structuralism,"5 might allow us to retain the insights of the above readings while enabling a more thorough accounting for the intentions and actions of the creators of Victorian literary culture—to see them, that is, as more than ciphers of epistemic possibilities. I therefore want to employ a Bourdieuian framework in this chapter, in order to shed some light on a question of late-Victorian-through-Edwardian literary history: how do we account for the turn-of-the-century emergence of the modern, mass-market romance novel? At the risk of oversimplifying or reifying Bourdieu's supple cultural theory, I hope to demonstrate here how his models both of the various species of capital—economic, social, symbolic, cultural, educational, political (terms to be defined in what follows)—and of the embedded fields of cultural production, power, and class relations have been enormously helpful in the attempt to explain the evolution of the romance into its modern, mass-market form.6 I am going to tell part of this story through an individual writer, Mary Arnold (Mrs. Humphry Ward), whose somewhat unenviable career vector—from Victorian totem of propriety to modernists' lightning rod of abuse—illuminates the various material, social, and ideological energies that served to shape the woman's romance novel into its recognizably secularized, liberal individualist form. There are therefore two interpretive horizons in play here:first,that of the great methodological potential of Bourdieu's theoretical apparatus in cultural historicizing projects such as this one; second, that of the history of a particular literary field, whereby this evolution of the romance contributes to our understanding of the twentieth-century's "Great Divide" between the "mass" and the "high" in culture. All the while, my metacritical goal is to demonstrate via this instance the compatibility between the textualist approaches glossed above and an approach that foregrounds institutions and social processes.7

THE LITERARY FIELD OF IATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND I want to start this story with the judgment of a recent literary historian, who tells us that around the turn of the century, there were no women novelists of a literary stature remotely comparable to that of James, Hardy, Conrad, Meredith, Bennett, Wells, Gissing, or a dozen other men. This situation was itself a specifically late Victorian phenomenon . . . from the death of George Eliot in 1880 until the publication of Virginia Woolfsfirstnovel The Voyage Out (1915), there was a break in the great

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tradition . . . even though there were more women publishingfictionand earning a good living from it than ever before. (Keating, 175) However we may feel about the mystical continuity of "the Great Tradition," the period 1880-1914 does seem to offer a conspicuous hiatus in contemporary canons of fiction by English women. Between the death of George Eliot and the publication of Virginia Woolf s first novels, we witness the yawning emptiness of what Raymond Williams, referring to British literature as a whole, calls "The Interregnum."8 Observers of the period were in fact noticing this hiatus in significant literary output from women authors. There is much evidence to suggest that in the mid-Victorian period, the popular image of female literary output in Britain had bifurcated into two general categories: popular "sensation" fiction, meant for light entertainment, and the morally serious novel, devoted to exploring ethical questions stemming from the relationship between individual and society. By 1880, the year of George Eliot's death, we might posit that there existed in the world of English letters these two ready-made roles for any would-be fiction writer who happened to be female: on the one hand, there was the "serious lady novelist," staking her claim to verisimilitude and the complex portrayal of moral problems and psychological truths, and to the mantle of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Eliot; on the other, there were the many writers of popular novels for the entertainment of a less educated audience, in a tradition spanning from Fanny Burney to Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The former category was understood to be a very small club, yet its members were accepted as the peers of the greatest male novelists. In fact, late Victorian male critics in positions of cultural power regularly listed women writers as among the best in the English tradition, as attested by this catalogue from an 1877 article in Nineteenth Century: "our great English novelists—Miss Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray," with "the greatest name of all, George Eliot, in the present" (Meyers, 229). One midcentury critic, Francis Guizot, went so far as to rhapsodize on how "[m]y delight is to read English novels, particularly those written by women. C'est tout une icole de morale. Miss Austen, Miss Ferrier, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, and many others almost as remarkable, form a school which . . . resembles the cloud of dramatic poets of the great Athenian age."9 The latter category, by contrast, had been belittled by none other than George Eliot herself, in her well-known derogation of "silly novels by lady novelists."10 On the occasion of Eliot's death, a female critic approvingly cited the great author's dictum: As an artist, [Eliot] wrote in 1852, Miss Austen surpasses all the male novelists that ever lived, and for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand. But in general the literature of women may be compared to that of Rome—a literature of imitation. (Simcox, 782) By critical consensus, female literary genius exhibited two special features: it expressed moral vision, and it was exceedingly rare. By the closing decades of

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the century, moreover, these women authors of genius had begun to be perceived as a phenomenon of the past. The categories of "woman novelist of genius" and 4<silly lady novelist"—the one embracing a select few, the other an undifferentiated mass—might be said to correspond to two positional poles on the late Victorian literary field, as hypothetically charted in table 10.1. Bourdieu defines the field generally as a competi-

Table 10.1

Hypothetical Configuration of the Literary Field in Britain, 1880-1900 + HIGH CONSECRATION (older figures)

intellectual audience Carlyle M. Arnold Ruskin Pater Swinburne, Rosetti psychological novel