Nick Prior, University of Edinburgh
After Bourdieu
Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of
Culture
Culture: What’s the Problem?
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Projection: the “problem of culture” is in the body of
criticism
Presents discursively: culture industry of culture talk:
turns, returns, critiques, renewals
“We are living now in the aftermath of what one might
call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the
insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida,
has also in some ways moved beyond them” (Eagleton,
After Theory, 2003)
Structure of Paper
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Impact and trajectories of Bourdieu-influenced
scholarship on the sociology of culture and music in UK
Post-Bourdieusian critiques and alternatives, postconstructivist turn to aesthetic form, meaning and
attachment
Cautionary note about the “new aesthetic turn” in
sociology of culture, and continuing advantage of an
“agonistic” relationship between sociology and
musicology
Why Bourdieu?
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Synthesis of founding fathers
Helped to lay the edifice of modernist sociology
A sociologist’s sociologist
A grand narrative of modernity
Sociological Politics: Political Interventions (2008)
Engaged rather than enraged intellectual
Phronetic thinker (Flyvberg, Making Social Science Matter,
2001)
A taste for Bourdieu? (Inglis, 2005)
Bourdieu: A Love Story
1) Exegesis and Understanding
2) Application
3) Critique
A) Cultural capital: Sarah Thornton Clubcultures, Routledge
(1995)
B) Habitus: homologies between social stratification and
cultural consumption in UK, musical clusters, “musical
families”, Centre for Research on Socio-Economic Change
(CRESC)
C) Field: genre, style and production are social accomplishments
enacted relationally in historically accreted fields
“Putting a Glitch in the Field” (Prior, 2008)
CC + / EC -
CC + / EC +
FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION (MUSIC)
RESTRICTED SUB-FIELD
LAR
G
LARGE-SCALE SUB-FIELD
“COMME
“AVANT-GARDE / EXPERIMENTAL”
COMMERCIAL POP / ROCK”
GLITCH
Autonomy /
“Intellectual”
Audience / Low
Economic Capital
Symbolic profit
Economic Profit
Self-authored / specialist software
Free / industry-standard software
“Research sector”
Mass audiences / economies of scale
Production for other producers
Majors and big independent labels
Small independent labels
Performance: authenticity and presence
Performance: automated absence
Mainstream magazines
Specialist music magazines
Radiohead / Björk / Madonna
Ryoji Ikeda / Oval / Alva Noto
CC- / EC -
Heteronomy / Market /
“Mass Audience” /
High Economic
Capital
Beyond Bourdieu
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“Cultural Omnivores” (Peterson), dynamic and reflexive
institutions, less reductive ontologies, intra-individual
variations in cultural practices (Lahire)
Bourdieu’s reductive account of the aesthetic, the
specificities of the object and the inventive agency of the
producer; denial of musical value beyond social value
Crisis of constructivism
Post-constructivist Sociologies
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Complexities of aesthetic meaning, expression, objecthood and
attachment
Janet Wolff: a “sociological aesthetics” based on a nonessentialist theory of aesthetic experience; respect for the
object
Georgina Born: “post-positivist empiricism” sensitive to
expressive practices, authorial subjectivities and creative
agency
Tia DeNora: the “inner sonorous life” of selves and
subjectivities
Antoine Hennion: neo-phenomenolgical resurrection of the
work and the aesthetic encounter as singular not instrumental
Challenges, Dangers, Cautions
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Terminological lack: can one separate “the thing” from
established discourses of “the thing”?
Adequacy: it’s one thing to say what is currently “good” as
a critique of Bourdieu, another to dismiss everything he
says as outside the limits of what can be possibly known
from a critical standpoint
Danger of cumbersome combinations, forced syntheses
between sociology/musicology
Agonistic Pluralism in the Sociology of Art
and Culture
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Is there wisdom in accepting the disciplinary limits of
sociology rather than producing second-rate aesthetics?
For a pluralist agonism where disciplines permit
adversaries; productive disagreements rather than the
illusion of consensus? Agonism = positive form of conflict
Sociology as a watchdog for uncritical and unreflective
assumptions about the discourses of music?
Not forgetting Bourdieu but employing him strategically
in on-going battles and dialogues