Within the constellation of European theorists with worldwide readership, Pierre Bourdieu is perhaps one of the most difficult to locate. A sociologist by vocation and identity, and as such deeply committed to empirical research, he also developed a critical vocabulary that has become naturalized in everyday discussions of power and culture, both in scholarship and in the public sphere. Terms such as “field,” “cultural capital,” “symbolic economy” and “ habitus” are such common currency today that their origins in Bourdieu’s work are sometimes occluded. His work provides a systematic critique of power structures in their material functioning, in an overwhelming prolific corpus of writings which spans over forty books and a significant body of articles and public interventions. It developed in an arc that encompassed work on the material conditions of exploitation in French colonialism, the study of education as an instrument of social reproduction and of creation of elites and nobilities, the use of language and taste to create distinction and power, the way in which culture develops structures of power and capital inherent to itself and autonomous from political and economic fields, the role of gender in social domination, and the practices and ideologies that facilitated the rise of neoliberalism, including the emergence of the fields of economics and journalism as complicit with new economic and political dynamics.
And yet, regardless of the richness of his work, he is also the target of significant criticisms. His penchant for empiricism and his methodological approach to conceptual construction usually attract accusations of mechanicism and reductionism, as his quasi-positivistic notion of practice is sometimes committed to classifying the diversity of the material into systematic conceptualizations. His ideological commitments and practices are also hard to place consistently in the Left–Right divide. It is unquestionable that he lived a life of direct political commitment and action. As the wide-ranging book Political Interventions documents, he was involved in some of the most critical political junctures of his time, including the war for Algerian independence, various debates on French and European higher education and the role of intellectuals in giving voice to the voiceless, and he was on the front lines against the emergence of the neoliberal economic paradigm.1 Nonetheless, as Jeremy Lane discusses, “Bourdieu’s tendency to assume that practices and position-takings were absolutely determined by position occupied in the field” led to problematic generalizations regarding resistant cultural actors, and his commitment to French notions of the universal led him to validate at times the sort of elitism that his own theories should have led him to deride.2 Yet, to properly evaluate Bourdieu’s contributions, one must remember that a key point in his work was to develop a sociological discipline that was fully aware of its institutional commitment and its symbolic capital, a process he called reflexivity. Throughout his career he advocated for the idea of a sociology that is aware of the ethical and political issues brought about by the materiality of research, and for the constant critique of academias and institutions themselves as structures of symbolic power and capital.3 This is perhaps one of the reasons why it is much harder to ascertain his politics. Unlike other theorists of cultural power that have influenced contemporary scholarship—such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière—his commitment to the “theory of practice” make his critique less easily useful for the type of utopian articulation that Marxism or even notions such as Rancière’s “ distribution of the sensible” call for.4 Yet Bourdieu was very much on the same page as some of these more radical theorists in terms of the fundamental target of his critique: the full-fledged understanding of structures of power. He indeed recognized Foucault, for instance, for his contribution to an understanding of the intellectual history of the “unthought by working to produce a materialist history of ideal structures.”5 But, at the same time, he was also unafraid to point to what we believed were mystifications disguised as materialism, as he did in one of his most infamous declarations:
While such statements generate a lot of disagreement and discomfort with his position-takings, particularly among those scholars who practice from a position of fidelity to theories such as Marxism, they reflect in their ethos the kernel of Bourdieu’s thinking: the urgency of understanding power as it works in practice, and not as we model it in position-takings and ideological paradigms, in order to better combat its alienating forms. David Swartz, one of Bourdieu’s finest readers, describes Bourdieu’s theory in a usefully concise way:A scientist and a man of action, Marx provided false theoretical solutions—such as the affirmation of the real existence of classes—for a true practical problem: the need for every political action to demand the capability, real or supposed, in any case credible, to express the interests of a group, to demonstrate—this is one of the primary functions of demonstrations—the existence of that group and the actual or potential social force it is capable of bringing to those who experience it and thus constitute it as a group.6
Thus, Swartz argues, “Bourdieu’s sociology makes no distinction between the sociological approach to the study of the social world and the study of political power. Bourdieu sees all of sociology as fundamentally dealing with power.”8Power is a central organizing feature of all social life. Power finds expression in many valued resources that become objects of struggle. Power also finds symbolic expression in cultural forms and practices that legitimate the unequal distribution of valued resources. And power concentrates in particular arenas of struggle for the control of the social order.7
Bourdieu’s influence is by no means restricted to the social sciences, and his work’s persistent presence in humanities scholarship—particularly in the fields of literary and cultural studies, on which the present book focuses—has to do with the alluring nature of this theoretical stance in responding to the different research questions that have dominated significant areas of the field in the past twenty years. In the English-language academy, Bourdieu is currently experiencing a revival as his work continues to prove its relevance to questions of the material workings of culture in the neoliberal era. For the sake of brevity, one can simply point to two landmark books published in recent years. The first, Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, edited by Philip Gorski, vindicates Bourdieu not only as a theorist of social power, but also as a theorist of social transformation at large, proposing his methodological corpus as a way to re-engage the discipline of history.9 More recently, the Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, edited by Laurie Hanquinet and Mike Savage, is a full-fledged recovery, validation and expansion of Bourdieu’s theories, including extensive discussions of his work and diverse explorations of his research question in the contemporary arena.10 Bourdieu’s revival in recent years is indeed related to the fact that his warnings about neoliberalism have, by and large, proven to be timely and on point. In his political and scholarly writings of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, he warned about the emergence of neoliberalism as a utopia of unlimited exploitation, the endangerment of modern culture by the growth of economism, the displacement of the public intellectual by a new class of media actors that willfully serve the field of power and the blindness of the discipline of economics in its complicity with a new order of power.11 Within scholarship in literary and cultural studies, this revival has paid particular attention to the ways in which Bourdieu’s thesis of the autonomy of the field of cultural production has merited revisiting and revision given the culturization of the economic and the economization of the cultural that has taken place under the aegis of neoliberalism. Books such as James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige propose significant revisions to Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural capital to understand the nature of new flows of value between fields, while scholars such as Sarah Brouillette investigate the “persistence of the art–commerce dialectic” in the neoliberal era, as concepts such as the “creative economy” create new forms of social space and cultural field for which Bourdieu’s theory remains relevant, but which also challenge some of its main tenets.12 This non-exhaustive sample of the ways in which Bourdieu’s work remains in circulation today shows the importance of re-assessing the value of his conceptualization in diverse contemporary settings. I will resist the temptation to define Bourdieu’s key terms because there is a copious bibliography that does this, most notably Michael Grenfell’s very useful Pierre Bourdieu. Key Concepts.13 Readers of this volume can consult that book for concise definitions, and they may refer to this book index to see how individual authors use key terminology and works by Bourdieu in their respective work. It is not the purpose of this book to provide an introductory approach to Bourdieu in Latin America or Spain for readers not familiar with his work. Rather, given that Hispanists and Latin Americanists across the board are broadly familiar with his work, the book seeks to engage with Bourdieu from the perspective of particular cases and subdisciplines of literary and cultural studies.
Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture seeks to contribute to the understanding of the value and limitations of Bourdieu’s work, particularly as it relates to the field...