One really intriguing volume which was spearheaded by Bourdieu (and collaborated upon by many others) is a 650-page volume of interview notes and essays which Bourdieu calls "stories" - private stories that he and the others "feel anxious" about making public, even though all agreed (and signed) allowing that to happen - especially the "difficult" spots...namely the "housing projects" or "today's schools" (3). I have included my notes from a couple of the essays because I found this volume so very different in how Bourdieu presented his ideas and his writing style. I include the title and a few excerpts and observations in the following paragraphs.
I found an essay entitled "Those Were the Days," in a volume entitled The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, (Pierre Bourdieu et. al.,) Stanford Press, 1993. Bourdieu's interview notes and essay (done in conjunction with Rosine Christin) were included with the essay, an essay in which he writes about a French high school student whose existence - because of his parents' divorce - "... has been placed under the sign of instability and ceaseless change, at work, at home, at school, with his friends" (428). What intrigued me about this interview/essay was how Bourdieu used it to reveal the ambiguity of this young nineteen year-olds' life. Bourdieu talks about what he calls, "Two separate, even opposed, worlds and two sets of memories that make sense only if placed in relationship to each other" (427). Bourdieu describes how the jobs of the boy's Algerian father and Yugoslav mother had caused him to have to move and change schools frequently. But what Bourdieu seems to focus on is what he referred to as the boy's "wisdom" which Bourdieu points out allowed the young man, (Malik,) to show that he knows "perfectly well where he stands, that his school is 'a dumping ground.' He adds, "at school they don't ask me to make top marks...might just as well do as little as possible, just enough to get by" (429) //
Reading this essay left me somewhat doubtful of Bourdieu's focus (or, perhaps I should say study) so I went on to some of the other essays in the collection. In another essay (written with Patrick Champagne) entitled "Outcasts on the Inside," Bourdieu goes on to reference the "high school malaise" and devotes his comments to the concept that the there is a great discrepancy between the way students in the elite Parisian lycees experience education and the way that the students in the vocational junior high schools in the poverty-stricken housing projects in the big cities experience. The essay, written in the esarly 90's, refers to "...the periodic student demonstrations of the past 20 years over various issues and the varying kinds of violence that are permanent occurrences in the most disadvantaged schools (as being) ...the visible manifestations of the permanent effets of the contradictions of the school system and the altogether new kind of violence it inflicts on those who are not suited to it" (425). The accusations continue as the essays goes on, "The educational system excludes as it always has, but now it does so continuously and at every level of the curriculum (between slow-track classes and the vocational schools...) and it keeps hold of those whom it excludes, just relegating them to educational tracks that have lost more or less of whatever value they once had. It follows that these outcasts on the inside are forced...to do a balancing act....that the establishment into which they have been directed by educational tracking is a place for assembling the most disadvantaged....in short they drag themselves listlessly through a school career they know has no future"(425). // The point of the interviews and the companion essays which grew out of them became obvious to me as I continued to explore this volume - these essays are the stories of struggling French citizens, people who suffer because they become trapped in layers of society that are below their desires, or perhaps more aptly put, below what they believed society promised them. As Bourdieu writes in the closing of the book, "...it is clearly necessary to get to the real economic and social determinants of the unnumerable attacks on the freedom of individuals and their ligitimate aspirations to happiness and self-fulfillment: determinants manipulated today not only by the merciless constraints of the labor and housing markets, but also by the decisions of the education market and the overt penalties and covert aggressions of working life....this observation is not cause for despair: what the social world has done, it can, armed with this knowledge, undo" (629).
As Michael Grenfell says of Bourdieu in Pierre Bourdieu, Agent Provocateur, (London: Continuum Press, 2004) "Clearly the world disappointed Bourdieu and his analyses sometimes seem to offer hope that things could be otherwise. However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a much more agressive philosophy and world order came into being....In many ways the picture painted by Bourdieu is horrific. Old systems and structures are swept away in the path of of the market logic. Individuals are marginalized or discarded. Those on the inside are crushed by the demands of management systems and work practices. The spirit of resistance that led Bourdieu to oppose the policies which produced such a society was fed by a refusal to accept that it was inevitable" (195).
Katha Pollitt wrote of Bourdieu in an article which appeared in the February 18, 2002, edition of The Nation after his death: "Bourdieu called himself ' to the left of the left.' Reading him could be a disturbing experience because the explanartoey sweep of his key concept of habitus --the formation and expression of self aroud an internalized and usually accurate sense of social destiny--tends to make ameliorative projects seem rather silly. 'Sociology,' he wrote, 'discovers necessity, social constraints, where we would like to see choice and free will. The habitus is that unchosen principle of so many choices that drives our humanists to such despair.' He believed, Pollitt contends that "schools could help give working-class kids the cultural capital that middle-class kids get from their families." He spent much of his life, Pollitt points out, "studying the part played by the French education system in reifying class and gender divisions and in selecting and shaping the academic, technocracit and political elite--the "state nobility" -- that runs France, ...but he believed in education."
In Culture and Power, Swartz writes: "Frequently Bourdieu writes as if there were an almost exact correlation between hopes and chances, though at other times he recognizes that these are never completely synchronized" (111) Later in Chapter Eight, "Education, Culture, and Social Inequality," Swartz says of Bourdieu's theory: "Pursuing his central theme of the important of culture in social stratification, Bourdieu sees the eduational system as the principal institution controlling the allocation of status and privilege in contemporary societies. Schools offer the primary institutional setting for the production, transmission, and accumulation of the various forms of cultural capital"(189). Swatrz points out that, "Bourdieu was one of the first sociologists to take a critical look at the popular post-WWII public policies of expandind educational opportunity in order to reduce social inequality" (190). And although Swartz contends that "all Western democracies have seen tremendous improvement during the last forty years," (190) his intent is to put forth (what I see as) one of Bourdieu's key goals: Bourdieu maintains that, "the educational system--more than the family, church, or business firm--has become the institution most responsible for the transmission of social inequality in modern societies. The task of the sociologist, therefore, is to 'determine the contribution made by the educational system to the reproduction of the structure of power relationship and symbolic relationships netween social classes" (190).
Swartz goes on to quote Bourdieu and Passeron from Reproduction, (1977) saying that, "...the education system performs three central functions....1) the 'function of conserving inculcating and consecrating' a cultural heritage....schooling provides not just the transmission of technical knowledge and skills, but also socialization into a particular cultural tradition; 2) the 'external function of reproducing social-class relations....reinforcing rather than redistributing the unequal distribution of cultural capital; 3) the function of 'legitimation,' consecrating the cultural heritage it transmits and deflecting attention from (and misrecognition of) the fact that it is reproducing a social function" (191). In other words, Swartz tells the reader, as an "early and key architect of the widely influential theory of social reproduction..."(191). He saw that educational institutions can "enhance rather than attenuate" social inequalities.
I plan to address some additional thoughts about Bourdieu's ideas on power in the Bourdieu paper.
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