Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

Habitus is a key concept in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and plays an organizing role in his classic study Distinction where tastes are divided between different class-based habitus. These divisions are set in the context of Bourdieu's account of the French cultural field as being polarized between a bourgeois habitus defined by the Kantian ethos of disinterestedness and a working-class habitus governed by the choice of the necessary. This paper probes this account of the habitus and aesthetics and its political implications, in the light of the challenges to it that are presented by Bernard Lahire's sociology of individuals and Jacques Rancière's account of the politics of aesthetics. It is illustrated by drawing on the evidence regarding the social distribution of cultural tastes from a recent study of the relationships between cultural practices and cultural capital in the United Kingdom. The central argument of the paper is that, far from succeeding in using the techniques of empirical sociology to map out a space that is beyond aesthetics, Bourdieu's account remains complicit with those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that have functioned to exclude the working classes from full political participation.

Cultural omnivores or culturally homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the upwardly mobile

“…However, many within British sociology have questioned the assertions underpinning Bourdieu's analysis of the socially mobile in Distinction (Bennett, 2007;Goldthorpe, 2008). Indeed, ever since Goldthorpe's (1980) Oxford mobility studies, there has been a renewed acceptance that late modern British society is characterised by much higher social mobility, particularly upward, than Bourdieu's theory implies (Breen, 2005;Erikson and Goldthorpe 2010;Goldthorpe and Jackson 2007;Heath, 2000;) 5 .…”

Social mobility and musical tastes: A reappraisal of the social meaning of taste eclecticism

“…Considered at the individual level, social mobility is then expected to produce cultural dissonance (Lahire, 2010(Lahire, [2001; Daenekindt and Roose (2014)), resulting from the mixing of primary and secondary socialization. This cultural dissonance, which can be expressed in the terms of habitus clive´ (Bourdieu, 2004;Bennett, 2007) or plural (Lahire, 2010(Lahire, [2001), also recalls the kind of cultural ambivalence experienced by the ''scholarship boys'' described by Richard Hoggart (1992[1957) and the cultural discomfort of all the 'class defectors' (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992;Friedman, 2014). Taste eclecticism can thus be considered as a by-product of social mobility, especially upward mobility (Friedman, 2012;Friedman & Kuipers, 2013).…”

The Symbolic Boundary of Sports: Middle School Athletic Culture and Mexican Immigrant Girls

“…He called taste a generative formula of lifestyle expressed in preferences for the things we surround ourselves with and engage in, including houses, cars, clothing, food, art, and sports. Taste is internalized and becomes the basis for social class distinction (Bennett, 2007). In this article, I explore the value placed on middle-school sports and explain how that shared value affirmed social legitimacy in the school setting.…”