Supplement Distinction Revisited: Introduction to an East German Reading Pierre Bourdieu; Gisele Sapiro; Brian McHale Poetics Today, Vol 12, No 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter, 1991), pp 639-641 Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0333-5372%28199124%2912%3A4%3C639%3ASDRITA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6 Poetics Today is currently published by Duke University Press Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/duke.html Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org http://www.jstor.org Sun Jan 27 05:46:16 2008 Supplement Distinction Revisited: Introduction to an East German Reading Pierre Bourdieu In order to verify whether the model proposed in Di,stinctioncan be applied to the case of the D.D.R., it is necessary to investigate what principles of differentiation are characteristic of this society (which amounts to admitting, contrary to the myth of the "classless society," i.e., of a society without differences, that such principles d o indeed exist, as the protest movements currently active [October 19891 in the country conspicuously attest); or, to put it more simply, to determine whether in the case of the D.D.R one rediscovers all (and only) the same principles of differentiation, bearing the same relative weights, as those encountered in the French case Right at the outset one sees that among the major differences between the two spaces and the respective principles of differentiation defining them is the fact that economic capital-private possession of the means of production-is officially (and, for the most part, in actual fact) out of bounds in the D.D.R (even if, as we shall see, a form of access to the advantages that are elsewhere furnished by economic capital can be secured in other ways, i.e., through the medium of a political type of social capital) 'The relative weight of cultural capital (which can be assumed to be highly valued in the German tradition, as in the French or Japanese) is proportionally increased It goes without saying, however, that, whatever the official meritoThis lecture was delivered at the Academy of Sciences, Berlin, October 26, 1989 Poetics Today 12:4 (Winter 1991) Copyright 1991 by 'The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics CCC 0333-5372/9 1/$2.50 640 Poetics Today 12:4 cratic ideology may want people to believe, not all the differences in opportunities for appropriating scarce goods and services can reasonably be related to differences in possession of cultural and educational capital It is thus necessary to hypothesize another principle of differentiation, another kind of capital, the unequal distribution of which is the source of the observable differences in patterns of consumption and life-styles I am thinking here of the subspecies of social capital which could be called political capital and which guarantees to its holders a form of private appropriation of goods and public services (residences, cars, hospitals, schools, and so on) This patrimonialization of collective resources can also be observed when, as in the case of the Scandinavian countries, a social-democratic "elite" has been in power for several generations; one then sees how the political type of social capital, acquired through the apparatus of the trade unions and the Labour party, is transmitted through networks of family relations, leading to the constitution of true political dynasties which accumulate large quantities of political, educational, and even economic capital 'The regimes that are properly called "Soviet" (rather than Communist) have carried to the limit this tendency toward private appropriation of public goods and services (also evident, although less intensively so, in French socialism) When other forms of accumulation are more or less completely controlled, political capital becomes the primordial principle of differentiation, and the members of the political "Nomenklatura" have hardly any competitors, in that struggle for the dominant principle of domination which takes place in the field of power, other than the holders of academic capital; indeed, everything leads one to suppose that the recent changes in Russia and elsewhere have their source in rivalries between the holders of political capital, of the first and especially the second generations, and the holders of academic capital, technocrats and especially researchers or intellectuals, who themselves come partly from the political "Nomenklatura." T h e introduction of an index of a specifically political capital of the Soviet type-an index that would have to be elaborated with some care, taking into account not only positions in the hierarchy of political apparatuses (in the first place, that of the Communist party itself), but also the seniority of each agent and of his lineage among the political dynasties-would no doubt enable us to construct a representation of social space capable of accounting for the distribution of powers and privileges, as well as of life-styles But, here again, in order to account for the particularity of the German case, notably, the somewhat grey and uniform tone of its forms of public sociability, one should take into account not the Puritan tradition so much as the fact that the categories capable of furnishing cultural models have been depleted Bourdieu Distinction Revisited 64 by emigration and especially by the political and moral control which, because of the egalitarian pretensions of the regime, is exerted not only over external expressions of difference but even over the pursuit of distinction itself One could ask, by way of verification, to what extent the model of social space thus obtained would be able to account, at least roughly, for the conflicts arising in the D.D.R today There is no doubt that, as I have suggested, the holders of academic capital are undoubtedly those most inclined to be impatient and to revolt against the privileges of the holders of political capital, and they are also those best able to turn against the "Nornenklatura" the very egalitarian or n~eritocratictenets on which its own claims to legitimacy rest Among the intellectuals, there are those who dream of opposing a "real socialism" to the caricature that the apparatchiks have produced and imposed (especially those apparatchiks who, nonentities outside the apparatus, are prepared to give their all for an apparatus that has given them all) But one might well wonder whether the intellectuals who share this dream will succeed in establishing a real and durable alliance with the dominated, particularly the manual workers, who cannot help but be susceptible to the "seeing-is-believing" effect of common or garden-variety capitalism, that is, the capitalism of the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the Volkswagen; or even with the minor State bureaucrats, who cannot find in the shabby security afforded by a third-rate Welfare State' (and purchased at the cost of conspicuous deprivations) suflicient grounds for refusing the immediate satisfactions promised by a liberal economy subject to State intervention and the moderating influence of social movements-even if those satisfactions are fraught with risks (notably, that of unemployment) Translated by Gisele Sapiro; edited by Brian McHale In English in the original ...Supplement Distinction Revisited: Introduction to an East German Reading Pierre Bourdieu In order to verify whether the model proposed in Di,stinctioncan be applied to the case of the... life-styles But, here again, in order to account for the particularity of the German case, notably, the somewhat grey and uniform tone of its forms of public sociability, one should take into... inclined to be impatient and to revolt against the privileges of the holders of political capital, and they are also those best able to turn against the "Nornenklatura" the very egalitarian or n~eritocratictenets