Social space and symbolic space (Pierre Bourdieu)

Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduction to a Japanese Reading of Distinction Pierre Bourdieu I think that, if I lvere Japanese, I 11.ould dislike most of the things that non-Jap

First Lecture Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduction to a Japanese

Reading of Distinction

Pierre Bourdieu; Gisele Sapiro; Brian McHale

Poetics Today, Vol 12, No 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter, 1991), pp 627-638.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0333-5372%28199124%2912%3A4%3C627%3AFLSSAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

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 05:45:52 2008

First Lecture Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduction to

a Japanese Reading of Distinction

Pierre Bourdieu

I think that, if I lvere Japanese, I 11.ould dislike most of the things that non-Japanese people write about Japan At the time, twenty years ago, when I was writing T h r I n h t ~ r i t o nancl feeling annoyecl ~ v i t h American ethnologies of France, I recognized a similar annoyance in the criti- cism that Japanese sociologists, notably, Hiroshi hliami ancl Tetsuro

Watsuji, had mountecl against Ruth Benedict's famous book Thr C h t y -srtnthe~nunlc ~ n dt h t ~ Sulord Thus, I shall not talk to you about the 'Japa-

nese sensibility," nor about the Japanese "mystery" o r "miracle." I shall talk about a country I know fairly ~vell, not because I was born there

a n d speak its language, but because I h w e studied it a great deal, namely, France Does this mean that, in doing so, I shall confine my- self to the particularity of a single society ancl shall not talk in any way about Japan? I d o not think so I think, on the contrary, that by presenting the model of social space ancl symbolic space that I ha1.e built up for the particular case of France, I shall still be speaking to you about Japan (just as, speaking elselvhere, I \voulcl still be speak- ing about Germany o r the Unitecl States) Ancl in order that you fully understand this discourse which concerns you and which may perhaps even seem to you, when I speak about the French ho,no acrtdetrricus full of' personal allusions, I \voulcl like to urge you to go beyoncl a particu- larizing reading that, besides being an excellent defense mechanism

'I'his lecture was deli\ered at the \laisor1 F1.arlco-,Japonaise or1 October 4, 1!1X!1

P o r t ~ c ~ Today 1 ' L : l (Lt'inter 1!191) Copyright 01!1!11 b) 'l'he Porter l ~ i s t i t ~ i t e for Poetics a n d Semiotics (:(;C 0333-5372i91iS2.50

628 Poetics Today 12:4

against analysis, is the precise equivalent, o n the reception side, of the curiosity for exotic particularism which has inspired so many works

on J a p a n

My work, and especially Distinction, is particularly exposed to such

a particularizing reduction T h e theoretical model does not appear there embellished with all the marks by which one usually recognizes

"grand theory," such as lack of any reference to some empirical reality

T h e notions of social space, symbolic space, o r social class a r e never studied there in and for themselves; they are tested through research

in which the theoretical and the empirical are inseparable, a n d which mobilizes a plurality of methods of observation and measurement, quantitative a n d qualitative, statistical and ethnographic, macrosocio- logical a n d microsociological (all these being meaningless oppositions), for the purpose of studying an object ~vell defined in space a n d time, that is, French society in the seventies T h e report of this research does not appear in the language to which certain sociologists, especially Americans, have accustomed us and whose appearance of universality

is d u e only to the imprecision of a vocabulary hardly distinguishable from everyday usage (I shall mention only one example, the notion

of "profession") Thanks to a discursive montage which facilitates the juxtaposition of statistical table, photograph, excerpt from an inter- vielv, facsimile of a document, and the abstract language of analysis, such a report makes the most abstract coexist ~vith the most concrete,

a photograph of the president of the Republic playing tennis o r the interview of a baker with the most formal analysis of the generative

a n d unifying power of the habitus

As a matter of fact, my entire scientific enterprise is based on the be- lief that the deepest logic of the social world can be grasped, providing only that one plunges into the particularity of an empirical reality, his- torically located and dated, but in order to build it up as a "special case

of what is possible," as Kachelard puts it, that is, as an exemplary case

in a world of finite possible configurations Concretely, this means that

an analysis of the French social space in 1970 is comparative history,

~vhich takes the present as its object, o r comparative anthropology, which focuses on a particular cultural area: in both cases, the aim is to try to grasp the invariant, the structure, in each variable observed This invariant does not disclose itself to casual inspection, especially

when carried out by someone with a taste for the exotic, that is, for

pic-turesque dzfferenc~s Such an observer, lvhether deliberately o r by simple thoughtlessness, tends to prefer the superficial curiosities, the most conspicuous differences, that are often produced and perpetuated for the benefit of tourists in a hurry who do not speak the language ( I

a m thinking, for instance, of lvhat has been said and written, in the case of Japan, about the "culture of pleasure") Such a comparatisrn of

Bourdieu Reading Distinction 629

the phenomenal must be replaced by a comparatism of the essential: equipped with knowledge of the structures and mechanisms that a r e overlooked-although o n different grounds-by the native a n d the stranger alike, such as the principles of construction of social space o r the mechanisms of reproduction of this space, and that are common

to all societies-or to a set of societies-the researcher, both more modest a n d more ambitious than the collector of curiosities, proposes

a built-up model which aspires to uniuersal z~alidity And he is able, thus, to register the real differences, the principle of which must be sought not in the peculiarities of some national character-or "soul,"

as certain orientalists might put it (not to name names)-but in the particularities of different collective historips This is, as you will have already understood, what I shall try to d o here and now

I shall thus present to you the model I have built u p in Distinc-tion, first cautioning you against a realistic o r substantialist reading

of analyses which aim to be structural or, better, relational (I refer here, without being able to go into details, to the opposition suggested

by Ernst Cassirer between "substantial concepts" and "functional o r relational concepts") To make myself clear, I shall say that the sub- stantialist o r realistic reading stops short at the practices (for instance, the practice of playing golf) o r at the patterns of consu~rlption (for instance, Chinese food) which the model tries to explain a n d that such

a reading conceives of the correspondence between, on the one hand, social positions a n d classes, considered as substantial sets, and, on the other, tastes o r practices, as a mechanical and direct relation T h u s ,

in the extreme case, naive readers could consider as a refutation of the model the fact that, to take probably too easy an example, J a p a - nese o r American intellectuals pretend to like French food, whereas French intellectuals like to go to Chinese o r Japanese restaurants; o r that the fancy shops of Tokyo o r Fifth Avenue often have French names, whereas the fancy shops of the Faubourg Saint-Honore display English names, such as "hairdresser." But I would like to take another example, even more conspicuous, it seems to me: you all know that,

in the case of Japan, the rate of participation in general elections by the least educated women of rural districts is the highest, whereas in France, as I showed in an analysis of nonresponse to opinion polls, the rate of nonresponse-and of indifference to politics-is especially high among women, and among the least educated and the most dis- possessed, economically and socially speaking This is an example of

a false difference that conceals a real one; it is obvious that, in both cases, there is an apathy which is linked to dispossession of the means

of production of political opinions, and the question is what historical conditions explain the simple absenteeism observed in one case and,

in the other, the phenomenon of a kind of apolitical participation But

630 Poetics Today 12:4

the matter is not so simple, and lve should ask ourselves further what historical differences (and we should invoke here the lvhole political history of J a p a n a n d France) have resulted in difrerent parties bene- fiting from one and the same conviction of not being in possession of the statutory a n d trchnicrcl competence which is necessary for partici- pation, one a n d the same disposition to unconditional delegation: in one case, thanks to the patronage system, the conservative parties, in the other (at least until very recently) the Communist party, lvhich has relied o n its docile electoral base to condone all the political reversals

a n d about-faces of lvhich its "centralism" is so productive

T h e substantialist mode of thought, lvhich characterizes common sense-and racism-and which is inclined to treat the activities a n d preferences specific to certain individuals o r groups in a society at a certain moment as if they lvere substantial properties, inscribed once

a n d for all in a kind of psspncp, leads to the same mistakes, lvhether one

is comparing different societies o r successive periods in the same soci- ety O n e could thus consider the fact that, for example, tennis o r even golf is not nolvadays as exclusi\~ely associated with dominant positions

as in the past, o r that the noble sports, such as riding o r fencing, are

no longer specific to nobility as they originally were (this is also the case for martial arts in Japan), as a refutation of the proposed model (which Figure 1, presenting the correspondence between the space of constructed classes and the space of practices, captures in a visual a n d synoptic way) An initially aristocratic practice can be given up by the aristocracy, and this is most often the case when this practice is adopted

by a growing fraction of the bourgeoisie o r petit-bourgeoisie, o r even the lower classes (this is what happened in France to boxing, which was enthusiastically practiced by aristocrats at the end of the nineteenth century); conversely, an initially lower-class practice can sometimes be taken u p by nobles In short, one has to avoid turning into necessary

a n d intrinsic properties of some group (nobility, samurai, as well as workers o r employees) the properties which rest with this group at a given moment because of its position in a definite social space and in

a definite state of the supply of possible goods and practices T h u s ,

at every moment of each society, one has to deal with a set of social positions which is bound by a relation of homology to a set of activities (the practice of playing golf o r the piano) o r of goods (a second home

o r a master painting) that are also characterized relationally

This formula, which might seem abstract and obscure, states the first condition for an adequate reading of the analysis of the relation be- tween social positions (a relational concept), dispositions (or habitus), a n d

"positions," that is, the "choices" made by the social agents in the most diverse domains of practice, food o r sport, music o r politics, and so

on It is a reminder that comparison is possible only from s y s t ~ mto sys-

Bourdieu Reading Distinction 631

trm, a n d that the search for direct equivalence between features seized

in isolation, whether, appearing at first sight different, they prove to

be "functionally" o r technically equivalent (like Pernod and sh6chzi o r

saki) o r nominally identical (the practice of golf in France and Japan, for instance), risks unduly identifying structurally different proper- ties o r wrongly distinguishing structurally identical properties T h e very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, mostly considered innate (one speaks of distinction naturellr, "natural refine- ment"), is nothing in fact but d q e r m c e , a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a rrlational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties

This idea of difference, of a gap, is at the basis of the very notion

of space, that is, a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are ex- terior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through relations of proximity, vicinity, o r distance, as well as through order relations, such as above, below, and brtzueen; certain properties

of members of the bourgeoisie o r petit-bourgeoisie can, for example,

be deduced from the fact that they occupy an intermediate position between two extreme positions, without it being possible ot~jecti\~ely

to identify them and without their subjectively identifying themselves, either with one o r the other position

Social space is constructed in such a way that agents o r groups a r e distributed in it according to their position in the statistical distribu- tion based on the two differentiation principles which, in the most advanced societies, such as the United States, Japan, o r France, a r e undoubtedly the most efficient: economic capital and cultural capital

It follows that all agents are located in this space in such a way that the closer they are to one another, the more they share in those two dimensions, a n d the more remote they are from one another, the less they have in common Spatial distances on paper are equivalent to social distances More precisely, as expressed in the diagram in Dis-tinction by which I tried to represent social space (Figure I ) , the agents

a r e distributed in the first dimension according to the overall volume

of the capital they possess under its different kinds, and in the second dimension according to the structure of their capital, that is, according

to the relative weight of the different kinds of capital, economic and cultural, in the total volume of their capital Thus, to make it clear,

in the first dimension, which is undoubtedly the most important, the holders of a great \~olume of overall capital, such as proprietors, mem- bers of liberal professions, and professors are opposed, in the mass,

to those who a r e most deprived of economic and cultural capital, such

as unskilled workers; but from another point of view, that is, from the point of view of the relative weight of economic capital and cultural

Figure 1 The space of social positions (shown in black); the space of life-styles (shown in grey) Reprinted with permission of Harvard University Press from Distinction: A Social Critique of t b

Judgment of Taste

-p l a m anfirrue s h o p

I Iarl coIIect10n

flght bank galleries go11 brldqe Cmnalssance des Arts cocktails

YJ&hn mrL I II 1 f o r e t o n ~ a rndino cruiws erhlbllion9

warn01 X ~ ~ L I S

Webem Wulez

Tel O w l

left bank gallerbes

boulevard lhralre movie camera

alr travel Le F~naro Duchamp

~r Nauvel Ob-ewaleur lllhographs Iqht grills

Braaue C 40 IMF Breuohcl museum VivaIda L'E~ornss UlnIIo

1 1 0 2 m

hotel holiday

auction

C 47.70W

buslmss meals

F w ~ l 5 0 1 Cftfoen OS GS

h~stwicalnanallvr Hlslorla hunllnq Lectures pour Tous

162.mOF

Goya Bunuel aanr> lDD,OW Romancsquechurches Cornedli-Francnix tomu <)0.000 pup T w r d ' a r ~ n l Ualka cycllng holdays country walking carnptnq swlmmtnp

horncam music-hall FrenceGullure lrnc hmr charnpapne salad

RennuII 16 mineral water R l x Gancourl L.Aurore fuhn m p b p

kmomL Wida Jacques Douat

VanGogh hang-gfvdlng lrekklng mlnlbus (

ceramics ocolwy modern (a27

634 Poetics Today 1 2 : 4

capital in their patrimony, they are also very sharply opposed among themselves, and this, no doubt, is as true in Japan as in France (this remains to be verified)

T h e second opposition, like the first, is the source of differences in dispositions and, therefore, in "positions," which can differ in their contents according to period and society o r can appear under an iden- tical form, such as the opposition between intellectuals and proprietors which, in postwar France and Japan alike, is translated, in politics, into an opposition between left and right, and so on More broadly, the space of social positions is retranslated into a space of "positions"

by the mediation of the space of dispositions (or habitus); or, in other words, the system of differential deviations in agents' properties (or

in the properties of constructed classes of agents), that is, in their practices and in the goods they possess, corresponds to the system of differential deviations which defines the different positions in the two major dimensions of social space Habitus, which are the products of the social conditioning associated with the corresponding condition, make a systematic set of goods and properties, united by an affinity of style, correspond to each class of positions

O n e of the functions of the notion of habitus is to account for style unity, which unites both the practices and goods of a singular agent

o r a class of agents (this is what writers such as Balzac o r Flaubert have so finely expressed through their descriptions of settings-e.g., the Pension Vauquer in Le PPre Gorzot-which are at the same time descriptions of the characters who live in them) Habitus a r e these generative and unifying principles which retranslate the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary life-style, that is,

a unitary set of persons, goods, practices Like the positions of which they a r e the product, habitus are differentiated, but they a r e also differentiating Being distinct and distinguished, they are also distinc- tion operators, implementing different principles of differentiation o r using differently the common principles of differentiation

Structured structures, generative principles of distinct a n d distinc- tive practices-what the worker eats, and especially the way he eats

it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions a n d the way he expresses them are systematically different from the industrial proprietor's corresponding activities-habitus are also structurzng structures, different classifying schemes, classification principles, different principles of vision and division, different tastes Habitus make different differences; they implement distinctions be- tween what is good and what is bad, between what is right a n d what

is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so

on, but they a r e not the same Thus, for instance, the same behav-

Bourdieu Reading Distinction 6 3 5

ior o r even the same good can appear distinguished to one person, pretentious to someone else, and cheap or showy to yet another But the essential point is that, when perceived through these social categories of perception, these principles of vision and division, the differences between practices, the goods which are possessed, the opinions which are expressed become symbolic differences and consti-

tute a real language Differences associated with the different positions, that is, goods, practices, and especially manners, function, in each soci-

ety, in the same way as differences which are constitutive of symbolic systems, such as the set of phonemes of a language o r the set of dis- tinctive features and of differential deviations that are constitutive of

a mythical system, that is, as dzstinctive signs

Constructing social space, this invisible reality that can neither be shown nor handled and which organizes agents' practices and repre- sentations, also entails the possibility of constructing theoretical classes that are maximally homogeneous from the point of view of the two major determinants of practices and of all their attendant properties

T h e principle of classification that can be constructed in this way is

genuinely e x p l a n a t o ~ This is a social taxonomy which does not stop

short at describing the set of classified realities but which, like the good classifications of natural sciences, fixes on determinant proper- ties that (as opposed to the apparent differences of bad classifications) allow for prediction of the other properties T h e classes which one is thus able to construct bring together agents who are as similar to each other as possible and as different as possible from members of other classes, whether adjacent o r remote

But the very validity of the classification risks encouraging a per- ception of theoretical classes, which are fictitious regroupings existing

only o n paper, through an intellectual decision by the researcher, as

real classes, real groups, that are constituted as such in reality T h e danger is all the greater as it does appear from the research that the

divisions drawn in Distinction d o indeed correspond to real differences

in the most different, and even the most unexpected, domains of prac- tice T h u s , to take the example of a curious property, the distribution

of the owners of dogs and cats is organized according to the model: commercial proprietors (on the right in Figure 1) preferring dogs, intellectuals (on the left in Figure 1) preferring cats Likewise, class endogamy is intensified, as the units which are spatially divided a r e more confined

T h e model thus defines distances that are predictive of

encoun-ters, affinities, sympathies, o r even desires: concretely, this means that people located at the top of the space have little chance of marrying people located toward the bottom, first because they have little chance