The Double Reductionism of a Single Sociology of Culture: The Cultural Arbitrary and the Logic of Fields
Abstract
This paper presents a critical reading of the concept of culture in the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu. Inspired by an already well-established line of criticism against Bourdieu that is especially marked in Anglo-American sociological theory, the paper argues that Bourdieu's concept of culture is reductionist in a double sense.
First, Bourdieu's view of culture as a set of classification schemes, as developed in Distinction, is straightforwardly reductionist, since these classification schemas are shown to depend on social position. But there is also a second, more sophisticated form of reductionism that affects Bourdieu's way of theorizing the relatively autonomous fields of cultural and intellectual production.
These fields are conceived as arenas for strategic action in pursuit of objective interests, which are determined by one's position in the field as well as in a broader social structure. This covert form of reductionism is illustrated in this paper through the example of Bourdieu's controversial analysis of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.