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.But thereis also, running through a good deal of his work, a sustained argumentwith cultural studies, particularly, as he sees it, for its inflated romanti-cisation of resistance.And, also concerned to re-introduce agency, as thequotations above suggest, Bourdieu goes to great lengths to differentiatehis model of social action (practical sense), from those cultural studiesmodels of active, expressive, working-class culture (Willis, 1978).Bourdieu s work can be characterised as theorising action more expan-sively, so as to all the better understand its limits, its re-inscription withinthe forces or fields of constraint.This is an immensely rich account ofaction in that it encompasses unthought action, mental structures, rit-ualistic bodily practices which are also historically deposited in thehabitus and absorbed in persons as a kind of unconscious feel for thegame , a feel which, for dominated people, so frequently as to be pre-dictable, veers towards submission, to knowing one s place in thehierarchy and bowing to social authority.Bourdieu also replaces the concept of class (which was key for theearly Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies work) withthat of social space, where classes are the result of the power of fields toinstitute specific social groups as classes.The concept of field allows Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 124124 The Uses of Cultural StudiesBourdieu to conceptualise power as dispersed and also autonomouslylocated in and operating through the complex array of institutions andsocial bodies of modern society.Thus, to an extent, field replaces capi-talism in the Marxist sense.While the changes wrought upon the workingclasses by the power of advertising and consumer culture are well-rehearsed, Bourdieu brings something very specific to the debate; not justthe mass of empirical and statistical detail which informs Distinction, butrather an account of cultural differenciation as a powerful means ofactively proliferating divisions and inequities through modalities of sym-bolic violence.Access to the field of culture (and to its modes ofclassification and judgement) marks out a point of intense power strug-gles, its processes play a key role in reproducing structural divisions.Though overwhelmingly concerned with the structures which under-pin (objective determinations) cultural practice or lifestyle, Bourdieu sapproach is also counter-posed to structuralism and post-structuralism.At points in Distinction and on many other occasions Bourdieu clarifieshis objections to semiology and structuralism, and spells out his reasonsfor preferring a mode of cultural analysis based on social rather than ontextual relations (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; see also Butler, 1999b).He is not concerned with the production of dominant meanings withinor internal to a given system of signification, let us say a television pro-gramme or an advertisement.Rather he is concerned with how andwhere cultural forms or objects (which could include television genres)fit within a wider grid of classifications, which in turn secure relations ofsymbolic power.However, he shares with Levi-Strauss, and Althusser, acommitment to structuralism as providing a tool for dismantlingcommon sense perceptions of the social world as a kind of transparency.His concern is to examine social relations and positions within the fieldof power and the regularities which can be shown and which in turndemonstrate constraints on the possibilities of action for subordinategroups.As many commentators show, Bourdieu s work is shaped bystrands in philosophy and in the social sciences, in particular the writingof Husserl, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Durkheim.1 From thesediverse writers and from the phenomenological tradition, he develops anunderstanding of perception, embodiment, practical sense and habitus.But to make a claim for Bourdieu s work in regard to cultural studies, itis important to remember that he was also a participant in those debateswhich were central to the new left in the 1960s and 1970s.Yet there isa marked distance from the neo-Marxism of the time
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