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game , a feel which, for dominated people, so frequently as to be pre-
dictable, veers towards submission, to knowing one s place in the
hierarchy and bowing to social authority.
Bourdieu also replaces the concept of class (which was key for the
early Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies work) with
that of social space, where classes are the result of the power of fields to
institute specific social groups as classes. The concept of field allows
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124 The Uses of Cultural Studies
Bourdieu to conceptualise power as dispersed and also autonomously
located in and operating through the complex array of institutions and
social bodies of modern society. Thus, to an extent, field replaces capi-
talism in the Marxist sense. While the changes wrought upon the working
classes by the power of advertising and consumer culture are well-
rehearsed, Bourdieu brings something very specific to the debate; not just
the mass of empirical and statistical detail which informs Distinction, but
rather an account of cultural differenciation as a powerful means of
actively proliferating divisions and inequities through modalities of sym-
bolic violence. Access to the field of culture (and to its modes of
classification 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 s
approach is also counter-posed to structuralism and post-structuralism.
At points in Distinction and on many other occasions Bourdieu clarifies
his objections to semiology and structuralism, and spells out his reasons
for preferring a mode of cultural analysis based on social rather than on
textual relations (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; see also Butler, 1999b).
He is not concerned with the production of dominant meanings within
or internal to a given system of signification, let us say a television pro-
gramme or an advertisement. Rather he is concerned with how and
where cultural forms or objects (which could include television genres)
fit within a wider grid of classifications, which in turn secure relations of
symbolic power. However, he shares with Levi-Strauss, and Althusser, a
commitment to structuralism as providing a tool for dismantling
common sense perceptions of the social world as a kind of transparency.
His concern is to examine social relations and positions within the field
of power and the regularities which can be shown and which in turn
demonstrate constraints on the possibilities of action for subordinate
groups. As many commentators show, Bourdieu s work is shaped by
strands in philosophy and in the social sciences, in particular the writing
of Husserl, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Durkheim.1 From these
diverse writers and from the phenomenological tradition, he develops an
understanding of perception, embodiment, practical sense and habitus.
But to make a claim for Bourdieu s work in regard to cultural studies, it
is important to remember that he was also a participant in those debates
which were central to the new left in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet there is
a marked distance from the neo-Marxism of the time. With Althusser
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Needs and Norms : Bourdieu and Cultural Studies 125
there is a shared sense of topography, a spatial model of separating cul-
ture from economy, a way of marking a move away from traditional
Marxist economism (Althusser, 1971). But where Althusser develops the
concepts of ideology (material practice) and interpellation (subject pro-
ducing practice) as the means by which domination is naturalised for
social reproduction to take place, Bourdieu recasts the socio-political ter-
rain in terms of field, and expands the sphere of economy outwards
rather than upwards to encompass additional forms of capital, notably
social capital, cultural capital and symbolic capital. Bourdieu also
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