Bourdieu: From Class to Culture

In Memoriam Pierre Bourdieu 1930–2002

Roy Boyne

I

WILL TRY to establish two things: first the continuing use but outdated
nature of the model of working-class culture found in Distinction;
second, the relationship between that model and the work which is

reported in The Weight of the World.

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I hope it need not be said that critique

is the most serious form of high regard.

Remnants of Necessitarianism

The empirical work upon which Distinction was based is now more than 20
years old. Characterizations of the working class in terms of their unreflex-
ive ‘choice of the necessary’, and of the cultured upper class as unreflexive
in their beliefs in the timeless and asocial qualities of truth, beauty and
progress, of which they are guardians, however, remain with us. They are
no longer to be found so clearly in Bourdieu’s later work. He called upon
intellectuals (despite their cosmopolitan privileges underlined in the hidden
contrapuntalism of The Weight of the World) to take a stand against the false
unanimity of dominant discourse, to swap the illusio of autonomous
aesthetics for the (much-to-be-preferred, and self-admittedly normative)
illusio of Realpolitik and the preservation of the values and achievements
of the cultural and scientific fields (Bourdieu, 1992: 348, 1998: 7–8). It is
also the case that he developed confidence in the possibility of reflexive
awareness, not only for intellectuals but also for the seriously disadvan-
taged. Speaking of the sociological enlightenment of those formerly charac-
terized in terms of their necessitarianism, he later said, ‘you may be upset
by what you are, but you have instruments to understand and to accept it
and that is the main problem of life’ (cited in Swain, 2000). Just as it was
20 years ago when Bourdieu, in practice, accepted the condition of the
working class but launched a critique of the illusio of the aristocracy of
culture, so it was at the beginning of the 21st century with his calling for

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intellectuals to act together while nevertheless sometimes preaching a form
of acceptance for the dispossessed. This is far from the only remnant of
necessitarianism that we find when we look to reactions across the wider
culture.

My first example taken from outside of Bourdieu’s corpus pertains to

critical reaction to the British film Billy Elliot. Eleven-year-old Billy’s
father and brother are both striking miners in 1984 Easington, in north-
east England. Billy attends a boxing club in the community hall. This takes
place at the same time as the ballet class for the young girls of this Durham
coastal pit village. Billy has no talent for boxing, and presented within the
film as a much less pre-determined figure than he would have been in
Bourdieu’s 1979 version of working-class necessitarianism, he creates an
appetite and discovers a talent for ballet. Necessitarianism is, however,
given a strong presence within the film through the characters of the father
and the brother, who both try to call Billy to order, just exactly as Bourdieu
describes the sanctions imposed on their own within the working class.

2

Thus Billy’s brother’s version of the demand for the refusal of ‘fancy
nonsense’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 379) is to provoke and insult him: ‘Ballet, you
twat!’ Both father and brother are eventually persuaded of the depth of
Billy’s desire, but although times are changing, as evidenced by Billy’s
ballet and the small leap made by his best mate who makes a pass at him,
which Billy handles with a supportive refusal, neither father nor brother
can shift that much: enough to support Billy but within the limits of their
traditional loyalties. When Billy’s father tests that, he is pulled back as he
so clearly wanted to be.

Billy’s resistance to the culture of the necessary is located at the end

of a long line of exemplary exceptions: talent and determination can tran-
scend origins and circumstances. There are good reasons to object to the
portrayal of such exceptions as if they were the rule. Barbara Ellen, writing
in The Observer (2000), put it like this:

The main charge against Billy Elliot has been one of sentimentality, but it is
guilty of far worse than that. Daldry, and the screenwriter, Lee Hall, both
come from working-class stock, but that doesn’t give them the right to tell it
how it isn’t. There is no nobility in poverty, nothing remotely photogenic about
life at the very bottom, very rarely a fast track out. Yet here Billy is, tap
dancing and pirouetting out of the ghetto, and into the welcoming arms of the
middle classes. The message is: if you’re talented, if you work hard, you can
escape, within 111 minutes. And this message is supposed to appeal to whom
exactly – the working classes? Don’t be silly.

Like Bourdieu’s 1979 picture of necessity, Ellen’s reaction to the film
confirms the closed horizons of the working class in contrast to open possi-
bilities elsewhere.

What keeps these horizons lowered? Bruno Latour, in a newspaper

commentary on Bourdieu, had no doubt about the answer to that question:

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It is not enough for someone to speak of the dominated to belong to the left.
Everything depends on the way in which they understand and express the
operation of power. Bourdieu’s sociology begins with moments of consummate
description, but then subjugates the multiplicity of expressions and situations
to a small number of obsessively repeated notions which describe the invisible
forces which manipulate the actors behind their backs. (Latour, 1998)

We can add to these intimations that there are both internal and external
forces (calls to order and invisible forces) reproducing the culture of neces-
sity, that rumours of the death of the working class (due to labour-force
changes resulting from globalization and technological advance, due also to
changes in the nature of trans-social seduction into consumption, and
additionally linked to class-transcendent identity issues related to age,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and, perhaps in a minor key, a multi-
tude of consumption-activities from salsa to sailing

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where skills and

enthusiasms not economic structures are the foundation of reference groups)
may be hard to substantiate. Roger Bromley (2000: 52) tells us about a 1998
ICM survey of UK class affiliation, which indicates that there might be a
higher proportion of people now thinking themselves working class (55%)
than may have been the case 50 years ago. Abercrombie and Warde (2000:
148) point to a poll reported in The Guardian in the same year which
declared that 68 per cent of respondents thought that Britain was ‘class-
ridden’, and Beverley Skeggs’s (1997: 161) study of class and gender is
crystal clear that ‘[c]lass was completely central’ to the lives of the women
with whom she worked. These are, of course, just a few of the examples that
could have been selected. Although I think it is probably fair to say that,
in the 1990s, class has lost its status as senior member of the pantheon of
social divisions, so that it does not really surprise to read something like
the following: ‘The rigid adherence to forms of ethnic and cultural essen-
tialism tends to obscure cross-cutting social divisions such as class . . .’
(Ratcliffe, 2000: 180). It is not so long ago that we were talking about the
cross-cutting divisions within class society.

While class remains salient, expressions of class cultures are much

more marked by reflexive attitudes – rueful, ironic, envious, reflectively
proud – than was the case in the picture painted by Bourdieu in 1979.
Skeggs’s subjects ‘were never able to feel comfortable with themselves’
(1997: 162); the music lovers discussed by Hennion and Maisonneuve
(2000) make it clear that they know that their taste can be understood socio-
logically, even to the point where they can hardly admit (although they know
of it) to the experience of unconditioned pleasure. Additionally, it is increas-
ingly clear that other structural contexts, such as ethnicity, gender, age,
medical status, are now routinely and reflexively incorporated into concep-
tions of self-identity. This was certainly shown to be the case in the report
from the Runnymede Trust – a two-year enquiry into ethnicity in Britain by
23 ‘commissioners’ drawn widely from the very best UK theorists,
researchers, activists, administrators, and community workers, chaired by

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Bhikhu Parekh – which makes it clear that ‘people have the capacity to
manoeuvre between distinct areas of life and to be “cross-cultural naviga-
tors” ’, and that structural contexts, while powerfully conditioning, are rarely
unrecognized and hardly if ever totally determinant (Parekh, 2000).

It is now necessary to sound a note of caution. It may be broadly right

that invitations to self-reflection almost invariably now give rise to reflex-
ively aware attitudes to the force of social structural conditions. What,
however, are we to conclude about those actions which are less delibera-
tive? As Weber schematized, there are forms of social behaviour which are
not thought through beforehand, reflexively or otherwise. Is this the point
at which cultural necessitarianism is reinforced rather than weakened, the
point at which the model of Distinction remains the key to understanding?
What is the relation between necessitarianism, emotion and habit? I cannot
possibly provide a full answer to that question here, but I do wish to indicate
its importance by pointing to the apparent lack of concern for issues pertain-
ing to reflexive awareness in debates about domestic violence. The Metro-
politan Police conference, ‘Enough is Enough’, at the end of October 2000,
was linked with the project of taking a ‘national snapshot’ of domestic
violence (and one might see both Distinction and The Weight of the World
also, in one aspect at least, as sharing something of this status as snapshot).
Preliminary indications are that the mise-en-scène is not much structured
by reflexive awareness (at least at the point of action). One case coming out
of this project has been reported as follows:

Jane is 27 years old. She has a three-year-old son and she is afraid. ‘I bet
they’re looking up, laughing at me. He said he wanted me dead, and he’s
getting closer.’ . . . Her possessions and those of her son have been destroyed
by a fire which started four hours earlier. They were out when the blaze began.
They will never live here again. Below a group of youths are milling in the
street. In the dim light it is difficult to pick out faces, but Jane suspects her
ex-boyfriend is among them. She pulls up her sleeve and shows a scar from
a knife wound . . . ‘We had a row at a friend’s house. I threw my mobile at
him. He lost it. He’s a nutter.’ . . . Newham’s community safety unit . . . are
not surprised when Jane says she is reluctant to give a statement. (Hopkins,
2000)

Sociological exploration of reflexive consciousness at the point of

action is hard to come by. Unedited cctv footage of street violence rarely
reveals self-consciousness in action; while covert recordings of football
hooligan reflection on skirmishes to come indicate disdain for or prohibi-
tion of analytical reflection. Methodological, cultural and ethical barriers to
research on violence at the point of violence, or passion at the point of
passion, mean that dramatists, lyricists, screenwriters, novelists and poets
have the field pretty much to themselves. If this is so, it is a prime reason
for holding the humanities and the social scientists squeezed together,
rather than, as with Bourdieu and the sociological tradition in general,
levering them further apart (Boyne, 2000).

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Misery

Class appears to be less unrecognizedly determinant of social action now
than was the case just a quarter of a century ago. It has even been over-
taken in the ranks of social-structural influences by ethnicity, economic
geography, gender and – quite possibly – genetic inheritance. Post hoc self-
reflection typically recognizes the power of such influences. However, there
is a limit to the advance of reflective/reflexive consciousness as the
consciousness-mode of the moment. Much behaviour is not rational but
emotional or habitual, and it seems quite possible that the necessitarianism
discussed in Distinction may be harder to dismiss as outmoded in these
cognitively impoverished contexts. This may be the case even if we do not
accept the continuing fidelity to necessitarianism that we still regularly find
reproduced by cultural intermediaries of one sort or another. Against that
background, how do we understand the relationship between Distinction and
The Weight of the World? The first shift to consider is that from inclusion to
exclusion.

A point from which to begin is Loïc Wacquant’s distinction between

the urban deterioration found in the housing projects of the USA and the
decaying suburbs around the major French cities. Listing the conditions of
‘joblessness, housing degradation, violence, isolation and immigration’
which, from the 1980s on, were represented within a ‘fantastical’ transat-
lantic discourse of ‘ghettoization’, Wacquant suggests that the ‘decomposi-
tion of the French working class’ has been exacerbated by a stigmatizing
symbolic domination which has to be endured ‘on top of socioeconomic
exclusion’ (Wacquant, 1999: 130–1). It is immediately tempting at this point
to turn to the class inclusionism of Distinction, where, despite the symbolic
domination to which the working classes are permanently subjected, we can
find that they have ‘everything which belongs to the art of living, a wisdom
taught by necessity, suffering and humiliation and deposited in an inher-
ited language, dense even in its stereotypes, a sense of revelry and festiv-
ity, of self expression and practical solidarity with others . . .’ (Bourdieu,
1984: 394). Is this the fundamental contrast? In the1970s, those subject to
symbolic and economic domination were described in terms of their own
defence mechanisms of social inclusion, whereas in the 1990s defensive
structures of class solidarity are less evident, revealing a picture of
unadorned exclusion. Would this not be the vicious side of the end of
ideology, where those, now reflexively aware, experiencing symbolic and
economic domination have no compensating illusions at all? Is this what
Bourdieu meant by misère du monde?

To show that this is indeed one of the key contrasts between these two

works is not so straightforward. Bourdieu is a structural sociologist. The
‘atoms’ of his social world are agents acting within fields. When he is dealing
with housing projects, however, he finds generic displacement, ‘people who
have nothing in common’ forced ‘to live together, either in mutual ignorance
and incomprehension or else in latent or open conflict’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 3).

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For Bourdieu these places are, and he italicizes this statement, ‘difficult to
describe and think about’. No single point of view can capture what is
happening there. What is needed are ‘multiple perspectives that correspond
to the multiplicity of co-existing, and sometimes directly competing, points
of view’. This multiple perspectivism can be assessed by comparing the
interviews reproduced in The Weight of the World, which Bourdieu carried
out. He did an ‘interview with a project head in the north of France’. The
project manager used to work against the bureaucratic grain and had some
success in dealing with difficult cases because of her intricate network of
connections within the community. The effort of struggling to subvert and
negotiate constricting procedures was tiring and often thankless. When she
moved to a different area, she was less able to intervene in specific cases,
but still had an understanding of the local social structures and regional
bureaucratic conditions. Her view of the shifts from the 1970s through to
the 1990s was clear:

You have these huge HLM [public housing] projects in which you’ve got
retirees who’ve spent a life . . . you know a normal life. They have acquired
this apartment, they’ve furnished it, they’ve spent their whole life working.
With the 1977 reforms in financing, some of them could have acquired a little
property, but some were too old and they said, ‘no, it’s not for us, our apart-
ment is fine, let’s keep it.’ So the idea of buying their own little house, I don’t
think it even entered their minds, and they were very satisfied with their
apartment, and their neighbourhood, with their environment, with their life
and all. And then the economic crisis: things change and you get another
type of population which is there because it has no choice. So we are in
another period, the people who come to these apartments, it’s not because
they’ve found a job, it’s because they can’t find another apartment. The ones
who come to make demands, who come to demonstrate, are the retirees,
people used to defending themselves, saying what they have to say, talking
because they have rights, and so they continue to talk. (Bourdieu, 1999: 197)

For Pascale, the project head, the long-term inhabitants of the projects

are not excluded, but they do recognize the dangers of exclusion and will
fight and talk. What about the more recent arrivals? Monsieur Leblond,
described as a member of a working-class family, has a house with a garage
and three bedrooms, and a 14-year-old daughter at the local lycée, which
he describes as having ‘80 percent foreigners in the total school strength
. . . Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Portuguese . . .’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 17).
Lots of them, Leblond says, are unemployed, especially the younger ones.
He knows that they have often not been helped very much by the state, and
also that many of them have different cultural backgrounds. He suggests
that some of the problems can be traced to individual families, and that it
is not so much a matter of inherent ethnic characteristics, even though these
differences can give rise to minor irritations. He has lived, worked, played
and brought up children in an erratically supported multi-ethnic neigh-
bourhood and has a matter-of-fact approach to the difficulties of doing this,

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which concludes with a somewhat whimsical wish that young people in
particular were more adaptable and prepared to compromise. That wish,
however, finds absolutely no echo in the discourse of François and Ali. What
is strongly echoed is Leblond’s matter-of-factness, and the practical repudi-
ation of basic racial difference. What François and Ali report is an up-close-
and-personal life in their environment and nothing else. There is barely a
trace of reflexive awareness of the field in which they are agents, and this
is because this field does not exist and hence their powers as agents do not
exist. Bourdieu does not put it like this, at least in part because his whole
self-construction as a sociologist refuses the idea that there could be any
such phenomenon as genuine social exclusion. Such a thing would be a
contradiction in terms. Reluctant to rehabilitate the notion of anomie (for
normless subjects cannot exist within his framework of social understand-
ing), his response is emotional, his concept that of shared suffering:

I did not have to force myself to share in the feeling, inscribed in every word,
every sentence, and more especially in the tone of their voices, their facial
expressions or body language, of the obviousness of this form of collective bad
luck that attaches itself like a fate, to all those that have been put together
in those sites of social relegation, where the personal suffering of each is
augmented by all the suffering that comes from co-existing and living with
so many suffering people together – and, perhaps more importantly, of the
destiny effect of belonging to a stigmatised group. (1999: 64)

For Francis, a counter-cultural street-level drug counsellor, what

Bourdieu (quite rightly and compellingly) sees as suffering, he sees as
thoroughly rooted in exclusion:

They had been rejected, at school, they were in remedial class, they were
already excluded! They were already excluded at school, so when they left
school, they had a mindset of exclusion. And since they didn’t have the
wherewithal to get a job, well then, they were excluded . . . (1999: 210)

Bourdieu’s own examination of social conditions in the housing

projects, from the points of view of administrators, savvy street-workers,
traditional working-class members and both French and immigrant youth,
presents a complex picture of socially accomplished local understandings
which, however, no longer connect to any macro-culture other than that from
which the processes of exclusion can be seen to have emanated. Bourdieu
does not much use the term social exclusion, but compared to the cultures
of the dominated which he examined in Distinction, the absence of neces-
sitarianism is explained not by reflexivity but by the lack of a countervailing
culture to impose and legitimate what is necessary. For those interviewed
in The Weight of the World, the experience of exclusion is often unmediated.
In this context, the sociological task must first be to reveal the condition,
which Bourdieu has done. What comes next?

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The Aesthetic of Suffering

Four years after The Weight of the World, Bourdieu published Pascalian
Meditations. In this later work, he looked back on his study of social suffer-
ing and saw it first (Bourdieu’s own word – première) as of methodological
significance, as an attempt to avoid the imposition by the researchers of
their epistemic categories and assumptions, therefore allowing access to the
field of social scientific knowledge for those normally excluded (Bourdieu,
1997: 74). This delicate recognition of exclusion as a problem of method is
followed by a reminder that the intellectual’s dream of a universal viewpoint
valid for all is just part of the scholastic illusio. This double move, method-
ologically aggressive yet politically self-effacing, provides Bourdieu with a
strong response to those who might object to his departure from the terri-
tories of the excluded. He has allowed them to speak, and at the level of
the field can do no more thereafter than underline the strengths of good
social science. What does it mean to remain at this level of description, to
comment upon what is described only by polishing the methodology and
closing off avenues of criticism from those who might not agree with his
approach, or who might think there is further to go? He does not explain
that many of those interviewed lack powers of agency

4

because they are

largely located within unformed or fractured or multiply chaotic fields. He
cannot advocate resistance because there is insufficient field sedimentation
to make it worthwhile embarking upon specific countervailing strategies.
This minimum level of analysis is absent from The Weight of the World
because apparently there is nothing to be done, except to allow the condition
to be described by those suffering it, and sometimes to help them through
sympathetic social explanation to come to terms with the condition. This is
now the imposition of necessitarianism from outside. It parallels the
aesthetic of the upper classes described in Distinction: just as truth, beauty
and honour are socially unconditioned, so is the suffering of the socially
excluded.

Pierre Bourdieu came out of the sociological tradition of Weber and

Durkheim. This is the tradition of the reliable and rigorous witness, but it
is also the tradition of the theorist and diagnostician. In The Weight of the
World the meta-reflections of the latter are carefully diverted away from the
interview subjects. The consequence of this is a vacuum that will be filled,
perhaps, in part, by work and thought on some of the following questions.
Does The Weight of the World aestheticize the projects and their inhabi-
tants? Does an undertheorized multi-perspectival sociological ventrilo-
quism lead to a potential mannerist deformation in representations of social
existence? How, within Bourdieu’s approach of reflexive multi-perspec-
tivism, is the reinforcing of stigmatism to be avoided? What are the grada-
tions between bearing witness and voyeurism in these contexts? Can a
variety of under-formed social milieux be identified, contrasted, classified?
These questions are difficult, but as a place to begin, and to begin to
conclude, we can examine the first of them.

There is, as Jon Cook (2000) reminds us, a well-established tradition,

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beginning with Brueghel and also the English pastoral, of the aesthetic
appreciation of the poorer circumstances of others. If Bourdieu’s The Weight
of the World is description without explicit diagnosis or recommended treat-
ment, is the appropriate prototype within this lineage? Jean-François
Millet’s The Gleaners, for example: three women working in the field, is it
shown by the painter just like it was? Millet worked within the contemporary
conventions of artistic composition just as Bourdieu is very clearly self-
located within the context of professional social science. As Mirbeau
pointed out (cited in Shiff, 1998: 201), Millet focused on the people rather
than the ground on which they stood, and the same might be thought true
of Bourdieu’s strategy in The Weight of the World. However, Millet was a
romantic who framed his subjects against a glowing world, and it is probably
the case that Bourdieu cannot be said to do that. Perhaps a more up-to-date
model is Richard Billingham; his work is certainly less auratic than Millet’s.
He took photographs of his parents and brother in their Birmingham council
flat over a period of seven years. Some of them were shown as part of the
Sensation exhibition in 1997. The most measured critical response to them
was that they were ‘part of an international movement in photography
towards kitchen-sinkish verité’ (Adams, 1997: 39). However, a different and
indirect response is worth noting. Under a part headline, ‘disease that just
won’t go away’, an article by Paul Barker (2000) in The Independent on
Sunday, which opens with the question, ‘Is Britain obsessed by class?’, is
wrapped around a 10-inch by 7-inch colour reproduction of ‘Ray and Eliz-
abeth’. They are Billingham’s parents, and he has photographed them,
prematurely aged and overweight, separated by the family dog and cat, all
on the brown velvet settee, part-covered by a pastel flowered quilt, eating
a definitively unappetizing TV dinner. Whether intentionally or not, Billing-
ham’s parents are framed as an intractable social problem. He did not mean
for that to happen. In fact there is no intentional theoretical framing by
Billingham at all, but there is an aesthetic which is even tinged with a little
of Millet’s sentimentality. He says of ‘Ray and Elizabeth’, ‘it looks like any
hack photographer could have come in and taken this photograph – it
doesn’t show you anything about the relationship I have with them. I wish
I’d never put it in the book, but it’s so well known now I just have to live
with it’ (cited in Barber, 2000).

For Bourdieu’s work around the Projects, there is not a single perspec-

tive. These situations are, he thinks, hard to deal with. They are fluid and
varied, in ways that are really quite different – at least as far as he was
concerned – from the fluidity of being always ahead of the game that marked
the progressive faction of the petite bourgeoisie as he saw them in the 1970s.
He was therefore reluctant to theorize these new spaces. He showed them
to us, but allowed them to declare for themselves what they are. He did not
want to fix the meanings of these spaces in advance, since he knew that
they are places of kaleidoscopic experience, and so he did not always clearly
say that these are places of exclusion, but that is what they declare them-
selves to be. In truth, he did not need to be specific that these are spaces

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of social exclusion, because it already followed from his social theorizing.
Thus he did say exclusion to the extent that these exteriorized social spaces
are not centred, they are difficult, without central principles. They are
places of exclusion because they require multiple perspectives, because
they are not yet, and perhaps never will be, governed by the clear quasi-
regulations of a relatively clear field. So did Bourdieu aestheticize the
inhabitants of these non-spaces? The answer is double: to the extent that
they are defined outside of regular social space their impact is romanticized
(like Millet’s figures, and as – at the limit – is the case with Billingham’s
photographs); to the extent that they must speak for themselves within the
social order, they are heard as a ‘disease that just won’t go away’. Neither
position is tenable. The Projects and their inhabitants are very clearly inside
the social. They do not constitute an unformed Other, but an immensely
complex sociological phenomenon which must be theorized, and the two
opening steps need to be the recognition of individuals without agency
within the social world, and the contrast between the countervailing cultural
defences of the working class, described in Distinction, and the stark
absence of anything analogous in The Weight of the World.

Notes

1. This is an extension of arguments found in Subject, Society and Culture (Boyne,
2000: ch. 1). I am grateful to Manchester University Sociology Department, and to
the delegates to the conference ‘Bourdieu in the 21st Century’, organized by Derek
Robbins, for their responses to the original presentations. The text that follows does
not repeat the arguments to be found in the book, which I did briefly go through in
the two lectures. Hence, although there may be references to sociological imperial-
ism vis-à-vis its denial of even a residue of unconditioned subjectivity, and to the
regrettable gap this opens and widens between social science and the humanities,
the arguments for characterizing Bourdieu as quintessentially sociological in this
respect will not be found here. There may also be reference to the core antinomy
within Bourdieu’s thought, two versions of which are (1) the effective modelling of
a flexibly transposable habitus on the condition of the petite bourgeoisie at the same
time as demanding principled political resistance as the model for action by cultural
intermediaries, and (2) refusal of the human subject as any kind of prime mover,
but making that same subject an agent of fields which are implicitly and sometimes
explicitly constructed as Machiavellian collectivities. Again, the argument for the
inevitability of these contradictions, and for their celebration in the context of a
less voracious sociology, but for their cautionary diagnosis in regard to Bourdieu’s
work, which in the tradition of the sociology of everything and everything socio-
logical is the very best that we have, will not be found here.
2. Another example can be drawn from the BBC television series The Sins. In
episode 1 (24 Oct. 2000), ‘Pride’, Len Green, the main protagonist played by Peter
Postlethwaite, says, ‘That’s what I hate about the working class. Once, just once,
try to better yourself, and what do you get?’ Len Green, unlike Bourdieu’s subjects
in 1979, but now in common with his examples in The Weight of the World, is aware
of the processes. Calls to order within working-class milieux have now assumed the
status of cliché. It would make an interesting research project to see to what extent
they now emerge out of the cultural intermediary fraction of the petite bourgeoisie

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to a greater extent than they do out of the working class itself, as is pretty much
the case with Barbara Ellen’s newspaper commentary on the film (which made no
mention of the fact that Sir Kenneth MacMillan was the son of a miner, or that
Philip Mosley, one of the Royal Ballet’s best dancers, is the youngest of his
generation from a Barnsley family with a strong mining tradition [Wainwright,
2000]).
3. An updated reference list of the petit bourgeois activities listed in Distinction
as running from Aikido to Zen might include personal trainers, loft-living, expresso
machines, Giorgio Armani, Jake and Dinos Chapman and (but only if you live in
Germany) golf.
4. When Angus Stewart (2000: 8) referred to ‘

agency as a critical aspect of social

inclusion’ (bold in original), he said nothing about those contexts in which no
agency is possible. This, one might think, is hardly surprising, since surely such
contexts hardly exist. Will we not at least find potential for agency wherever we
look? If we could have got Bourdieu to answer this question directly, the answer
would probably have been a qualified negative. It is a source of great loss both that
we will never know for sure and that we will not have the chance to see whatever
answer it was transcended by his further work.

References

Abercrombie, N. and A. Warde (2000) Contemporary British Society, 3rd edn.
Cambridge: Polity.
Adams, B. (1997) ‘Thinking of You: An American’s Growing, Imperfect Awareness’,
pp. 35–9 in Norman Rosenthal et al. Sensation: Young British Artists from the
Saatchi Collection. London: Thames and Hudson.
Barber, L. (2000) ‘Candid Camera’, The Observer Magazine 28 May: 10–17.
Barker, P. (2000) ‘Class: The Way We Are’, The Independent on Sunday 4 June: 17.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. London: Routledge. Orig. 19
Bourdieu, P. (1992) The Rules of Art. Cambridge: Polity.
Bourdieu, P. (1997) Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil.
Bourdieu, P. (1998) Contre-feux. Paris: Liber-Raisons d’Agir.
Bourdieu, P. (1999) The Weight of the World. Cambridge: Polity.
Boyne, R. (2000) Subject, Society and Culture. London: Sage.
Bromley, R. (2000) ‘The Theme that Dare not Speak its Name: Class and Recent
British Film’, pp. 51–68 in Sally Munt (ed.) Cultural Studies and the Working Class.
London: Cassell.
Cook, J. (2000) ‘Culture, Class and Taste’, pp. 97–112 in Sally Munt (ed.) Cultural
Studies and the Working Class. London: Cassell.
Ellen, B. (2000) ‘Billy, Don’t be a Hero’, Observer Magazine 8 October.
Hennion, A. and S. Maisonneuve (2000) Figures de l’amateur: formes, objets et
pratiques de l’amour de la musique aujourd’hui. Paris: La Documentation Française.
Hopkins, N. (2000) ‘The Men who Turn Home into Hell’, The Guardian 3 October.
Latour, B. (1998) ‘La Gauche a-t-elle besoin de Bourdieu?’, Libération 15 Septem-
ber.
Parekh, B. (Chair of Commission) (2000) The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.
London: Profile Books.

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Ratcliffe, P. (2000) ‘Is the Assertion of Minority Identity Compatible with the Idea
of a Socially Inclusive Society?’, pp. 169–85 in Peter Askonas and Angus Stewart
(eds) Social Inclusion: Possibilities and Tensions. London: Macmillan.
Shiff, R. (1998) ‘To Move the Eyes: Impressionism, Symbolism and Well-being,
c.1891’, pp. 190–210 in Richard Hobbs (ed.) Impressions of French Modernity.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Skeggs, B. (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: Sage.
Stewart, A. (2000) ‘Social Inclusion: An Introduction’, pp. 1–16 in Peter Askonas
and Angus Stewart (eds) Social Inclusion: Possibilities and Tensions. London:
Macmillan.
Swain, H. (2000) ‘Move Over, Shrinks’, Times Higher Education Supplement 14
April: 19.
Wacquant, L. (1999) ‘America as Social Dystopia’, pp. 130–9 in Pierre Bourdieu
et al. The Weight of the World. Cambridge: Polity.
Wainwright, M. (2000) ‘The Boy who Became the Real Billy Elliot’, The Guardian
2 October.

Roy Boyne

is Professor of Sociology at the University of Durham. His latest

book, Risk, will be published in 2003.

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