Bourdieu in the city

Challenging urban theory

Bibliographic Data

ID12136157
AuthorsGregory Smithsimon (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York Brooklyn New York USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume39
Issue1
Pages110-111
Publication date2024-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociological Forum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0884-8971 • E-ISSN: 1573-7861
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/socf.12983
OpenAlexW4392355297
LanguageEN
Citations received13

Bourdieu in the city: Challenging urban theory By Loïc Wacquant, Hoboken, NJ: Polity. 2023. 288 pages. $20 (paper or ebook). ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5645-8 Loïc Wacquant is the sharpest dissector and critic of urban theory in sociology. In Bourdieu in the City, he sets himself an unexpectedly steep challenge: show that Pierre Bourdieu is an urban theorist. It takes a reader as perceptive as Wacquant to see his task for the challenge it is. Is not Bourdieu already an urban theorist? Could not a keyword search of his name in City and Community establish that? No. Bourdieu's work on distinction, social class, habitus, and symbolic capital is woven into urban sociology. But to be urban, as Wacquant recognizes, is to take space and the built environment seriously, and to take the city itself as the subject of analysis. Wacquant primarily finds evidence Bourdieu did this in his earliest work. The subtitle is therefore enigmatic, less Bourdieu challenging urban theory than that showing Bourdieu is urban makes for some challenging urban theory. In what must be a first for an academic text, there is a plot twist on the final page. The book is a compilation of three talks Wacquant gave at conferences in York, Barcelona, and at Harvard, which synthesize and extend theoretical insights by both Bourdieu and Wacquant himself. Wacquant, a student of both Bourdieu and the Chicago School, is uniquely positioned to diagram Bourdieu's work for American readers. The first chapter goes back to Bourdieu's earliest work to show he has done urban sociology, in his studies of peasant life in his home town of Béarn and displaced cities in war-era Algeria. Chapter two focuses on territorial taint, building from Goffman's ideas on stigma, Bourdieu's discussion of it in Distinction, and Wacquant's own work on stigmatized ghettoes. Wacquant asserts, at least, that poor neighborhoods today are stigmatized to a degree far beyond what earlier centuries' skid rows, Tenderloins, and Black districts experienced. This chapter elaborates Wacquant's work on “spatial stain” more than it does work by Bourdieu. The third chapter shows how to apply Bourdieu's concepts like symbolic power, bureaucratic fields, social space, habitus, and a trialectic of spaces to an urban sociological research agenda. This, Wacquant admits, takes some stretching. Wacquant demonstrates his recommended approach by showing how he framed race and marginality in terms of class, race, and the state in his own work like Urban Outcasts. His goal is to use Bourdieu's approach to move beyond silos he finds among urban scholars of postindustrial precarity, race and immigration, and criminology. Throughout, the book snaps with the spring-steel of Wacquant's rapid rhetorical moves and uncompromising terminology for state-supported marginalization. Borrowing a technique readers will recognize from Bourdieu's work, occasional digressions and examples are set off in page-long shaded boxes, apart from the flow of the main text. The chapters conclude with Wacquant responding to interlocutors who had participated in the original colloquia for which the chapters were written. Thankfully he avoids defensiveness or insistence, and thoughtfully responds to and amplifies those readers' comments. Bourdieu is most often cited to show how social hierarchies are upheld through culture and social status, or how social capital and its embodiment in habitus reproduce social privilege over generations. Wacquant's exploration gives readers another way to use Bourdieu in urban sociology. For Bourdieu, people embrace cultural symbols either seeking distinction above or avoiding stigma below. Wacquant leverages stigma in his urban sociology as a key driver shaping ghettoes, joblessness, and incarceration. A strong structural model can sometimes make it challenging to account for societal shifts and movements for social change. It is apparent that the nation with the world's highest incarceration rate prefers punitive prisons and jails to productive social policy. But there have been landmark structural changes that must be explained. The US incarceration rate has been dropping significantly for over a dozen years, and the state and federal prison population, after peaking in 2010, is lower than it has been since 1995. How would a theory that the state is fundamentally carceral account for the success of widespread initiatives to reduce mass incarceration, like movements against cash bail, state-level decriminalization of marijuana, an end to felony disenfranchisement, President Trump's signing of the First Step Act to reduce federal prison terms, falling crime rates, movements against mandatory minimum sentences, and ban-the-box laws against employers' criminal background checks? These are substantial developments in the history of US support for mass incarceration. Wacquant writes about incarceration without explaining how his theory accounts for these developments. As social scientists and the general public, we tune in to crises when the numbers go up—on incarceration, teen pregnancy, or crime—but barely consider the equally important question of why those figures all later dropped. Wacquant writes that mass incarceration rose with neoliberalism. Could it be that as the era of neoliberalism has been replaced with nationalism, protectionism, and autocratic movements worldwide, neoliberalism's mass incarceration strategy is likewise being replaced with some other form of social control? Wacquant deftly synthesizes the work of Bourdieu, the Chicago School, and his work. For the theoretical construct Wacquant ambitiously develops to be adopted in urban sociology, it would need to show how a broad range of the theorists who are currently and productively applied by urbanists could fit into this newly synthesized framework. What is therefore striking given the book's theoretical ambition is how many centrally important urban theorists are explicitly excluded, when often they could have been integrated. The text is conspicuously devoid of Marx and Marxists. Bourdieu referenced Marx favorably in his own work. It was the Chicago School's authors, in contrast, who are well into their second century of denying Marx his due, whether clinging to liberal perspectives when more radical ones are called for, or not citing Marxists whose work their own reflects. Unlike Bourdieu, Wacquant makes clear that he sees old-school Marxism as “turgid,” and while anyone can identify the shortcomings of Marxism as a single theoretical foundation, it is also clear the contortions needed to write urbanism without Henri Lefebvre (cited here only to insist that his trialectics have nothing to do with Bourdieu's triad despite their obvious homomorphism), David Harvey, or Peter Marcuse (whose typology of ghettoes echoes Wacquant so clearly yet apparently in a register that he cannot hear). Typical of the Chicago School, here in Wacquant's stigmatized zone is capital concentration, uneven development, class, labor, a reserve army of the unemployed, even the lumpenproletariat with nary a footnote to Marx. Ironically, Marx is to urban sociology much as Bourdieu is: not an urban theorist per se (though Engels was) but one who is invaluable to urban sociology. It is a considerable challenge to develop a single framework that can accommodate things as different as US and European society's applications of racialization and incarceration. In particular, applying a European's framework to American cities requires a substantial reorganization to provide sophisticated theorizing on the fundamental role of US racism in US urbanism. I would have thought that Aldon Morris' definitive work would have cemented DuBois' place in urban theory as a researcher who did the work earlier and better than Chicago, but Dubois has a low profile in Bourdieu in the City considering how broad and deep is Wacquant's appreciation of the many traditions of American sociology. Granted, Bourdieu may not have made use of DuBois, dying before his contribution was so widely acknowledged, but it would have been helpful had Wacquant's skills at synthesis rectified that absence here. While Marx and DuBois are too faintly rendered, the Chicago School, as is often the case in the work of its disciples, is embarrassingly prominent. We must at last let go of the patently untrue morphological assertion that a city is distinguished from a suburb or countryside by “size, density, and heterogeneity.” We designate as cities places whose population size varies by two orders of magnitude, call Phoenix a city when its density is that of an East Coast suburb, and know Tokyo is a city despite it being far more ethnically homogenous than the American countryside. More to the point, the definition is a morphological one and Wacquant knows perfectly well that what matters sociologically about a city are its social processes. A new urban theory is a chance to update the definition of urban. There is the briefest sighting of an inexplicably persistent rivalry when Wacquant takes the time to refer to the volume co-edited by Mitchell Duneier “elephantine.” That is an unexpected slight in a book about a theorist whose magnum opus, Distinction, weighs in at a pachydermish 640 pages. Sometimes critiques are reflections. Spoiler alert: after setting himself the task in the first chapter of establishing that Bourdieu is not just a scholar in the city but an urban scholar, and spending the book explaining what Bourdieu has to add to urban theory, Wacquant concludes, on the last two pages of the epilogue, with a reversal. Yes, Bourdieu called for a “topological reading” of institutions (very nearly the spatial reading that defines research as urban), was an advisor on urban policy for the banlieues, had considered starting an urban research center, and was drawn inexorably to Paris as a center of culture and power. Yet Wacquant ultimately must “close on a note of regret,” that in Bourdieu's work, “the city lurks as the absent presence.” Bourdieu was clearly a sociologist in the city, but Bourdieu was not an urban sociologist. The book is better seen, then, as a three-way synthesis of Wacquant's own work, Bourdieu's foundation, and the Chicago School's all-to-familiar take on cities. Given how deftly Wacquant wields a theoretical scalpel, this book is clearly useful for anyone seeking to apply Bourdieu to urban sociology, and to researchers, particularly in criminal justice, who seek to more carefully and fruitfully apply Wacquant's own work to their research. It could be useful in the right graduate seminar, if Bourdieu, urbanism, and the complex structure of the racial and carceral state were the focus. Bourdieu's work is of great value for urbanists. His better-known work on power, culture, and class has broader application to the understanding of cities. But for a researcher focusing on questions akin to those Wacquant has developed over his career on urban exclusion and incarceration, Bourdieu in the City offers sharply rendered structures and processes for a researcher to explore

Epistemology · Social science · Sociology · Urban theory · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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