Habitus Clivé

Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4271241
AutoresTony Bennett (0000-0001-7082-2585)
Ano2007
Volume38
Fascículo1
Páginas201-228
Data de publicação2007-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.2007.0013
OpenAlexW2128998637
IdiomaFR
Citações recebidas38
Referências citadas18

Habitus is a key concept in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and plays an organizing role in his classic study Distinction where tastes are divided between different class-based habitus. These divisions are set in the context of Bourdieu's account of the French cultural field as being polarized between a bourgeois habitus defined by the Kantian ethos of disinterestedness and a working-class habitus governed by the choice of the necessary. This paper probes this account of the habitus and aesthetics and its political implications, in the light of the challenges to it that are presented by Bernard Lahire's sociology of individuals and Jacques Rancière's account of the politics of aesthetics. It is illustrated by drawing on the evidence regarding the social distribution of cultural tastes from a recent study of the relationships between cultural practices and cultural capital in the United Kingdom. The central argument of the paper is that, far from succeeding in using the techniques of empirical sociology to map out a space that is beyond aesthetics, Bourdieu's account remains complicit with those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that have functioned to exclude the working classes from full political participation

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnography · Habitus · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Work (physics · Anthropology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Engineering · Gender Studies · Music History and Culture · Social and Cultural Dynamics