Bourdieu and Criminology

Afterword to Criminology & Criminal Justice’s Virtual Special Issue: Bourdieu and Criminology

This is an afterword to a virtual special issue on Bourdieu and Criminology. To view the papers in this collection, please follow this link: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/crj/bourdieu-and-criminology. All articles in this virtual special issue have been made free to access for three months following publication.

Professor Emerita Bridget Fowler School of Social and Political Sciences University of Glasgow

Abstract

In bringing together such a wide-ranging set of articles from the journal Criminology and Criminal Justice, the editors have assisted in extending Bourdieu’s genetic constructivism to criminology, including his conceptual instruments for exploring actors’ “regulated improvisation”, both inside and outside the law. The contributions gathered here provide an excellent forum for discussing new studies in this area, showing the fertility of his theoretical approach. Despite the many references in Bourdieu’s writings to Kafka’s The Trial - and indeed to lawyers, codification and the legal field - this is a social space which Bourdieu himself only fleetingly illuminates. It is suggested in this afterword that his approach allows us to theorise the social transformation following from a split habitus, not just the social reproduction to which most social scientists refer. Moreover, it is argued that aspects of his theory - unreferenced in the articles above - might also be usefully developed in further research, namely, his studies of gift exchange, of the “revaluing of values” in certain cultural fields, and his analysis - in On the State - of the legal and administrative fields.

Keywords:

Bourdieu – social change – legal field – hysteresis – amor fati - Welfare State

Afterword

Unlike those edited collections that derive initially from conferences, this Special Issue of the Journal has been admirably unified by its authors’ common concern to develop Bourdieusian concepts for criminology and penology. In particular, these contributors offer a series of insightful treatments of capital(s), habitus and field, symbolic violence and misrecognition: once-innovative forms of thought which are elsewhere in danger of becoming crass formulae or magical “lexicographic amulets” (Passeron 2003:42). Some go further, developing Bourdieu’s lesser-known concepts in their fieldwork , such as classification struggles over the vision and division of the world; the actor’s “illusio” within various social games; doxa, orthodoxy and heterodoxy; the body as memory pad and hysteresis (or “torn habitus”). But whether these articles are read solely as “Bourdieusian Meditations” or for their criminological value, they will certainly serve as an accessible lever towards further theoretical and applied research. My aim in this brief afterword is to reflect on this body of work in the light of certain misinterpretations of Bourdieu and to suggest further aspects of his approach that could usefully be mined in this field.

As some of these authors note, the issue that has emerged foremost amongst the critiques of Bourdieu is the alleged over-determinism of his conception of the social world. His “logic of practice” has as its central postulate the child’s socialization into a set of dispositions formed by the group’s experience:

The habitus - embodied history, internalised as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product (1990: 56).

The habitus operates as a generative grammar permitting innovative action within certain limits. It is geared also to the reproduction of structures, including accommodation to taken-

2 for-granted domination. But Bourdieu is careful to point out that this does not occur – as is sometimes claimed - in a mechanistic, circular fashion (2005b).

Thus the most valuable contributions within this Special Number note that Bourdieu emphasized persistence and reproduction, but they also accompany this with an awareness of the potential for a habitus to incorporate change, albeit always with elements of continuity. Thus, at the outer limit, the notion of “symbolic revolution”, with its linked “subversive habitus”, ranks high amongst his most neglected concepts (Bourdieu 2005b: 47). Categorised here is the Calvinist reformation, or course, but also scientific revolutions (like that of Einstein), legal revolutions, or Manet’s and Baudelaire’s artistic revolutions (Bourdieu 2013). More generally, his “critical critics” tend to pass too quickly over his notion of “hysteresis”, those mismatches between habitus and field which may engender symbolic revolutions. These time-lags, or gaps, create individual misfits (“porte-à-faux”) or destabilised groups, who suffer from inappropriate expectations and potentially, from resentment (Bourdieu 2000: 160-1, 2005b: 47). Such acute disjunctures are linked to a split or even torn habitus (“habitus clivé” or “déchiré”): the most extreme form of hysteresis (Bourdieu 2013: 84-5, 250).

Further, it has sometimes been claimed that there is radical inconsistency between Bourdieu’s early and later publications, with the earlier writings emphasizing much more the subordinate classes’ or gender’s (etc) habitus as marked by a trained complicity with social structures or a love of their fate (amor fati). His later writings (post 1980s) are held to designate actors as suffering more from discrepancies between anticipated futures and their actual world-experience, even embracing latterly a “re-enchanting” “sentimental sociology” (Fabiani 2016: ch 8).

This alleged inconsistency in Bourdieu’s thought disappears when it is remembered that already, in the first major formulation of his theory, Bourdieu emphasized that the habitus of those from a precapitalist social formation undergoes unsettling shifts of adjustment when moving into an urban market economy (1977: 78). Similarly, in his empirical study of the 1970s, Distinction, he alerts us to the crises of habitus provoked by the devaluation of degrees in contemporary graduates’ search for professional and

3 vocational jobs (1984: 142-50; cf 1988: 162-9). Indeed, he emphasizes throughout his historical research the disjunctures experienced by those who are from the “proletaroid intelligentsia” (to use Weber’s terms): uprooted peasants’ or workers’ children promised academic or cultural careers that are never forthcoming (1996a:262-4; 1996b: 387). Moreover, by the early 1980s, The State Nobility alerts us to a changed mode of academic reproduction, with the decline of both the philosophically-oriented Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, and the rise of the bureaucratic and business schools, like the Ecole Normale d’Administration (1996b: 200-201). And consistent with his early work, in his telling investigation of the rise of home-ownership and decline of municipal housing provision, the Social Structures of the Economy (2005), he points particularly to migrants from pre-capitalist regions - along with the old and the unemployed - as liable to suffer especially from a “habitus clivé” (2005a: 214).

Habitus originally was of course a way of addressing the wider (meta)field of power. Linked to gender and class - or more specifically, the numbers of capitals an actor possesses -it determined what we might call the primary habitus. It was only later, in the 1970s, that the term became used in relation to the fields of capitalist modernity, including the legal, scientific, cultural, academic and media fields, each generating what we might call a secondary habitus. In the articles collected here, those particularly in question are the legal fields, the policing field and the relatively new “street field”, all with their specific habitus.

If Bourdieu’s view of the habitus is that it is never totally static, its underlying dispositions are derived from actors’ distinctive array of capitals (or for the street habitus, their absence). Such dispositions may undergo shifts in their expression. Thus, presupposed within the habitus is a potential for “permanent revision”, as he explained:

Habitus changes constantly in relation to new experiences. Dispositions are subject to a kind of permanent revision, but one which is never radical, because it works on the basis of premises established in the previous state (2000:161).

This is particularly evident in the legal field. Here, as Javier Velasquez Valenzuela (2018) has noted, experience first as a solicitor, solicitor-advocate or advocate, and then as a sheriff leads to the continuous evolution of the legal habitus, a habitus which thus needs to be understood more broadly than the purely judicial habitus alone (2018:192-3, 209). The

4 specific development of this legal habitus tends to produce divergent “sentencing styles”, such as the degree to which judges respond to the nature of the offence, as opposed to the needs of the offender (2018: 185-8).

The important studies of probation front-line staff included here also reveal a degree of development of their professional habitus in relation to their early probation training, especially due to the imposition of an enforcement regime in the 1990s and the subsequent shift to a neoliberal regime of managerially-monitored governance. But as Robinson et al (2014) remark in their empirical study, these changes over time have provoked what Bourdieu calls a “tormented habitus”, characterised by a mourning for a lost quality of professionalism in their relations with offenders (2014: 126, 135). Evidently, this uneasy habitus - with its changed relation with the field - is remote from the simplistic model of Bourdieu’s actors as all allegedly in love with their social fate (amor fati). Yet as Phillips (2019) further elaborates, the probation staff in charge of the increasing number of Scottish offenders with a Community Pay-back Order voice very mixed reactions to these changes, reflecting the clash between their initial formation as autonomous professionals and the new constraints on practicing as they think fit. Pleased to be relieved of the more authoritarian enforcement regime of the early 2000s, their probation habitus as dominated actors still bears testimony to a degree of symbolic violence. This is implicit in the lingering disjuncture between the probation work they had early been led to expect and the somewhat “myopic” compliance with new imperatives that managers have succeeded in eliciting (2019: 50). Given the dialectical relation between field and habitus, Phillips suggests that the “structuring structures of the habitus ha[ve] been appropriated by the field” (2019: 55). In other words, by seeking to adapt the conditions in which they work, probation staff introduce strategies for a formal rather than substantive compliance in relation to their professional raison d’être. The crucial question that remains is how “doxic” or totally taken- for-granted this is, as Phillips argues, as opposed to reluctantly accepted for one’s own survival.

Further, in my view, the secondary professional habitus of probation staff, sheriffs, police, and security staff should ultimately be mapped onto their primary habitus in the field of power to gain deeper insight into these actors’ practices. Some of these researchers are already doing this: ongoing deprivation in relation to the market and State (their primary

5 habitus) is stated to be the precondition for the secondary street habitus to emerge. But we ought to pursue more systematically how the earlier class, gender, ethnic and religious habitus of – say – sheriffs – is mapped onto their later professional formation. Of course, to some extent, their initial positions in social space become translated into professional positions, especially via the amount of certified cultural capital they acquire (cf Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus). Of course, the degree of cultural capital - and of actors’ precocity in acquiring it - moulds not just their choices of career within the field, but their judicial dispositions more widely. Yet the specific legal/professional habitus adopted is surely far from being the product of their cultural capital alone or the result of purely scholastic choices about jurisprudence. For, as Bourdieu, McNay and others recognise, the specific field habitus is combined with the traces of the earlier primary habitus (Bourdieu 2001: 91; McNay 1999). This has been shown, for example, in the case of one family of Indian Supreme Court judges and Vice-Presidents from the (Indian) “legal aristocracy”, who formed an effective legal “dynasty” from the 1940s on, blocking radical social changes such as nationalization (Dezelay and Garth 2006: 43-4)).

It seems to me, however, that there may be areas where Bourdieu’s conceptual instruments have not yet been fully drawn on in the criminological field: first, from his economic sociology, second, his analyses of revalorisation, and, thirdly, his studies of the State bureaucratic field. Take, first, his models of gift exchange in peasant societies such as Kabylia (Algeria), to which he opposes a capitalist market exchange in which profit is ultimately accumulated for profit’s sake. As he points out, in precapitalist societies, with their “semi-artistic” labour on the land, the group’s practices are part of an established social technology of integration. Gifts between actors are offered with a well-founded anticipation of a future return, or counter-gift, and although the gap in time between giving and receiving obstructs any precise calculation of equivalence, such objective equivalence exists. Yet gifts of goods or services are not made strategically, with prior intention. Indeed, it would be “theoretically monstrous”, Bourdieu states, to assume egoistic cynicism is the subjective meaning of such exchanges (Pascalian Meditations). Now in certain areas of street crime, this alternative analysis of reciprocal gift exchange might offer a useful and non-romanticised model to be drawn on further (see Bourdieu’s Anthropologie Economique

(2017)). This is promising even if - as Shammas and Sandberg (2016) point out - crimes such as drug distribution are sometimes perpetrated on a highly commercial model and may even be enacted with the use of lethal violence.

Secondly, such reciprocal gift exchange would seem all the more appropriate in those social spaces where forms of deviance are accompanied by a “revalorisation of values”: a desire to make one’s name in a different way. Bourdieu had explored this in the innovative (subf)ield of cultural production after 1850 which he entitled “the economic world reversed”, i.e., that world where market success as a writer becomes the mark of suspicion in terms of literary values. It might well be that this revalorisation of values emerges in other, criminal, spaces such as the street habitus, including in the drug-using and dealing narratives explored by Sandberg and Fleetwood (2017). Here market-oriented realism may in certain cases be substituted for an alternative pursuit of living in the present and enjoying a multiplicity of experiences: the strait-jacket of the measured, clock time of industrial capitalism falls away, replaced by differently-valued modalities of temporality and worth.

Sandberg and Fleetwood argue powerfully that drug-dealers’ stories provide the social glue integrating a street-community together, claiming that this is a more dialectical relationship than Bourdieu provides. But rather than supplement Bourdieu with narrative analysis of stories, it can be argued that these cultural forms are already catered for in his own model. It is true that Bourdieu starts with the actors’ position in terms of their capitals (economic, cultural, symbolic etc). But he consistently argues that there is a key space in which conflicting political visions and division have a relative autonomy (see, for example, Classification Struggles, 2018). Certain political discourses or narratives are consecrated, that is, their bearers become the spokespersons of the group. Particularly in his writings on religion, he presents a dialectical relation – the group chooses the spokesperson it admires - the prophet (or trade union leader, radical politician etc) - and he/she in turn, unites the group around a new vision of the world (1989:23). But whilst, in traditional societies, poets or bards may be those whose distinctive role it is to depict a crisis and to find solutions, in more complex capitalist societies there are often rivals offering conflicting world-describing and world-making discourses, heterodox as well as doxic. These heterodox communal gatherings grouping around new political discourses are well-described in Fraser and Matthew’s (2019) study of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. They may sometimes be

7 matched - but not in any “iron law” - by another, different, phenomenon: that of spokespersons surreptitiously substituting their own particular interests for those of the group as a whole. Creating a form of “political fetishism” (Bourdieu 1991:203), such transformations are often accompanied by a perceived absence of “voice” for the mass of group members and even by such subordinate classes’s total “exit” from the political field.

Thirdly, Bourdieu’s On the State could also be mined for studies of criminal justice, particularly of the legal field and the judiciary. Individual laws might be unjust, he argues, but: “[J]urists are the driving force of the universal, of universalization” (2014: 270), with their proclaimed independence and their “capital of words” (2014: 331) […] “[t]hey were the bearers of a rational habitus […]” (2014: 333).

The state, traditionally defined (Weber) as the monopoly of the means of violence, is distinctive for Bourdieu in possessing the ultimate monopoly of the means of symbolic violence. The State offers a unified, God-like view of all the social perspectives. It thus commands the unique capital of offering a privileged vision of the world as well as the capacity to determine what is the public good, embodied in the judiciary (1989:22). In Bourdieu’s persuasive view, the State has thus both a Hegelian side with its distinctive symbolic power but also a Marxist side, its service to the dominant social classes.

This is not just a question of the wider bureaucratic field - the State’s codifications of the law and legal settlement of struggles of power with the executive - important as those have recently been in Britain. For Bourdieu also discusses the founding of the welfare state, which he links historically to the rise of the social sciences in the late 19th Century. The contemporary assault on public protection from the late 1970s entails the reduction of this “social state”, even the creation of civic deserts in entire lower-class areas from which hospitals, municipal housing offices and other dignified architecture have been removed. This is a highly dangerous policy, for the Welfare State not only serves but controls. It “domesticat[ed] the dominated” he observes, alluding to Weber’s “Marxist” formulation of these issues (2014:359). For Bourdieu, these changes or “secessions” culminate in a “non- state within the state”(2014:359), the marketization of prisons, remand centres etc. This has yet to be fully addressed but research into this area is importantly initiated in Bowden’s

8 study of police and security services. Such changes represent, for Bourdieu, an undeniable recent strengthening of the Right Hand of the state against the Left Hand - the great State Nobility against the minor State Nobility of teachers, social workers and magistrates in lower courts. However, in his view, the decline of public services can only intensify inner contradictions. Given the failure to recognise the needs of the subordinate class, such state “secessions” provoke despair and widespread volatility.

Bourdieu ended his life fêted by honorary doctorates and yet embattled. In the last few years he was under constant pressure from French sociologists, some of them his ex- doctoral students. This scientific struggle has continued since his death: indeed, the blows of some, such as Fabiani (2016) and Latour (2005), aimed to strike at the heart of his symbolic body. It is therefore particularly timely to welcome the publication of the present collection of essays. As we have seen, these extend to criminology Bourdieu’s historical (or genetic) constructivism, including his distinctive logic of practice and his conceptual instruments for exploring actors’ “regulated improvisation”, both inside and outside the law. In bringing together such a wide-ranging set of articles from the journal Criminology and Criminal Justice, the editors have provided an excellent forum for further research in this area, showing the fertility of his theoretical approach. For, despite the many references in Bourdieu’s writings to Kafka’s The Trial (eg 1989:22) - and indeed to lawyers, codification and the legal field - this is a social space which he himself only fleetingly illuminates.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (1989) Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory, Vol 7, (1) 14-25.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (1996a) The Rules of Art, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (1996b) The State Nobility, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge : Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine Domination, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (2005a) The Social Structures of the Economy, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (2005b) Habitus pp 43-49 in eds. J. Hillier and E. Rooksby, Habitus: A Sense of Place (Second ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate.

Bourdieu P. (2013) Manet: Une Révolution Symbolique, Paris : Raisons d’Agir/Seuil.

Bourdieu, P. (2014) On the State, Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu P. (2017) Anthropologie Économique, Paris : Raisons d’Agir/Seuil.

Bowden, M (2019) The Security Field: Forming and expanding a Bourdieusian criminology, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol*** 1-18

Dezelay, Y. and Garth, B. (2006) The Legal Construction of a Politics of Notables, Retfaerd, Nordisk juridisk tidsskrift, Special Issue: Pierre Bourdieu: From Law to Legal Field, Argang 29, 3/114, 42-63.

Fabiani, J.-L. (2016) Pierre Bourdieu : Un Structuralisme Héroique, Paris: Le Seuil.

Fraser, A. and Matthews, D. (2019) Towards a Criminology of Atmospheres: Law, Affect and the Code of the Street, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol ***1-17.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McNay, L. (1999) Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity, Theory, Culture and Society, vol 16, 1, 95-117.

Passeron, J.-C. (2003) Mort d’un ami, disparition d’un penseur, pp 17-90 in eds. P. Encrevé and R.-M. Lagrave, Travailler avec Bourdieu, Paris: Flammarion.

Phillips, J. (2016) Myopia and Misrecognition: the Impact of Managerialism and the Management of Compliance, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol 16 (1) 40-59.

Robinson, G., Priede, C., Farrall, S., Shapland , J and McNeill, F. (2014) Understanding “quality” in probation practice: Frontline perspectives in England and Wales, Criminology and Criminal Justice, vol. 14 (2) 123-142..

Sandberg, S. and Fleetwood, J.(2017) Street Talk and Bourdieusian Criminology: Bringing Narrative to Field Theory, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol 17 (4) 365-381.

Shammas, V.L. and Sandberg, S. (2016) Habitus, Capital and Conflict: Bringing Bourdieusian Field Theory to Criminology, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Vol 16 (2) 195-213.

Velasquez, J. V. (2018) Doing Justice: Sentencing Practices in Scottish Sheriff Courts, Unpublished PhD, University of Glasgow.

Bridget Fowler, Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Fellow,

School of Political and Social Sciences,

University of Glasgow,

Adam Smith Building,

Glasgow,

G12 8RT

Email: [email protected]

Tel: 0141 330 5064

Fax: 0141 330 3554

A biographical note:

Bridget Fowler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology (Glasgow). Her publications include Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997); The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007); Pierre Bourdieu: Unorthodox Marxist? in ed. S. Susen and B.S.Turner, The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu (2011) and Pierre Bourdieu on Social Transformation, Theory and Society, 2020 (forthcoming).