41
" Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover, "
― Pierre Bourdieu , The Social Structures of the Economy
46
" Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. "
― Pierre Bourdieu , The Forms of Capital
47
" Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible. And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices. "
― Pierre Bourdieu , The Forms of Capital
51
" If I had to characterize my work in two words, that is, as is the fashion these days, to label it, I would speak of constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructivism, taking the word structuralism in a sense very different from the one it has acquired in the Saussurean or Lévi-Straussian tradition. By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representation. By constructivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notable those we ordinarily call social classes. "
― Pierre Bourdieu , In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology
53
" Mais, pour sortir de l’aporie, suffit-il d’affirmer, comme Arthur Danto7, que le principe de la différence entre les œuvres d’art et les objets ordinaires n’est autre chose qu’une institution, à savoir le « monde artistique » (art world) qui leur confère le statut de candidats à l’appréciation esthétique ? Constat un peu court, et, si un sociologue peut se permettre un tel jugement, un peu « sociologiste » : né, encore une fois, d’une expérience singulière trop vite universalisée, il désigne seulement le fait de l’institution (au sens actif) de l’œuvre d’art. Il fait l’économie de l’analyse historique et sociologique de la genèse et de la structure de l’institution (le champ artistique) qui est en mesure d’accomplir un tel acte d’institution, c’est-à-dire d’imposer la reconnaissance de l’œuvre d’art comme telle à tous ceux (et à ceux-là seulement) qui (comme le philosophe visitant un musée) ont été constitués (par un travail de socialisation dont il faut aussi analyser les conditions sociales et la logique) de telle façon que (comme l’atteste leur entrée dans un musée) ils sont disposés à reconnaître comme artistiques et à appréhender comme telles les œuvres socialement désignées comme artistiques (notamment par leur exposition dans un musée). "
― Pierre Bourdieu , The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Meridian-Crossing Aesthetics)
57
" Comprendre, c’est ressaisir une nécessité, une raison d’être, en reconstruisant, dans le cas particulier d’un auteur particulier, une formule génératrice, dont la connaissance permet de reproduire, sur un autre mode, la production même de l’œuvre, d’en éprouver la nécessité s’accomplissant, en dehors même de toute expérience empathique : l’écart entre la reconstruction nécessitante et la compréhension participante n’est jamais aussi manifeste que lorsque l’interprète est conduit par son travail à éprouver comme nécessaires les pratiques d’agents occupant dans le champ intellectuel ou dans l’espace social des positions tout à fait éloignées des siennes, donc propres à lui apparaître au demeurant comme profondément « antipathiques "
― Pierre Bourdieu , The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Meridian-Crossing Aesthetics)
59
" C’est sans doute parce qu’il a vécu, avec la lucidité des commencements, toutes les contradictions, éprouvées comme autant de double binds, qui sont inhérentes au champ littéraire en voie de constitution, que personne n’a vu mieux que Baudelaire le lien entre les transformations de l’économie et de la société et les transformations de la vie artistique et littéraire qui placent les prétendants au statut d’écrivains ou d’artistes en face de l’alternative de la dégradation, avec la fameuse « vie de bohème », faite de misère matérielle et morale, de stérilité et de ressentiment, ou de la soumission tout aussi dégradante aux goûts des dominants, à travers le journalisme, le feuilleton ou le théâtre de boulevard. Critique "
― Pierre Bourdieu , The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Meridian-Crossing Aesthetics)
