Here's to Your Mr. Thompson

After completing Bourdieu’s work, I’m a little unsure how to put my thoughts into a concise post; therefore, I’m going to give a list of the main points I found and focus on the one which I think is represented in every chapter.

Here are the central points that Bourdieu expresses throughout the text:
1. The dominant language serves as representational symbol of the producer’s power
2. People are interpellated through inculcation
3. Habitus is the result of the inculcation
4. Linguists do not recognize the cultural repercussion of language
5. The power of language is determined by the market or receivers
6. The inequality of between the classes of speakers will never be resolved without a resolution to the class struggle in general
7. Language is NOT action, but it can be the catalyst for action

I’d like to begin by thanking the editor. After reading the first five chapters, I decided I should go back and read the introduction, which I had stupidly skipped. Here was the obvious key that I had been chronicling in my notes without being able to articulate. Bourdieu’s entire piece is focused around two words: habitus and inculcation. Thompson says that habitus is “a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways” (12). He goes on to say the these “dispositions are acquired through the gradual process of inculcation in…early childhood” (12). I found that these two terms were at the center of all the examples I felt were important.

At the beginning of the text Bourdieu points out several examples regarding the nature of habitus. He explains that actions as simple as pronunciation, sitting, and silence are the results of inculcation. Whether unconscious or not, the speaker applies a learned set of actions depending on his or her social situation.

School is a major target of the author. His text approaches the educational system in the same manner as Althusser does his apparatus of interpellation: “Given that the educational system possess the delegated authority…it follows that the social mechanism of cultural transmission tend to reproduce the structural disparity between the very unequal knowledge of the legitimate language and the much more uniform recognition o f this language” (62). What Bourdieu is saying here is that the school systems set children up to understand their place in the class system. If they can reproduce the legitimate language well, they will dominate those who know how it should sound, but lack the education to play “the game.” This system, however, is inescapable, and the students do not have a choice of playing the game or not.

Another example of habitus is presented in the anecdote about the mayor from Bearnais. In this account, the author presents the idea that those in power can use their authority as a master of the legitimate language to subvert the legitimate language for their own ends. This subversion is not a true subversion, the mayor has no wish to subjugate French; he does this win praise from the illiterate (in terms of the legitimate language) by using the subjugated language instead of the dominate form (68).

Later in the text Bourdieu examines another way the people are manipulated. He focuses on the “symbolic efficacy in the construction of reality” though “naming” (105). This power of naming places social constrictions on individuals by grouping them. These organized groups are then inculcated to behave in prescribed manners.

Again, the examples are present in every chapter, but I will end with one from chapter 8. The example from chapter 8 is an extension of the example from page 105. In his examination of politics, Bourdieu claims that a struggle develops between opposing ideologists to win the support of the masses. It is their symbolic power placed in language that allows them to “carr[y] out a political action” (190). The words themselves cannot create any action, but the words spoken by an individual of authority can force the habitus or actions of the market.