File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0001, message 75


From: "rocamora agnes" <agnes-AT-rocamora.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: homology
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 08:43:11 -0800


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Thank you all for your help,
I still cannot stop being sceptical about Bourdieu's neatness of homological relations, especially in the fields of production and consumption (homology between the position of agents in the field of class relations and the position in the field of production of the objects they consume: to a low position corresponds the consumption of a 'low' object or to an avantarde position correspond the consumption of an avantgarde objects etc. as is clearly expressed in Bourdieu's Le Couturier et sa Griffe).
He writes that the working class has a taste for necessity, this taste is of course 'motivated' by their class habitus. Now, in La Misere du Monde, he interviews young people who do not have any money, live in the poor suburbs of Paris and who, following Bourdieu, should want what they can afford to want, that is near to nothing. However he insists that these same young people cannot but desire many of the consumer goods (expensive designer clothes for ex.) that they see. Shopping malls, ads are everywhere to make them desire these products which, Bourdieu notes, they end up stealing so big is their desire to own them. We are here far from a taste for necessity determined by a predetermined habitus against which they, according to Bourdieu in Distinction and Photography for example, shouldn't be able to do anything.
I must also say that I do not agree in the first place with this taste for necessity of the working class (see on that account Grignon and Passeron's Le Savant et Le Populaire Paris: Gallimard. There is also a very good study by A.Partington on popular fashion and the working class in Chic Thrills where there is no trace of a working class'habitus defined by its taste for necessity).
I simply think that this notion of homology is interesting and surely often works, but not as systematically as Bourdieu seems to imply.
Agnes

HTML VERSION:

Thank you all for your help,
I still cannot stop being sceptical about Bourdieu's neatness of homological relations, especially in the fields of production and consumption (homology between the position of agents in the field of class relations and the position in the field of production of the objects they consume: to a low position corresponds the consumption of a 'low' object or to an avantarde position correspond the consumption of an avantgarde objects etc. as is clearly expressed in Bourdieu's Le Couturier et sa Griffe).
He writes that the working class has a taste for necessity, this taste is of course 'motivated' by their class habitus. Now, in La Misere du Monde, he interviews young people who do not have any money, live in the poor suburbs of Paris and who, following Bourdieu, should want what they can afford to want, that is near to nothing. However he insists that these same young people cannot but desire many of the consumer goods (expensive designer clothes for ex.) that they see. Shopping malls, ads are everywhere to make them desire these products which, Bourdieu notes, they end up stealing so big is their desire to own them. We are here far from a taste for necessity determined by a predetermined habitus against which they, according to Bourdieu in Distinction and Photography for example, shouldn't be able to do anything.
I must also say that I do not agree in the first place with this taste for necessity of the working class (see on that account Grignon and Passeron's Le Savant et Le Populaire Paris: Gallimard. There is also a very good study by A.Partington on popular fashion and the working class in Chic Thrills where there is no trace of a working class'habitus defined by its taste for necessity).
I simply think that this notion of homology is interesting and surely often works, but not as systematically as Bourdieu seems to imply.
Agnes 
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