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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu's topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape.
Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
About the author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Taking Bourdieu to Town
Prologue
Finding an entry into a field in flux
Bourdieu’s trialectic
Practice and symbolic power in the city
1. Bourdieu in the Urban Crucible
Bourdieu’s urban pertinence: A youthful excursus
Transversal principles for putting Bourdieu to work
Habitus and field in the urban crucible
Topos, space, and place in Bourdieu: A response to my German commentators
2. The Bitter Taste of Territorial Taint
Bourdieu meets Goffman in the city
Historical specificities of spatial stain at century’s turn
A topology of territorial taint
The bitter taste of spatial stigma
Dispossession and dishonor in the dual metropolis: Reactions and recommendations
3. Marginality, Ethnicity, and Penality in the Neoliberal Metropolis
Triangulating urban inequality
Deploying and extending Bourdieu’s concepts
The jail as core urban institution
For transversality
Precariat, punishment, politics: A reply to my critics
Epilogue: Bourdieu in the City, the City in Bourdieu
Bourdieu in the city
Capital accumulation, diversification, contestation
The variegation of habitus in the urban vortex
Acknowledgments
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.
The trialectic of symbolic, social, and physical space
Chapter 2
Figure 2.
A topology of the production and impact of territorial taint
Chapter 3
Figure 3.
The fatal triangle of the urban precariat
Figure 4.
The underlying theoretical architecture of the trilogy
Figure 5.
The main concepts developed in the trilogy
Figure 6.
Spatial seclusion in the shaping of habitus
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 1.
Distribution of strategies designed to cope with territorial stigma
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
About the author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Taking Bourdieu to Town
Prologue
Begin Reading
Epilogue: Bourdieu in the City, the City in Bourdieu
Acknowledgments
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he christens the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu’s topological sociology gives us the tools, not just to energize, but to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape.
Wacquant proposes to rethink “the urban” as the domain of the accumulation, diversification, and contestation of capitals (in the plural) and the ground for the commingling and collision of variegated habitus, which makes the city a central site and stake of historical struggles. He shows that the city is a paradoxical absent presence at the heart of Bourdieu’s sociology and that “urbanizing” his thought strengthens his theory of fields but unsettles his account of action.
At every step in the formulation of his neo-Bourdieusian program for the social study of the metropolis, which foregrounds the role of symbolic power and the state, Wacquant confronts the objections and responds to the criticisms that his arguments have evoked across disciplinary and national boundaries. This gives unusual force and special clarity to a book that aims to change the way its readers understand Bourdieu and view the metropolis.
Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory, as well as to anyone in the social sciences and humanities interested in the work of Bourdieu and its relevance to their own concerns.
Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research associate at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris. His books are translated into 20 languages and include Urban Outcasts (2008) and The Invention of the “Underclass” (2022), both also published by Polity Press.
Bourdieu in the City
Challenging Urban Theory
Loïc Wacquant
polity
Copyright © Loïc Wacquant 2023
The right of Loïc Wacquant to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5645-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938907
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
À Délou, Jaja, Mumusse et à leurs familles
“I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen, 1944
Taking Bourdieu to Town
Drawing on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the neoliberal metropolis, this book essays a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist and a novel conception of the urban articulated through Bourdieu’s theoretical framework.1 It invites the reader to explore the city through what I call the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu’s topological sociology gives us the tools, not only to energize the social science of the city, but also to challenge its canon and reset its analytical parameters.
To state the core thesis succintly: I propose to rethink “the urban” as the domain of the accumulation, diversification, and contestation of capitals, plural, and the terrain for the commingling and collision of variegated habitus, which makes the city a central site and stake of historical struggles. At every step in the formulation of this neo-Bourdieusian program for the social study of the metropolis, which foregrounds the role of symbolic power and the state, I confront the objections and respond to the criticisms that my contentions have garnered across disciplinary and national boundaries. At the cost of occasional redundancy, I hope that including these stripped-down dialogues imparts nuance and clarity to a book that aims, somewhat immodestly, to change the way its readers understand Bourdieu and view the metropolis.
Accordingly, I have tailored my arguments with two audiences in mind: practitioners of urban studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into urbanization, urbanism, and inequality in the city; and the gamut of social scientists and humanists interested in dissecting and deploying the work of Pierre Bourdieu in their own domain. I have titled this book Bourdieu in the City to suggest the arrival of a fresh perspective on the theoretical scene of the metropolis, although I intend my reinterpretation of Bourdieu to activate novel empirical projects more so than trouble the good conscience of pure theorists.
The book is composed of three chapters which can be read separately as each was born from, and thoroughly reworks, a keynote to a conference where the explication and implications of Bourdieu’s work for students of the city were in play; and each presentation was followed by a symposium in person and in print through which I was pushed and pulled to clarify and exemplify my positions. It is a book of epistemological elucidation, conceptual elaboration, and analytic extension based on abstract argumentation, even as it is rooted in the concrete difficulties of empirical research, and it hopes to incite and inform further research, rather than battle for pride of place in the pantheon of scholastic theories.2
Yet these three chapters also build on each other and mark a progression from Bourdieu’s work, early to late, to my own, and from the principles anchored by the trialectic of symbolic, social, and physical space to their application in the dissection of the fateful triangle of marginality, ethnicity, and the state in the polarized metropolis. They culminate in a concluding restatement of the distinctive features of a (neo-)Bourdieusian approach to the social science of the city. Such an approach is epistemically reflexive in that it takes care to forge and clean its concepts; it starts with the study of the state as paramount symbolic power and bureaucratic machinery; it takes in the whole span of social and physical space and not just its lower regions (as too many urban sociologists, myself included, are wont to do); it treats social agents as skilled symbolic creatures actively engaged in the fabrication of their world, although under constraint and duress; lastly, it is agonistic, putting struggles in and over the city at its analytic epicenter.
This book is also a work in self-clarification and self-critique.3 The trialectic guided me practically in my research on urban marginality but I came to grasp it as such and formalize it only retroactively (first in a talk to the department of architecture at the University of Cambridge in October of 2010), in the course of reflecting upon that research under the gentle press of questions from readers and objections from audiences. In hindsight, I had not fully grasped the pervasiveness and power of Bourdieu’s topological mode of reasoning. I did not properly thematize as such the struggles among specialists in cultural production over the representation of neighborhoods of relegation. I did not sufficiently call forth the active side of habitus to capture how their residents rework the spatial stigma thrust upon them, which I do now in chapter 2. I presented a picture of the material and symbolic battles over space in the dual metropolis that was one-sided because it was drawn from knowledge of their outcome, thus obscuring the lateral historical possibilities that were not actualized. The present tome also constitutes a sequel of sorts to my dissection of The Invention of the “Underclass” (Wacquant 2022a), which is a case study in the politics of knowledge implementing the same principles of epistemic reflexivity to chart the rise, diffusion, and fall of a racialized “folk devil” in the American hyperghetto.
Figuring out what Bourdieu meant or did with this or that concept of his helped me better figure out what I was trying to do and think. This was not, as positivism would have it, a magical and instantaneous leap from darkness to light and from falsehood to truth but, in accordance with the tenets of historical rationalism, a slow and never-ending march toward a more controlled construction of the object that gradually “approximates” reality.4 For instance, it took me two decades to figure out that the jail, which I had studied as a penal institution, is also a quintessentially urban institution – which is obvious once you have stated it, but then it totally changes how you articulate the problematic of the political production and containment of precarity in the city. This realization itself leads to the further question of how urban sociology could ignore this central institution hiding in plain sight, which in turn leads one to interrogate the statelessness of most urban research and, when it does consider the state, the narrow conception of it as an ambulance rushing after “social problems” to confront marginality downstream when it first produces it upstream.
Admittedly, to meet these criteria for a full-fledged neo-Bourdieusian social science of the city is a tall order and a demanding call, but they have the virtue of setting a regulative ideal to aspire to in the conduct of urban inquiry. As Pierre Bourdieu liked to punctuate the meetings of his research team: “Let’s get to work.”
1.
By neoliberal metropolis, I mean the postindustrial city subjected to economic deregulation (i.e., re-regulation in favor of firms), the retraction and reorganization of public services through market-like mechanisms, the shrinking of the social safety net, and the correlative expansion of the penal dragnet, all these elements being glued together by the justificatory tropes of technical efficiency, fiscal integrity, and individual responsibility (Wacquant 2012a). I elaborate the concept of neoliberalism in
chapter 3
,
infra
, pp. 147–9.
The brave reader unfamiliar with Bourdieu will find a compact overview of his personal and intellectual trajectory, his core concerns and concepts, and his theories of domination, culture, science, and politics in Wacquant (2008b). They are also invited to read the entries relevant to their interests in the stupendous Dictionnaire international Pierre Bourdieu deftly assembled by Gisèle Sapiro (2021).
2.
“There are greater theoretical and scientific profits in making concepts work than in working on concepts, especially concepts that have no use in scientific research” (Bourdieu 2015: 201).
3.
This is the way social science should work: “All scientific knowledge is thus submitted to a self-critique. In the modern sciences, one is instructed only by continuously critiquing one’s own knowledge” (Bachelard 1953: 123).
4.
Vincent Bontems (2010: 48–57) offers a lucid discussion of “approximationalism” in Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science. This position is congruent with Max Weber’s (1947) perspectival epistemology, particularly his elaboration of the “ideal-type” as theoretically guided instrument of construction of the object.
Prologue
Over the past three decades, urban theory stricto sensu has undergone concurrent dissipation and profusion. Dissipation as the older paradigms of Chicago-style ecology, neo-Marxist analyses of accumulation and class struggle in space, and Weberian-inspired political-economic approaches focused on the interplay of market and state gradually lost their hegemonic hold over inquiry into the city. Profusion attested by the proliferation of newer perspectives, from feminism and postmodernism (for a brief moment), to semiotics and ordinary urbanism, to actor-network and assemblage theory, to the posthuman city and postcolonial approaches seeking to reformulate the analytic of the metropolis from the standpoint of the Global South, so-called.1
Finding an entry into a field in flux
At the same time, contemporary urban studies lato sensu have become more dispersed and even polarized into roughly six main clusters of researchers who rarely engage each other.2 A rough sketch of the constellation devoid of center they form is useful to situate the aims and contents of the present book. The first cluster is a family of abstract, discursivist theorists drawing on (preferably French) philosophers, from Henri Lefebvre to Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze, and tackling “the urban” at ever larger scales, as represented by students of global cities and planetary urbanization. The work of Neil Brenner is emblematic of this approach; two theorists who similarly jump with intrepidity from the urban to the epochal are Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells, as David Harvey did before them. Also arrayed under this banner, but in a more empirical vein, are the practitioners of the critical political economy of neoliberalism and urban political ecology.3 These scholars are mostly geographers, strong on abstraction, weak on history, and publish in Antipode.
The second cluster is eclectic and catholic in terms of topic, method, and scale. It comprises macrosociologists of large urban aggregates, with a predilection for statistical studies of neighborhood-level processes (e.g., Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place [2013]), as well as scholars who work closer to the ground and draw on microsociology, organizational study, and phenomenology, broadly conceived to probe not so much the structure as the texture of social life in the metropolis construed as the site of inequality, culture, and action (e.g., Forrest Stuart’s Ballad of the Bullet [2020]). When they tackle the production of space, it is not to discuss issues of scale but to track down the institutional fabrication of urbanity and its discontents (e.g., Anne Lambert’s “Tous propriétaires!” L’envers du décor pavillonnaire [2015]). This is the genre of urban studies that regularly wins the Robert E. Park Award of the City and Community section of the American Sociological Association. It tracks the divides of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and politics in the city.4 It favors theories of the middle range with a light touch, serving to organize data and interpret local findings based on direct observation. The American tradition of “urban ethnography” fits under this heading, although much of it is blissfully atheoretical. These scholars are mostly sociologists, weak on abstraction and strong on institutions; they publish in City and Community.
The third node of contemporary urban studies, steeped in positivism, centers on urban politics, economics, policy, and social problems – as defined by city elites and state officials. It is comfortably anti-theoretical and churns out mountains of technically impeccable articles on narrowly defined topics taking the social and spatial order of the metropolis as a given, as with the abundant studies of segregation, immigration, housing, crime, neighborhoods, municipal politics, and regional development that fill the pages of mainstream journals. It is dominated by urban economics and planning, and it periodically finds a popular expression in trade books based on shallow empirical generalization and prediction aimed primarily at city managers and planners, as represented by the blockbuster tomes of celebrity urbanologists Richard Florida on the (center) left and Edward Glaeser on the (far) right.5 Researchers working in this stream are mostly economists, strong on methodology and weak on conceptualization. They publish in the Journal of Urban Affairs and Urban Studies (though that journal, to its credit, is quite eclectic).
A fourth cluster of urban students has recently coalesced to investigate the impact of digital technologies and ecological degradation, under such headings as the “smart city,” the “networked city,” the “sustainable city,” the “resilient city,” and the “equitable city.”6 They labor at the interface of scholarship, technology, and policy and tackle pressing issues of metropolitan expansion, urban engineering, and municipal management. Lately they have been joined by the prophets of “urban science” surfing the ocean of big data newly released by cities, which they aim to grasp as “complex adaptive systems” (Bettencourt 2021) – rehashing in a celebratory vein the anti-urban platitudes of the 1960s, as when the MIT star computer scientist Jay Forrester (1969) used the same systemic approach to prove that cities were doomed to go extinct. These scholars are understandably attracting resources and attention out of proportion with their intellectual contribution. They are mostly based in urban planning, data science, and environmental design and engineering; they are strong on practicality and weak on intellectual autonomy; they publish in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science and in new journals such as Sustainable Cities and Society.
The fifth aggregate, distinct if not opposed to the other four, including planetary approaches, is formed by research on urbanism and urbanization in the Global South which aims to either supplement, challenge, or provincialize studies of the North Atlantic countries. Its favorite objects are settlement, planning, the environment, and politics at the macro level and informality, citizenship, cultural innovation, violence, and political agency at the micro level, joined in an obsessive focus on “slums.”7 Scholars working in this vein come from every social science discipline, including political science; they are strong on theory and comparison, but weak on specification; they have yet to generate a publication home of their own but, meanwhile, they find an outlet of choice in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Lastly, a new generation of historians has made dynamic contributions to contemporary urban studies as they have moved to encompass new objects, expanded into new countries, taken a view of the longue durée, and incorporated quantitative methods. In his review of the field, Ewen (2016) highlights novel inquiries into space and identity, power and city governance, urban culture and the built environment, and the growth and spread of transnational networks between metropolitan centers.8 Deplorably, though, historical work is generally ignored by other students of the city due to the high disciplinary barrier between the social sciences and the humanities and to the deeply presentist cast of urban studies as practiced in the Anglophone world. As one would expect, historians of the city are strong on narrative and weak on theory, and they publish in the Journal of Urban History.
The present book situates itself at the intersection of the first two clusters, high theory and institutionalist analysis, and is informed by the last, in the guise of histories of urban marginality on both shores of the Atlantic over the past two centuries (Wacquant 2022a: 10–12, 15–27, 125–7). Like the first, it is formal and abstract insofar as it aims to explicate the epistemological stance and extend the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu – a French sociologist, initially trained as a philosopher, mind you – for the structural study of the metropolis as a dynamic concatenation of spaces and capitals, plural. Like the second, it elaborates concepts with which to grasp urban practice, experience, and institutions at multiple scales, including at ground level, as constructed by skilled agents of flesh and blood. In addition, Bourdieu in the City offers an oblique critique of the third cluster, the positivist science of urban social problems, and intends to provide conceptual levers for the fourth, the study of cities of the Global South, by sketching an analytic that bridges the gap between continents.
Furthermore, the novel reading of Bourdieu as urban theorist I propose engages a pragmatic conception of theory grounded in the historical epistemology of Gaston Bachelard (1938), Georges Canguilhem (1952), and Alexandre Koyré (1957), adapted by Bourdieu et al. (1968) for the social sciences, which prioritizes epistemological rupture with common sense (ordinary and scholarly), mandates conceptual vigilance, and stresses discontinuity in scientific evolution.9 For this philosophy of science, the value of theory resides in its ability to produce new and well-articulated empirical objects, rather than getting drawn into scholastic paper battles with other theories.
Bourdieu’s trialectic
Bourdieu in the City is not intended as an eclectic combination of the structuralist and the phenomenological takes on the city, rehearsing Bourdieu’s (1980a) influential critique of the deadly antinomy of objectivism and subjectivism. Nor does it aim just to make room for the author of Distinction (1979) in the pantheon of theorists before which students of the city are expected to genuflect. I intend the present book, not as an addition, but a challenge to the urban canon and a springboard for a possible reconstruction of urban theory and inquiry around what I christen the Bourdieusian trialectic of symbolic space, social space, and physical space.10
By symbolic space, the Bourdieu of Language and Symbolic Power ([1982] 1991) refers to the topography of cognitive categories through which we cut up the empirical manifold and classify people, places, objects, and activities. These mental grids (captured, in their simplest form, by interdependent dualities such as masculine/feminine, high/low, right/left, active/passive, public/private, etc.) mold our way of thinking, feeling, and acting: sedimented inside the body, they are constitutive of habitus and thus they carry our history, individual and collective. They are endowed with authority and potency to the extent that they are sponsored by paramount symbolic agencies such as the state, religion, science, politics, and the law, and/or subtended by the “natural attitude” of everyday life dear to Alfred Schutz as a result of shared socialization, social ceremonies, and rites of institution.11 Crucially, the cognitive categories that serve to map the world are not transcendental universals – as with Immanuel Kant and the classical neo-Kantians – but historical forms resulting from classification struggles inscribed in bodies and institutions (Bourdieu 1979: 543–85; 1980b; 1997: ch. 4).
By social space, the Bourdieu of Distinction (1979) means the multidimensional distribution of agents in objective positions defined by the allocation of efficient resources or capital, economic, cultural, social, and symbolic, for the generic species (which can be further specified depending on the field or subfield, e.g., bureaucratic versus intellectual capital in the academic field). For purposes of theoretical parsimony, these multiple dimensions can be collapsed into the two axes of total volume of capital (in its different pertinent forms) and composition of capital (especially the relative weight of economic and cultural capital), with a third axis capturing changes over time in capital volume and composition. On my reading, social space is the generic “mother category” out of which emerges the more specific concept of field, as a specialized social space characterized by differentiation, autonomization, a bipolar organization, and the monopolization of specific authority (Wacquant and Akçaoğlu 2017: 62–4; Wacquant 2019). The cleavages of social space materialize the hierarchy and force of competing social “principles of vision and division,” such as class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, citizenship, etc., which serve as basis for strategies of group-making and claims-making.
As for physical space, tackled by Bourdieu early in The Bachelors’ Ball ([1962] 2002) and Uprooting (with Sayad 1964) and late in The Weight of the World (1993) and The Social Structures of the Economy (2000), it designates the bounded, three-dimensional material expanse within which agents and institutions are geographically situated and their actions “take place,” in the literal sense of happening and occupying a certain locus and a definite volume. An empirical concretization is the built environment of a city, with its infrastructure, buildings, passageways, public spaces, etc., which acts as the hard container and pivot of the species of capital unequally distributed (social space) among the different salient social categories of people (symbolic space). Physical space enters critically into the formula of action, then, not just through the material constraints it imposes and facilitations it allows, but also as the space of concretization of mental categories (as when the image of the city in the mind of the dominant becomes topographic and architectural reality) and social divisions (as when the partitions of social space become separate neighborhoods).12
Each of these spaces is “thick” with its specific history, concretized by arrangements of cognitive schemata, distributions of capital, and the city’s evolving landscape, as well as with the history of its relationships with the other two. For each space is at once a product, a stake, and a weapon in historical struggles for the appropriation of material and symbolic goods. Product: take classification systems such as the ethnic taxonomies used by the state in the United States; they result from battles for the recognition and institutionalization of certain categories and the erasure of others, as shown by Cristina Mora (2014) in her masterful study of the invention of the Hispanics in and after the 1970s. Stake: these same taxonomies are the targets of strategies of conservation or subversion, as when members of particular populations – say, Americans of mixed descent or black French people – fight for acknowledgment by the state and visibility in national culture (DaCosta 2007; Ndiaye 2008). Weapon: mobilization based on existing ethnic categorization in the political field allows different populations to make claims for public and private resources, such as protected, preferential, or remedial access to education, jobs, and the vote, as with affirmative action programs in the Soviet Union, India, and the United States (Martin 2001; Weisskopf 2004).
Similarly, the physical structure of a city is the layered product of past contests over place, including battles between proponents of market value versus use value (Logan and Molotch [1987] 2007), waged in social space: think of segregated neighborhoods as the sedimented product of historical discrimination in housing and of the projection of past class struggles onto the topography of housing. It is the stake of continuing contention over the distribution of people and goods across areas, as illustrated by battles over gentrification, land use, or infrastructural projects. And the geographic layout is a weapon that can be unsheathed to facilitate or hinder strategies of closure, negatively, as with the use of natural and man-made obstacles to corral undesirable populations and activities, and, positively, as when physical propinquity and geographically dense webs of institutions facilitate collective mobilization and group-making in social space.13
At the topological level, then, social life according to Bourdieu can be dissected by tracing the mutual projection and dynamic transposition of one space into the other two:
The structure of social space thus manifests itself, in the most diverse contexts, in the form of spatial oppositions, inhabited (or appropriated) space functioning as a sort of spontaneous symbolization of social space. There is no space, in a hierarchical society, that is not hierarchized and which does not express social hierarchies and distances in a more or less distorted or euphemized fashion, especially through the effect of naturalization associated with the durable inscription of social realities onto and in the physical world. Differences produced by social logics can then be seen to arise out of the nature of things (think of the notion of “natural frontier” or that of “natural area” dear to the early Chicago School). (Bourdieu 1993a: 159)
The structure of the spatial distribution of capitals at any moment records the balance of social struggles over what Bourdieu (1993a: 164) calls “the profits of space,” including benefits derived from location, rank in a hierarchical structure of places, and occupancy. These geographic struggles in space and over space are waged individually (as with residential mobility) and collectively (through political contests over housing, municipal services, or environmental policy, for instance).
All three spaces are necessarily implicated in social action and, like tectonic plates, they constantly rub on each other. Thinking in terms of spaces, plural, invites us to think relationally or, better, topologically14 by tracing the layered connections between the different elements constitutive of a mental, social, and geographical structure. Rather than postulate a perfect homology between these three structures, as Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss ([1903] 2017) do in their classic essay on “Primitive Forms of Classification,” Bourdieu gives us for mandate to investigate the varying replications, distortions, gaps, and disarticulations that emerge between them as a result of struggles within each of these three spaces and across them, aiming to preserve or transform the historical state of their correspondences – ranging from perfect isomorphism to complete disjuncture.
Thus Bourdieu (1993a: 160) notes that “social space retranslates itself into physical space but always in a manner that is more or less scrambled” (brouillée). He also insists that the mapping of symbolic space onto social space, making possible shared identity and igniting group formation, is never perfect due to the semantic elasticity of social reality: “The social world may be uttered and constructed in different ways according to different principles of vision and division – for example, economic divisions and ethnic divisions” (Bourdieu [1982] 1991: 19), and the relative potency of these principles is at stake within reality itself. In nuce, the French sociologist invites us to hold together in our analysis the cognitive categories of agents, the position they occupy in a multidimensional stratification order, and their place in and peregrinations across the cityscape.
Bourdieu in the City takes up this agenda by bringing together thoroughly rewritten and expanded versions of three articles occasioned by three conferences in York (England), Porto, and Brussels that offered so many opportunities to bring Pierre Bourdieu’s triadic framework to bear on urban reality. In seriatim, these chapters excavate the epistemological principles informing Bourdieu’s topological sociology; elaborate the concept of territorial stigmatization as paradigmatic manifestation of symbolic power in the city; and retrace how I drew on the author of Distinction to plumb the triangular relationship between class fragmentation, ethnic division, and penalization in the neoliberal metropolis. The book thus hopes to effect a double and reciprocal elucidation: it uses my work on urban inequality and marginality to illuminate and extend Bourdieu’s theories, and it uses Bourdieu’s theories to explicate my inquiries and respond to my critics. In keeping with the tenets of historical epistemology, I will seek, then, to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu’s incipient theory of the urban, not by comparing and contrasting it with established theories of the same, in the sort of clash between sacred texts that pure theorists relish, but by shining a light on the new empirical problematics it allows us to articulate.
One final note of theoretical clarification: the trialectic of symbolic, social, and physical space will evoke for some readers Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) triad of “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” space proposed by the Marxist philosopher in his influential book, La Production de l’espace. The two notions differ in that Bourdieu’s trialectic rests on three distinct constructs capturing three modalities of social action (or history inscribed in bodies, institutions, and materiality) and builds in power differentials (via distributions of capital, material and symbolic), whereas Lefebvre’s triad refers to three facets of physical space which overlap with one another (lived space is contained within perceived and conceived space), leaves domination out of the equation, and points to different users of space (conceived space is the space of planners, engineers, and technocrats while lived space is the space of “inhabitants” as well as artists and philosophers) rather than to different modalities of social and spatial existence regardless of agent. Moreover, for Bourdieu there is a dynamic interplay and a structural correspondence (or homology) between the three modalities of social action, whereas Lefebvre gives us little guidance as to the concretized relations between the elements of his triad.
Practice and symbolic power in the city
Chapter 1 lays out the conceptual perimeter and frames the themes of this book. I first establish the pertinence of Bourdieu’s sociology for students of the city by revisiting his youthful work on power, space, and the diffusion of urban forms in provincial Béarn and colonial Algeria. In both cases, urbanization is the key vector of transformation, and the city, town, or camp the site anchoring the forces dissolving the social fabric of the French countryside and overturning French imperialism in North Africa. Bourdieu’s dissection of the resettlement camps in which millions of Algerian peasants were corralled by the French army during the war of national liberation (1954–62) reveals the dramatic disarticulation of symbolic, social, and physical space caused by forced mass relocation: instead of being aligned, cognitive categories, position in stratification, and location in the layout of the camp are scrambled, yielding a paradoxical pattern of anti-urban urbanism. These early studies establish that all social and mental structures have spatial correlates and conditions of possibility; that social distance and power relations are both expressed in and reinforced by the manipulation of physical distance; and that propinquity to the center of accumulation of capital (economic, military, or cultural) is a key determinant of the force and velocity of social change.
Next, I discuss four principles that undergird Bourdieu’s investigations and can profitably drive urban inquiry: the Bachelardian moment of epistemological rupture; the Weberian invitation to historicize the agent (habitus), the world (social space), and the categories of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity); the Leibnizian–Durkheimian imperative to deploy the topological mode of reasoning; and Ernst Cassirer’s command to heed the constitutive efficacy of symbolic structures. I disclose the origins, flag the methodology, and elaborate the analytic effects of what I call Bourdieu’s topological reflex, the impulse to think in terms of geometric configurations. From the formulation of these principles against the backdrop of historical epistemology, I draw three recommendations for scholars wishing to take a Bourdieusian approach to practice and power in the city: eschew the fetishization of concepts, beware of the rhetorical temptation to “speak Bourdieuese,” and do not hesitate to poach Bourdieu’s toolbox for one or another notion (rather than feeling obligated to roll out his complete analytic).
Bourdieu is an asset for urban theory and inquiry, as for other provinces of social research, insofar as he allows us to formulate novel questions, produce fresh data, draft rich descriptions, elaborate deep interpretations, and produce strong explanations of social phenomena, in short, construct scientific objects that we could not have produced without his help. As a fundamentally eclectic thinker disciplined first and foremost by epistemological principles – practicing what he liked to call a “Realpolitik of the concept” – Bourdieu would be horrified by the idea of an orthodoxy requiring that one buy into his “system” in toto, lock, stock, and barrel. Indeed, he is on record opining that, “much as Marx said he was not a Marxist, I would say that I am neither a Bourdieusian nor a Bourdivine” (Bourdieu 2005: 325).15 Two sets of articles published as two “Interventions” on “Bourdieu Comes to Town” in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in January 2018 and January 2021 showcase the analytic plasticity, methodological versatility, and empirical productivity of Bourdieu’s theories. Scrutinizing these theories also points to an original conception, dormant in his writings, of “the urban” as the site of the flourishing of multiple capitals and the meeting ground of variegated habitus.
Chapter 2 builds on the analytic framework elaborated in my book Urban Outcasts (2008a) to plumb the triadic nexus of symbolic, social, and physical space at the lower end of the urban spectrum. It revisits and elaborates the concept of territorial stigmatization I forged by wedding Bourdieu’s ([1982] 1991) notion of symbolic power with Erving Goffman’s (1963) model of the management of “spoiled identity.” The concept aims to capture how the blemish of place impacts the residents of disparaged districts (their sense of self, their vision of their place in the city, and their social strategies of reproduction and mobility, social and spatial), the surrounding citizenry and commercial operators, street-level public bureaucracies, specialists in cultural production (such as journalists, scholars, and politicians), and state officials and policies.
I sketch a topological model of the production, circulation, and consumption of spatial taint in the city that may guide further comparative research on the mapping of symbolic space onto physical space via social space. I argue that suffusive place stigma is a novel and distinctive phenomenon that crystallized at century’s end as a result of the dissolution of the neighborhoods of seclusion emblematic of the Fordist-Keynesian phase of industrial capitalism – namely, the communal black ghetto in the United States and homogeneous working-class districts in Western Europe. Territorial stigma in the neoliberal era differs from the traditional topography of disrepute in the industrial city encapsulated by the expression of bas-fond (Kalifa 2012) in that it has become autonomized from the taint of poverty and ethnicity, nationalized and democratized (it is recognized everywhere and by everyone), sponsored by the state, equated with social disintegration, and racialized through selective accentuation. It elicits fear and revulsion leading to punitive corrective measures by the state, such that deprecated districts of relegation have served as testing ground for the policy of penalization of poverty fostered by neoliberal state restructuring (Wacquant 2009a, 2012a).
The sociosymbolic strategies fashioned by the residents of defamed districts to cope with spatial denigration are not limited to internalization and replication. They span a broad panoply ranging from submission to indifference to defiance, and their adoption depends on social position and trajectory. Suffice to say that it is not enough to understand how symbolic space gets imprinted onto social and physical space, to dissect dominant discourses about the city circulating in the public sphere – as Robert Beauregard (2013) does in his influential study of the trope of urban crisis and decline in postwar America. One must imperatively grasp how these discourses trickle down the urban ladder to swirl into the lives of the people they castigate, where they are repackaged, revalued, and mobilized for different practical ends, including strategies of sociosymbolic resistance to denigration.16
Over the past decade, research on neighborhood taint has mushroomed across disciplines and countries to show how it operates in different urban settings and political formations, advancing our empirical understanding of the role that symbolic structures play in the production of spaces of inequality and marginality in the city (Slater 2016; Kirkness and Tijé-Dra 2017; Schultz Larsen and Delica 2019; Smets and Kusenbach 2020; Sisson 2021a). This research suggests the need for public policies designed to reduce, not only the burden of material deprivation, but also the press of symbolic domination in the dual metropolis. They point, that is, to the urgent need for state programs of “territorial destigmatization” (Schultz Larsen and Delica 2021) capable of integrating the residents of redoubts of relegation into the civic community. But then we encounter the extraordinary stickiness of stigma as negative symbolic capital once it has seeped deep into the minds of a broad public. This is the fundamental asymmetry of stigmatization: it is relatively easy to tarnish (a person, group, or place) and difficult to cleanse.17
Chapter 3 opens wide the analytic compass to draw a theoretical map of the research program pursued across my three books Urban Outcasts (2008a), Punishing the Poor (2009a), and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (forthcoming). In this trilogy, I disentangle the triangular nexus of class fragmentation, ethnic division, and state-crafting in the polarized metropolis at century’s turn to explain the political production, sociospatial distribution, and punitive management of marginality through the wedding of disciplinary social policy and neutralizing criminal justice. I signpost how I deployed three key notions from Pierre Bourdieu (social space, bureaucratic field, and symbolic power) to clarify categories left hazy (such as the ghetto) and to fashion new concepts (territorial stigmatization and advanced marginality, punitive containment and liberal paternalism, hyperincarceration and negative sociodicy) as tools for the comparative sociology of the unfinished genesis of the postindustrial precariat in the neoliberal metropolis, the penal regulation of poverty in the age of diffusing social insecurity, and the building of the neoliberal Leviathan.18 The distinctively Bourdieusian touch of these various concepts resides in the dogged effort to hold together the material and symbolic moments of social action and to trace the latter’s double sedimentation in institutions and in socialized bodies.19
Bringing the study of the contemporary permutations of class, race and immigration, and the state into a single framework shows how the racialization, penalization, and depoliticization of the urban turbulences associated with advanced marginality reinforce one another in Western Europe as in the United States. It confirms that punishment is not just a key index of social solidarity, as Émile Durkheim ([1893] 2007) famously proposed, but also a core political capacity and a key site for staging the sovereignty of the state as classifying and stratifying machine. And it reveals the deep kinship between race and judicial sanction as kindred forms of official dishonor that converge in the fabrication of public outcasts. This analytic move indicates that penal institutions and policies are fundamental to the constitution of social and moral order in the metropolis, such that we urgently need to bring the police, the court, the jail, and the prison to the center of urban theory and inquiry.
Together, these chapters suggest how Bourdieu can excite, enrich, and reorient the study of the metropolis, and even dissolve it in a broader topological social science, encompassing the city in a general analytic of the dynamic relationships between symbolic division, social space, and the natural/built environment in urban, periurban, and rural settings.20 Bourdieu does not just add a new set of powerful and flexible notions – habitus, capital, social space, field, doxa, symbolic power, and reflexivity – to the panoply of established theoretical perspectives: he paves the way for reconceptualizing the urban as the domain of accumulation, differentiation, and contestation of manifold forms of capital (including, crucially, the contestation of capital by capital) and the meeting ground of variegated habitus, which effectively makes the city a central ground and prize of historical struggles.
In conclusion, I consider the paradoxical absent presence of the city in Pierre Bourdieu’s oeuvre. Urbanization was a driving force in the emergence of the state (as paramount symbolic power), the fields of cultural production, and the field of power with its competing forms of capital. It also brought into the same compressed physical space agents endowed with disparate dispositions owing to their varied social trajectories and positions, thereby injecting the dialectic of social and mental structures with unique dynamism liable to produce discordance as much as agreement. Yet Bourdieu is silent on the specificities of the city as a social milieu, and when he does address urbanization as process – most notably in his early account of the social death of the village society of his youth (Bourdieu [1962] 2002) – it turns out to be pivotal to his argument, but it is inexplicably left in the background. I probe the reasons behind this paradoxical silence. I argue that “urbanizing Bourdieu” strengthens his account of the rise of fields, leading to what we could call a society of microcosms, as opposed to what Norbert Elias ([1987] 1991) calls “the society of individuals.”21 But it unsettles his account of action and calls for further theoretical elaboration of the internal coherence and external congruence of habitus in the material and symbolic multiverse of the metropolis.
The lifeblood of research is open and frank debate and I have been fortunate to elicit more than my share of them. The concepts of advanced marginality, territorial stigmatization, and (hyper)ghetto, to take but three, have been questioned theoretically, extended and distended analytically, as well as tried and tested in varied empirical contexts, ranging far from their original sites of incubation.22 Accordingly, I have amplified the chapters in this book by appending to them the responses, revised and expanded, that I gave to my critics in the live discussion and the print debate that each of them occasioned. Chapter 1 is followed by my rejoinders to the participants to the “Bourdieu Comes to Town” conference held in York, England, in May 2012 and to the subsequent print symposium on my article by the same title organized by German colleagues in Sub\Urban: Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung (July 2017). Chapter 2 closes with my replies to queries raised at the conference “Putting Wacquant to Work” in Sheffield in May 2016 and to the objections formulated by the contributors to the edited volume that grew out of that conference (Flint and Powell 2019). Chapter 3 is complemented by my live rejoinders to the conference on “Ethnicity, Marginality, and Penality in the Neoliberal City” held in Brussels in October 2010, mixed in with my extended responses, drafted especially for this book, to the ten scholars from multiple disciplines invited to react to the resulting article in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the summer of 2014.
Now, there is always a danger that turning back onto one’s own work in an effort at clarification and specification morphs into a stale exercise in self-justification or, worse, spills over into intellectual narcissism and theoretical dogmatism. Every scholar is understandably wedded to their own research and emotionally attached to the fruits of long years of arduous labor. But Max Weber ([1919] 1946) reminds us in “Science as Vocation” that the task of science is to produce knowledge that, by design, is doomed to be “surpassed.” The social scientist has no sooner forged a concept, built a theory, and established an empirical proposition than she must scrutinize them for their flaws, circumscribe their limitations, flag their silences, and gear up for the collective work needed to transcend them, whether by revision, absorption, or rejection.
In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific “fulfilment” raises new “questions”; it asks to be “surpassed” and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as “gratifications” because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically – let that be repeated – for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. (Weber [1919] 1946: 138)
It is in this spirit that I invite the reader to weigh the heuristic potential of Bourdieu’s sociology for invigorating and reframing urban studies, to test drive the concepts that I forged by implementing his epistemological and theoretical principles in the study of marginality, and to draw out their implications for their own research agenda, thus joining the collective effort needed to capture and explicate the signal transformations of social life and structures of power in the twenty-first-century metropolis. The French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard put it best when he wrote that the subject of science is not an isolated cogito (I think) but a plural cogitamus (we think). The author of this book is only one of myriad nodes in an extended intellectual network laboring to push urban theory forward.
1.
This is a personal bird’s-eye view flagging the main genres to help orient the reader. Closer to the ground there appear more strands that alternately mesh and clash (e.g., growth machine and urban regime theory), and it emerges that the older paradigms have undergone revivals, sometimes spectacular, as with Sampson’s (2012) potent restatement of Chicago-style ecology and the morphing of neo-Marxism into the critical geography of neoliberalism, as with Brenner and Theodore (2003) and Peck (2010). A nuanced picture of the full landscape of urban theory can be found in Harding and Blokland (2014); for further viewpoints, see Roy (2009, 2016), Farías and Bender (2010), Parker (2015), Robinson (2016), Storper and Scott (2016), McNeill (2017), and Lawhon (2020). For thematic overviews, as distinct from analytic ones, see Tonkiss (2005), Amin and Thrift (2017), and Jayne and Ward (2017).
2.
I mean urban studies as a multidisciplinary field of inquiry into the city. A very different, but stimulative, outlook on critical urban studies is sketched by Leitner et al. (2019). A provocative critique of the managerialist turn of the field in the neoliberal university is Tom Slater’s (2021)
Shaking Up the City
.
3.
See, in particular, Neil Brenner’s
New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question
(2019); Saskia Sassen’s
Cities in a World Economy
(2018); Manuel Castells’s
The Rise of the Network Society
(2011); Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard (eds.),
Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers
(2007); Nik Heynen’s “Urban Political Ecology I and II” (2014, 2016); and Daniel Aldana Cohen’s (2020) “Confronting the Urban Climate Emergency.”
4.
I have in mind here Talja Blokland’s
Community as Urban Practice
(2017), Mario Luis Small’s
Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio
(2004), Mary Pattillo’s
Black on the Block
(2008a), and Ruth Fincher and Jane M. Jacobs’s
Cities of Difference
(1998). There is a vibrant stream of field research on Latin American cities, but it has so far failed to make a dent in US debates (but see Deckard and Auyero 2022).
5.
See Richard Florida,
The Rise of the Creative Class – Revisited: Revised and Expanded
(2014, first edition 2002); Edward Glaeser,
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
(2008). For an incisive critique of these two saccharine visions of the city, see Peck (2005, 2016).
6.
This is evidenced by the multiplication of handbooks with a policy slant on these topics, such as Andersson et al. (2011) on creative cities, Willis and Aurigi (2020) on smart cities, Stowers (2018) on sustainable cities, Burayidi et al. (2019) on urban resilience, and the volumes published in the Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series.
7.
Here again Routledge has flooded the market with grotesquely overpriced handbooks and readers: Miraftab and Kudva (2014), Parnell and Oldfield (2020), and Rukmana (2020). See also the idiosyncratic survey of “Cities of the Global South” by AbdouMaliq Simone (2020), the invitation of Ren (2018) to shift the geographic focus of urban studies “From Chicago to China and India,” and the Symposium edited by Marco Garrido, Xuefei Ren, and Liza Weinstein, “Toward a Global Urban Sociology: Keywords” in
City & Community
(2021, vol. 20, no. 1).
8.
The mammoth, two-volume,
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History
(Gilfoyle 2019) offers a synthesis of three generations of mainstream historiography on the US city. A panorama of the comparative study of urban development from ancient times to the present is Clark’s (2013)
The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History
.
9.
Historical epistemology is little known among Anglophone social scientists but it has exerted a broad subterranean influence on the philosophy of science. Thus, Bachelard was in dialogue with the Vienna Circle, Canguilhem shaped the views of Foucault and Bourdieu, while Alexandre Koyré was a major inspiration to Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. A compact presentation is Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s
On Historicizing Epistemology
(2010); a demonstration in action is Loïc Wacquant,
The Invention of the “Underclass”: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge
(2022a).
10.
The young Bourdieu tackled the correspondence between physical and mental structures in his cross-Mediterranean ethnographies of colonial Kabylia and provincial Béarn (see especially Bourdieu 1962 and 1970; Bourdieu and Sayad 1964). The mature Bourdieu of
Distinction
(1979) and
The State Nobility
(1989a) focused on the dialectic of social and mental structures, while the late Bourdieu (1993a, 2000) tackled the relations between social and physical space. I bring these three dyadic endeavors together into a single triadic framework. Bourdieu himself came close to collapsing these two duos into a triad in an unpublished lecture given at the University of Oslo entitled “Physical Space, Social Space and Habitus” (Bourdieu 1996), but the short text does not deliver on the promise of the title.
11.
A concrete example of a symbolic structure is the ethnoracial taxonomy (white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, etc.) with which Americans learn to categorize one another and the state categorizes them. It resides at once in the objectivity of official classifications (such as those used by the Census, schools, hospitals, etc.) and in the subjectivity of everyday typologies. Another is the implicit map of neighborhoods and their perceived properties that people carry in their head as they move in and across the city.
12.
This twofold projection of mental and social categories onto geography is particularly visible in colonial cities. A paradigmatic demonstration of the stubborn
remanence of appropriated physical space
is Zeynep Çelik’s (1997) rich historical study of the architecture of Algiers as both reflective and constitutive of colonial confrontation across 13 decades.
13.
The negative trialectic of symbolic, social, and physical space is at work in the erection of the ghetto as instrument of ethnic ostracization (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993), the positive trialectic in the creation of upper-class enclaves and gated communities (Low 2004; Holmqvist 2017). Wacquant (2010a) sketches a model of urban seclusion that brings these two dynamics together.
14.
Topology is the mathematical study of the formal properties of geometric configurations. Bourdieu (1989b: 16) notes that “sociology, in its objectivist moment, is a social topology, an
analysis situs
as they called this new branch of mathematics in Leibniz’s time, an analysis of relative positions and of the objective relations between these positions.” I treat the modality of a topological social science in chapters 1 and 2 (
infra
, pp. 34–5, 37–40, 50–3, and 81–91).
15.
This remark was made orally by Bourdieu in closing observations to a conference on the international reception of his work held in Cerisy-la-Salle in June of 2001, an event that was painful for him to attend (if only on the last day) as, being of a shy temperament, he hated being the center of attention.
16.
One empirical manifestation of this revaluation is found in cultural forms such as linguistic contests, tagging, tattooing, and especially music, produced by strategies of stigma inversion, as with urban blues in the dark ghetto of the 1960s (Keil 1966), gangster rap in the 1990s (Kubrin 2005), and drill music in the 2010s (Stuart 2020).
17.
On the pathways and pitfalls of strategies of group destigmatization, see Lamont (2018).
18.
By precariat, I mean the precarious fractions of the proletariat (in the original Marxian sense of sellers of labor power) whose existence is stamped by interlinked forms of insecurity rooted in the fragmentation of wage work and the retraction of the welfare state: employment, income, housing, family, etc. I return to this concept in
chapter 3
,
infra
, pp. 148–9.
19.
“The motor of historical action … is not a subject who would confront a society as an object constituted in exteriority. It resides neither in consciousness nor in things, but in the relation between two states of the social, that is, between history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and history incarnate in bodies, in the form of the system of durable dispositions I call habitus” (Bourdieu 1982: 37–8).
20.
A study extending Bourdieu’s trialectic to a rural setting is Powell’s (2022) deft dissection of the transformation of the symbolic, social, and physical space of a declining coal valley in North Wales.
21.
Here Bourdieu comes close to Max Weber, for whom modernity can be characterized as a “society of organizations” and from whom he borrowed the notion of “value spheres” to theorize field as a universe endowed with its own
nomos
. For a stimulative exegesis of the contrasts between Weber and Elias on this front, see Breuer (1994).
22.
