Old Habitus Dies Hard

Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities & Lifestyle, edited by Fiona Devine, Mike Savage, John Scott, and Rosemary Crompton

It's been more than ten years since I had any direct involvement in academia, so I thought this brand new collection of studies, compiled by the editors of Renewing Class Analysis, would get me up to speed with the latest in cutting-edge theories concerning class and social stratification.

I needn't have bothered. It seems like very little has changed in the time since I completed my postgrad. All the contributors to this collection seem to be agreed that simplistic 'producerist-based' definitions of class are inadequate (specifically, blunt) tools for class analysis, as are emphases on patterns of consumption or lifestyle, as exemplified by more recent, postmodern approaches. Class has far more to do with the exercise of power than relationship to the means of production, thus most seem to be content to rely on Bourdieu's concept of social fields and his distinction between economic and cultural capital, possessed to varying degrees by members of society and in such proportions as to allow us to define their location in the social hierarchy. Thus Michael Vester examines the way Bourdieu's pioneering work on class in France can be operationalized for Germany, and Mike Savage, Gaynor, Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst examine the changes in habitus amongst the community of Cheadle, an article that at least had the merit of discussing somewhere I can claim to have visited many times (mostly unwillingly).

We seem not to have gotten very far in the space of ten years. There doesn't seem to have been much rethinking done, only an attempt to apply some of Bourdieu's principles. Odd the top of my head, I can think of three classic theorists of modernity, Elias, Veblen, and Simmel, whose works could have been put to use in informing Bourdieu's approach, but nothing like this seems to have been attempted (maybe that was never the remit, but there's precious little originality here).

For instance, Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption could be used to examine the contestation of lifestyle patterns at the borders of social fields; even a simple example such as the increase in wine-tasting among working-class communities and the knock-on effect this must surely have on the popularity of oenophilia among the middle classes could benefit from this. We used to refer to such behaviour as embourgeoisement, and I was delighted, no I wasn't, I was horrified, to see this term still being used to describe changes in working-class behaviour. In any case, how do you determine whether the adoption of a specific behaviour means that an individual has risen up the social ladder or that the behaviour has dripped down? Or indeed, up -Beverley Skeggs's article, "The Re-Branding of Class," at least manages to acknowledge this problem in her wry poke at Guy Ritchie and the Mockneys (great band name by the way).

It's also difficult to believe that there's no place for Elias's figurational sociology in the exploration of any aspect of habitus. If it's the case that increased bureaucratization and centralization of authority and the various processes of production and consumption lead to increased 'self-control' and 'self-restraint' among individuals in any given society, so that different emotions predominate in different epochs, cultures, and classes, we should be able to trace the historical forces that lead to the differentiation of social fields according to ethos: The supposed stiff upper lip of the English upper class must not only have a synchronic aspect (as part of a social space occupied by the class to set it apart from the 'lower orders') but also a diachronic aspect, a biography that relates it to membership of a class experiencing the consequences of modernization as necessitating interchangeability of members, self-restraint, and, indeed, a consciousness of its own 'civilizing' tasks.

And maybe, just maybe, Simmel's idea of neurasthenia (exemplified by Stendhal's syndrome) could be put to use, especially at this time of year, to explore Bourdieuvian habitus amongst working-class and middle-class children and the extent to which they might overlap and undermine standard definitions of class. I dunno, just an idea.

The blurb on the back of the book says, " . . . the book celebrates the emergence of new ways of understanding social inequalities." I didn't see any.