A Public Servant

Abstract

When Pierre Bourdieu died onJanuary 23, a torrent of tributes, commentaries, and memories flooded the media. Le Monde stopped the presses to make his demise the lead story. Although he had been a severe critic of their policies, the prime minister, Lionel Jospin, and President Jacques Chirac both considered it politic to pay homage. The Centre Georges Pompidou held a public tribute. The New York Times carried an obituary on page 41. Most readers had probably never heard of this French Thinker and Globalization Critic. In spite of Bourdieu's numerous studies of the world of visual culture and the special interest of October in French-inspired discourse, he did not rank among those Parisians frequently credited in this journal's footnotes. In English-speaking countries Bourdieu had, in fact, a relatively minimal presence outside of certain sociology departments. The more recent import of intellectual fare was dominated by other names: Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze. For a while even Jean Baudrillard held a sizable market share, particularly in the art and advertising industry (for years his name graced the masthead of Artforum). It would be a fascinating research project-in the tradition of Homo Academicus (Bourdieu's study of his own academic milieu, published in 1984)-to explore the forces behind the relatively tepid reception of his investigations in the field of cultural production in comparison to the extensive following enjoyed by his peers outre-mer. This aloofness vis-a-vis a fellow critical intellectual is particularly surprising in light of the International Sociological Association's listing Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) among the ten most important works of sociology of the twentieth century. When the Centre Georges Pompidou asked me to contribute to its Hommage 'a Pierre Bourdieu, I posed the following rhetorical question: What does it mean that the Pompidou is holding this tribute? Had he not laid bare the often unacknowledged role played by the enormous symbolic held by institutions such as this one, with which they-like other educational, religious, and cultural institutions that are shaping our respective habitus-commit what he termed symbolic violence? Had he not assailed them for surrendering a large part of that capital to the public-relations apparatuses of corporations and