In “Sign of the Times,” Quinn Cook ’29 brings the work of various social theorists and philosophers to bear on aspects of contemporary (student) life.
After an onslaught of short-form videos detailing various “old money” brands (see also “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth”), my Instagram feed presented me with something that I didn’t know had an audience: explanations of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social inequality.
It quickly became clear that this content was not intended to be a good faith analysis of the vast wealth gap which confronts us today, but a manual for the arriviste: the creator deployed Bourdieu as a guide towards first identifying and then acquiring symbolic capital and those “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” — habitus —which make one appear at home in the world of the wealthy.
This appropriation of Bourdieu was, in some ways, fitting. He speaks about the social reproduction of the status quo — including and especially class inequality — but, according to certain critiques, fails to flesh out a program or method to challenge this. Certainly, studies like his about luxury consumption, exclusive social circles, and the rituals of the wealthy can be titillating to the reader even when presented in a critical, unflattering light. It is no surprise that the united content recyclers of TikTok and Instagram picked up Bourdieu as an intriguing peek into the world of the upper class and higher status.
If it is not surprising, however, it is still disappointing. Bourdieu detailed the mechanics of symbolic capital and power not so that they could be further accumulated, but so they might be interrogated. The crude perversion of his work in particular belies a tendency of social media’s treatment of theory in general: to remain deaf to the “voice again tumbling down the steps of history” Fanon speaks of which tells us that “it’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it”; to continue interpreting the world, contra Marx, and failing to realize that “the point is to change it”; to decline, in short, to actually engage with theory itself.
How can one, after all, become an expert on prison systems without also becoming their greatest critic? How can one study a racist regime without also becoming an outspoken defector? Though theory may begin as a descriptive model, aiming to make an oft unquestioned slice of the world more intelligible, quite often one cannot come to understand its object deeply without also becoming, in some ways, a dissident.
Bourdieu himself exemplifies this. At age 25, he was conscripted in the French army — electing not to join the Reserve Officers College, as most of his peers did — and sent to Algeria. Once his service ended, he remained there to teach and research at the University of Algiers until the Algiers putsch of 1961 forced him to flee. Though trained as a philosopher at the École Normale Supérieure, his sociology was born through ethnographic fieldwork in the foundry of colonial conflict.
Bourdieu’s work, then, was never not political, and his apparent political “emergence” in the 1990s, engaging in debates and actively supporting labor strikes, should not come as a surprise. In this light, the deflating — indeed, the corruption — of Bourdieu’s broader project in contemporary short-form video content seems rather distasteful.
It is not, however, unique. The retreat of “theory” from the popular mind has, in some ways, been met by the explosion of accounts which pump out the same kind of content about Plato, Adorno, Derrida and others — some of which is not bad, and most of which is not made in bad faith. These are, however, the trappings of victory, not victory itself.
The goal of this column is to lend a hand in leading theory out from the walls of enigmatic prose and circular citations by wielding it to talk about the salient features of college life. I’m not interested in grand theorizing on grand subjects, but perhaps more engaging is grand theorizing on modest subjects: the composition of an Instagram Reel, the quality of chatbot-generated text or the terrible layout of our dining halls, for example.
Hopefully I can do so without falling into the same reductive traps that I feel so free to lambast when I see them in others, but I will rest easier disclaiming that I am not, as Bourdieu warns, “dispensing lessons,” and neither am I “a prophet nor an intellectual guru.” My aim is not to teach (I’d have stiff competition and insufficient knowledge, were that my intention), but to begin conversations and, perhaps, open the horizon to a public and modest site for the application of theory: contemporary collegiate student life.
PS: If you are interested in Bourdieu, consider reading “The Forms of Capital” or “Practical Reason”