Reading literature/culture: a translation of "Reading as a Cultural Practice"

Style, Winter, 2002 by Todd W. Reeser, Steven D. Spalding

In September 1983, Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier concluded an interdisciplinary conference in the Provencal town of Saint-Maximin with a discussion on the practice of reading. The conversation between the two men was published with essays from the conference under the title Pratiques de la lecture (Practices of Reading) in 1985, edited by Chartier. In their stimulating dialogue published as "La Lecture: Une Pratique culturelle" ("Reading as a Cultural Practice"), Bourdieu and Chartier synthesize and comment on many of the themes presented by other scholars at the conference. Their commentary on reading as a cultural practice should be of particular interest to scholars and students of French intellectual culture and of literary and cultural studies. Those interested in the development of Bourdieu's thought will find that his comments form a useful introduction to his ideas on cultural production. The exchange between the two French thinkers is presented here for the first time in English.

Long before his death in January 2002, Pierre Bourdieu had joined the prestigious ranks of France's most celebrated scholars and intellectuals. The sociologist had taken his place among an impressive list of contemporaries-- including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault--in the tradition of French intellectuals. Bourdieu's extensive and wide-ranging body of research has been of tremendous impact in a number of academic disciplines in France and abroad as well as in other more mainstream realms of French society--what Bourdieu influentially theorized as "fields." His influence in America stems from the success of certain of his books, especially Distinction and The Rules of Art. In France, Bourdieu's reputation dates back much further, originating in his work on Algeria and the French education system in the sixties, and it bore much more radical connotations than it did in America. This is in large part due to his association with the intellectual effervescence of the sixties and to the correspondence betwee n his key themes--education, culture, Marxist critique--and those of May '68. In addition to the reach of his most well-known books, Bourdieu's influence spread further through his prestigious university posts (including the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the College de France) and esteemed publishing outlets. From his editorship of the collection "Le Sens Commun" for Editions de Minuit and the series "Raisons d'Agir" for Editions du Seuil to his direction of the journals Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales and Liber, Bourdieu brought about an impressive lineage of scholarship and research dedicated to examining the production of culture through the various lenses of history, sociology, and anthropology.

Roger Chartier's historical research shares a number of commonalities with that of Bourdieu. A generation younger than Bourdieu, Chartier has made himself known in academic circles for a more traditional historical brand of research, one that nonetheless recalls Bourdieu's style of sociology. He has written extensively on early modern France and Europe in investigations of print culture, education, and the changing meaning of authorship. The social nature of writing, reading, and literary production is a constant theme in Chartier's work, and his influence has been most directly felt in the development of book history (e.g., Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, and The Order of Books). In some ways similar to New Historicism, book history examines the conditions and constraints of writing and publishing as well as their relationships with cultural institutions in the production and circulation of meanings.

The central idea of the dialogue can be summed up by Chartier's statement that "reading [...] can never be reduced to what is read" (672). The discussion between the two men proposes ways in which, in Bourdieu's words, "[r]eading obeys the same laws as other cultural practices" (667). Reading and interpreting the words on the page are only one aspect of the "practice" of reading. As Bourdieu states here, "there is a great deal of prejudicial knowledge that is not transmitted by reading but nonetheless informs it" (674). Part of the two men's goal in this discussion is to reflect on the forms such "prejudicial knowledge" can take. Bourdieu points out, for instance, that a reading of a given text is often mediated by other texts: Descartes' interpretation of scholasticism is informed by the specific shape of given texts, such as the philosophical handbooks in circulation at his time (674). This "prejudicial knowledge" also pertains to readers' perceptions of "the right reading," their predispositions to accept a certain interpretation, and the production of a primordial "need to read." This approach to reading implies the presence of the habitus, one of Bourdieu's most well known concepts. The principle of the habitus emphasizes that the individual is inscribed upon, both corporally and non-corporally, by social, intellectual, and cultural means. As a result, these social inscriptions--including cultural practices, or what people do--appear natural and thus beyond resistance. In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu explains the habitus as: