ABSTRACT
What are the contrasting implications of the work of Bourdieu and Foucault for the place of culture within an analytics of power? Is anything to be gained by drawing elements from both to enrich our understanding of the ways in which culture – whose definition I shall postpone for the moment – operates as a part of the mechanisms through which power is exercised? These are the two main questions that guide my discussion in this chapter. While they are difficult enough in themselves, answering them is not made any easier by two silences. The first is that, in contrast to Bourdieu – for whom the concept of culture was a matter of central concern – Foucault has little to say about it. He did, of course, write about aesthetic matters,1 and his account of an ‘aesthetics of existence’ (Foucault, 1989) finds a place for aesthetic practices as a counter to governmental power.2 But there is no extended discussion of the concept of culture in his work which places the couplet knowledge/power, rather than that of culture/power, at the centre of attention. The second silence is that while – as associates and, occasionally, political allies – Bourdieu and Foucault did not discuss each other’s work publicly when they were both alive, Bourdieu commented on Foucault’s work, sometimes quite extensively, after Foucault’s death in 1984. We do, then, know what Bourdieu took to be the shortcomings of Foucault’s work, but do not know where Foucault might have taken Bourdieu to task. While usefully drawing attention to this discrepancy, Stefan Callewaert (2006) compounds its effects in siding unequivocally with Bourdieu by pigeon-holing Foucault among the philosophers whose dominance of the French academic field Bourdieu contested in the name of the empirical social sciences.3
