Pierre Bourdieu

“Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.”

“Such competence is not necessarily acquired by means of the 'scholastic' labours in which some 'cinephiles' or 'jazz-freaks' indulge. Most often it results from the unintentional learning made possible by a disposition acquired through domestic or scholastic inculcation of legitimate culture. This transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and evaluative schemes that are available for general application, inclines its owner towards other cultural experiences and enables him to perceive, classify and memorize them differently. . . . In identifying what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are aided by their whole social group and by the whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name.”

“Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.”

“I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.”

“The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.”

“Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.”

“The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.”

“I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.”

“The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.”

“Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.”

“Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician.”

“Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.”

“The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.”

“The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences.”