Bourdieu, Pierre, Et Al. 1991. New Capital. Japanese Reading of State Nobility
Bourdieu, Pierre, Et Al. 1991. New Capital. Japanese Reading of State Nobility
Bourdieu, Pierre, Et Al. 1991. New Capital. Japanese Reading of State Nobility
Second Lecture. The New Capital: Introduction to a Japanese Reading of State Nobility
Author(s): Pierre Bourdieu, Gisele Sapiro and Brian McHale
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter, 1991), pp.
643-653
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772707 .
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strategies. Families invest all the more in school education (in transmission time, in help of all kinds, and in some cases, as today in Japan,
in money, as witness the juku and the yobi-ko3)as their cultural capital
is more important and as the relative weight of their cultural capital compared with their economic capital is greater-and also as the
other reproduction strategies (especially successional strategies, which
aim at the direct transmission of economic capital) are less effective or
relatively less profitable (as has been the case in Japan since the Second World War and, to a lesser degree, in France). This model, which
may seem very abstract, allows us to understand the growing interest
that families and especially privileged families, including the families
of intellectuals, teachers, or members of liberal professions, have in
education in all advanced countries and, no doubt, in Japan more than
anywhere else. It also allows us to understand how the highest school
institutions, those which give access to the highest social positions,
come more and more completely to be monopolized by the children of
privileged categories, which is as true in Japan and the United States
as it is in France. More broadly, this model constitutes one of the most
powerful means for understanding not only how advanced societies
perpetuate themselves, but also how they change under the effect of
the specific contradictions of the scholastic mode of reproduction.
For an overview of the functioning of the scholastic mechanism of
reproduction, one might evoke, by way of a first approximation, the
image that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell used in explaining how
the Second Law of Thermodynamics could be suspended. Maxwell
imagined a demon who sorts the moving particles passing before him,
some of these being warmer, therefore faster moving, others cooler,
therefore slower moving; the demon sends the fastest particles into
one container, the temperature of which thus continually rises, and
the slowest into another container, the temperature of which thus continually falls. He thereby maintains difference, order, which would
otherwise tend to be annihilated. The educational system acts like
Maxwell's demon: at the cost of the energy which is necessary for
carrying out the sorting operation, it maintains the preexisting order,
that is, the gap between pupils endowed with disparate quantitiesor with different kinds-of cultural capital. More precisely, by a succession of selection operations, the system separates the holders of
inherited cultural capital from those who are deprived of it. Differences of aptitude being inseparable from social differences according
to inherited capital, the system tends to maintain preexisting social
differences.
3. Two private schools especially dedicated to intensive preparation for the major
competitive examinations.
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essarily stem from reason, and the titles which sanction their results
present certificatesof social competence, titles of nobility, as guarantees of technical competence. In all advanced societies, in France, the
United States, or Japan, social success depends very strictly on an
initial act of appointment(the assigning of a name, usually the name
of an educational institution, Todai University or Harvard University
or Ecole Polytechnique) which consecrates scholastically a preexisting
social difference. The presentation of certificates, often the occasion
for solemn ceremonies, is quite comparable with the dubbing of a
knight. The conspicuously (all too conspicuously) technical function
of formation, transmission of a technical competence and selection
of the most technically competent, conceals a social function, that is,
the consecration of the statutory bearers of social competence, of the
right to rule. We thus have, in Japan as well as in France, a hereditary scholastic nobility (the nisei, or second generation, as it is called
in Japan) of leaders of industry, prestigious doctors, higher civil servants, and even political leaders, and this scholastic nobility includes
an important segment of the heirs of the old bloodline nobility who
have converted their noble titles into academic titles.
Thus, the school institution, once thought capable of introducing
a form of meritocracy by granting to individual aptitudes privileges
rivaling the hereditary kind, actually tends to establish, through the
hidden linkage between scholastic aptitude and cultural heritage, a
true State nobility, the authority and legitimacy of which are guaranteed by academic qualification. A review of the history suffices to
reveal that the reign of this specific nobility, aligned with the State, is
the result of a long process: State nobility, in France and no doubt in
Japan as well, is a body which, created in the course of the State's creation, had indeed to create the State in order to create itself as holder
of a legitimate monopoly on State power. State nobility is the inheritor
of what is called in France "noblesse de robe" (i.e., nobility recruited
from the legal profession and to be distinguished from the "noblesse
d'epee" with which, nevertheless, it increasingly allied itself through
marriage in the course of time) in that it owes its status to cultural
capital, essentially of ajuridical type. I cannot rehearse here the whole
historical analysis sketched in the last chapter of my book, based on
the works of historians of education, historians of the State, and historians of ideas. This analysis could serve as the basis for a systematic
comparison between this process and the one (which I believe to be
quite similar, despite all the apparent differences) that led the samurai, one segment of whom had already in the course of the seventeenth
century been transformed into a literate bureaucracy, to promote, in
the second half of the nineteenth century, a modern State based on
a body of bureaucrats in whom noble origin and a strong scholastic
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In other words, the "particles" which pass before the demon carry
in them, that is, in their habitus, the law of their direction and of
their movement, the principle of their "vocation" which directs them
towards a specific school, university, or discipline. I have made a
lengthy analysis of how the relative weight of economic and cultural
capital (what I call the structure of capital) in the capital of teenagers
(or of their families) is retranslated into a system of preferences which
induce the latter either to privilege art against money, cultural things
against the business of power, and so on, or the opposite; how this
structure of capital, through the system of preferences it produces,
motivates them to direct themselves, in their educational and social
choices, toward one or the other pole of the field of power, the intellectual pole or the business pole, and to adopt the corresponding practices and opinions. (Thus one can understand what, because we are
so used to it, seems so self-evident, i.e., that the students of the "Ecole
Normale," the future professors or intellectuals, tend more to present
themselves as left-wing, read intellectual revues, frequent the theater
and the movies, and tend not to engage in sports, whereas HEC students tend more to present themselves as right-wing, do practice sport
intensively, and so on.)
Likewise, in place of the demon of the metaphor, there are many
"demons," among them the thousands of professors who apply to the
students categories of perception and appreciation which are structured according to the same principles. (I cannot develop here the
analysis I have made of the categories of professorial understanding,
the paired adjectives such as "bright/dull," in terms of which the master judges the productions of the students and all their manners, their
ways of being and doing.) In other words, the action of the educational
system results from the more or less orchestrated actions of thousands
of small Maxwell demons who, by their well-ordered choices according to the objective order (the structuring structures are, let me repeat,
structured structures), tend to reproduce this order without either
knowing they are doing so or wanting to do so.
But the demon metaphor is dangerous, again, because it favors the
conspiratorial fantasy which so often haunts critical thinking, that is,
the idea of a malevolent will which is responsible for everything that
occurs in the social world, for better and especially for worse. What we
are justified in describing as a mechanism,in the interests of making a
point, is sometimes experienced as a kind of infernal engine, as though
agents were no more than tragic cogs in a machine that is exterior
and superior to them all. The reason for this is that each agent is
somehow constrained, in order to exist, to participate in a game which
requires of him great efforts and great sacrifices. And I think that,
in fact, the social order guaranteed in part by the scholastic mode of
reproduction today subjects even those who profit from it to a de-
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Reference
Elias, Norbert
1983 [1975] The Court Society, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell).