Bourdieu and Hip Hop

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Kevin D. Haggerty wrote:

> I have been following this discussion about Hip Hop for a while now and
> have been intrigued with attempts to dismiss it for being unrefined, etc.,
> or being inherently (naturally?) inferior to jazz and other forms of music.
> 
> This has lead me to wonder how relevant it might be to introduce some
> Bourdieu at this point? While not a clear inheritor of the FS mantle, his
> work seems to bear some relevance to the squabbles that have been taking
> place on the list. Perhaps we should be talking about a "musical field" in
> the way that Bourdieu talks about "artistic" and other fields. 

Excellent point. Bourdieu is one of the great dialecticians working in
sociology today, though he doesn't get the intellectual air-time 
he deserves. In 1975 Bourdieu's path-breaking "Distinctions" basically
picked up where Sartre and post-structuralism left off, by recombining the
notion of the existential project (a.k.a. the international political
commitment) and the post-struc ideologies of the post-national sign-system
(a.k.a. the global media commodity) into the "habitus", or a coherent
ecology of consumption, production, and distribution in which a specific
class fraction (or competing fractions) could be located. This does not
mean the class fraction in question is identical with the habitus, only
that the substance of what that class thinks, argues, desires, fetishizes, 
and dreams about are concrete realities, which need to be thought through
and analyzed in their own right. Bourdieu's concept of the field, on the
other hand, is something like the localized or micrological case study,
wherein the objective clash of one habitus with another can be registered.
I'm oversimplifying a bit, but basically the field and habitus relate to
one another much like the global market-niche and the multinational branch
of the consumer-culture in question (e.g. the marketplace for 
car stereos vs. the automotive culture). A whole branch of hip hop, 
for example, plays largely on the development of 
the car stereo (so-called "jeep music") in amplifying bass
lines and transmitting technically impeccable sounds at incredibly high
volumes; other variants of hip hop rely on the aural compression of the
hypermobile Walkman, which tends to wash out middle-range acoustics and
replace these with a flat, tinny "electronic" sound. This plays merry
hell with Mozart's flute rondos, but gives Public Enemy's sampled guitar
riffs in "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" (their second and
best album) an uncanny urgency and wondrous aesthetic beauty.

Another excellent example would be the culture of the Cold War: research
engineers employed by Lockheed or the Soviet Ministry of Rocket Forces 
existed in the same technocratic habitus, argued over technical
solutions for missile guidance systems, and shared many of the same
ideological fixations, commonalities which ultimately overruled the
significant differences in the local field in question (this is why I like
to argue Bill Clinton is America's Gorbachev: the failed reformer
attempting to save the Empire from itself).

Some of this was anticipated by Adorno and the Frankfurt Lefties; in fact,
towards the end of his life Adorno increasingly turned towards
radical sociology (e.g. sterling essays like "Late Capitalism or
Industrial Society", where he shows that each concept makes sense only in
the overarching context of a total system, wherein the old East-West
differences mattered not a damn). Bourdieu represents a maturation and
extension of the same fundamentally multinational, leftwing, Marxist and
utopian stance, but adds some important innovations in aesthetics and
culture-theory (hopefully, other folks can comment here... anyone want to
take on Bourdieu's "The Rules of Art"?).

One final example: think of the listserv as a new kind of cultural field,
as against that larger chaotic habitus of informatic guerillas, Silicon
rentiers, modem-besotted libertarians, quantum-phase programmers, and
ordinary consumers a.k.a. the electronicized global proletariat, all being
swept up into an exponentially expanding Information Culture. This gives
rise, of course, to all manner of contradictions and the most
violent antagonisms -- efforts to censor the Net, or more typically, 
to fill a new form with an archaic content, as people invent new forms
of culture to deal with new conditions. All this generates in turn run new
forms of discourse (e.g. that faithful friend of Internet civility, the
"delete message" button) and, ultimately, new forms of solidarity (e.g.
union b-boards, cyberpicketing, and the whole messy, drawn-out business 
of divesting the global bourgeoisie of their roughly $45 trillion of net
planetary assets). Imagine the impossible: a people's occupation of Wall
Street!

-- Dennis