Pierre Bourdieu Quotes

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.

~ Pierre Bourdieu

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.

~ Pierre Bourdieu

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

~ Pierre Bourdieu

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

~ Pierre Bourdieu

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.

~ Pierre Bourdieu

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

~ Pierre Bourdieu

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

~ Pierre Bourdieu

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.

~ Pierre Bourdieu