Supplement distinction revisited introduction to an east german reading (Pierre Bourdieu)

Supplement. Distinction Revisited: Introduction to an East German Reading
Pierre Bourdieu; Gisele Sapiro; Brian McHale
Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces. (Winter, 1991), pp. 639-641.
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Sun Jan 27 05:46:16 2008


Supplement. Distinction Revisited:
Introduction to an
East German Reading
Pierre Bourdieu

In order to verify whether the model proposed in Di,stinctioncan be
applied to the case of the D.D.R., it is necessary to investigate what
principles of differentiation are characteristic of this society (which

amounts to admitting, contrary to the myth of the "classless society,"
i.e., of a society without differences, that such principles d o indeed
exist, as the protest movements currently active [October 19891 in the
country conspicuously attest); or, to put it more simply, to determine
whether in the case of the D.D.R. one rediscovers all (and only) the
same principles of differentiation, bearing the same relative weights,
as those encountered in the French case. Right at the outset one sees
that among the major differences between the two spaces and the
respective principles of differentiation defining them is the fact that
economic capital-private possession of the means of production-is
officially (and, for the most part, in actual fact) out of bounds in the
D.D.R. (even if, as we shall see, a form of access to the advantages that
are elsewhere furnished by economic capital can be secured in other
ways, i.e., through the medium of a political type of social capital).
'The relative weight of cultural capital (which can be assumed to be
highly valued in the German tradition, as in the French or Japanese)
is proportionally increased.
It goes without saying, however, that, whatever the official meritoThis lecture was delivered at the Academy of Sciences, Berlin, October 26, 1989.
Poetics Today 12:4 (Winter 1991). Copyright 0 1991 by 'The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/9 1/$2.50.


640

Poetics Today 12:4

cratic ideology may want people to believe, not all the differences in
opportunities for appropriating scarce goods and services can reasonably be related to differences in possession of cultural and educational
capital. It is thus necessary to hypothesize another principle of differentiation, another kind of capital, the unequal distribution of which
is the source of the observable differences in patterns of consumption

and life-styles. I am thinking here of the subspecies of social capital which could be called political capital and which guarantees to its
holders a form of private appropriation of goods and public services
(residences, cars, hospitals, schools, and so on). This patrimonialization of collective resources can also be observed when, as in the case
of the Scandinavian countries, a social-democratic "elite" has been in
power for several generations; one then sees how the political type
of social capital, acquired through the apparatus of the trade unions
and the Labour party, is transmitted through networks of family relations, leading to the constitution of true political dynasties which accumulate large quantities of political, educational, and even economic
capital. 'The regimes that are properly called "Soviet" (rather than
Communist) have carried to the limit this tendency toward private appropriation of public goods and services (also evident, although less
intensively so, in French socialism).
When other forms of accumulation are more or less completely controlled, political capital becomes the primordial principle of differentiation, and the members of the political "Nomenklatura" have hardly
any competitors, in that struggle for the dominant principle of domination which takes place in the field of power, other than the holders
of academic capital; indeed, everything leads one to suppose that the
recent changes in Russia and elsewhere have their source in rivalries
between the holders of political capital, of the first and especially the
second generations, and the holders of academic capital, technocrats
and especially researchers or intellectuals, who themselves come partly
from the political "Nomenklatura."
T h e introduction of an index of a specifically political capital of the
Soviet type-an index that would have to be elaborated with some
care, taking into account not only positions in the hierarchy of political
apparatuses (in the first place, that of the Communist party itself), but
also the seniority of each agent and of his lineage among the political
dynasties-would no doubt enable us to construct a representation of
social space capable of accounting for the distribution of powers and
privileges, as well as of life-styles. But, here again, in order to account
for the particularity of the German case, notably, the somewhat grey
and uniform tone of its forms of public sociability, one should take
into account not the Puritan tradition so much as the fact that the
categories capable of furnishing cultural models have been depleted

Bourdieu

. Distinction Revisited

64 1

by emigration and especially by the political and moral control which,
because of the egalitarian pretensions of the regime, is exerted not
only over external expressions of difference but even over the pursuit
of distinction itself.
One could ask, by way of verification, to what extent the model of
social space thus obtained would be able to account, at least roughly,
for the conflicts arising in the D.D.R. today. There is no doubt that, as I
have suggested, the holders of academic capital are undoubtedly those
most inclined to be impatient and to revolt against the privileges of
the holders of political capital, and they are also those best able to turn
against the "Nornenklatura" the very egalitarian or n~eritocratictenets
on which its own claims to legitimacy rest. Among the intellectuals,
there are those who dream of opposing a "real socialism" to the caricature that the apparatchiks have produced and imposed (especially those
apparatchiks who, nonentities outside the apparatus, are prepared to
give their all for an apparatus that has given them all). But one might
well wonder whether the intellectuals who share this dream will succeed in establishing a real and durable alliance with the dominated,
particularly the manual workers, who cannot help but be susceptible
to the "seeing-is-believing" effect of common or garden-variety capitalism, that is, the capitalism of the refrigerator, the washing machine,
and the Volkswagen; or even with the minor State bureaucrats, who
cannot find in the shabby security afforded by a third-rate Welfare
State' (and purchased at the cost of conspicuous deprivations) suflicient grounds for refusing the immediate satisfactions promised by a
liberal economy subject to State intervention and the moderating influence of social movements-even if those satisfactions are fraught

with risks (notably, that of unemployment).

Translated by Gisele Sapiro; edited by Brian McHale.

1. In English in the original