The individual “point of view”

The individual’s relationship to the wider space of “society” and “culture” remains problematic. While at an abstract level the individual/social dichotomy is an old issue in social science of limited contemporary interest (methodological individualism being generally unacceptable outside the narrow confines of rational choice theory), at the level of explaining specific actions it remains important. It was Robert Merton who highlighted the tension between socially and culturally transmitted aspirations and the actual opportunities that a society holds out for its members (Merton, 1938): such tensions may be even more acute when the disarticulation between official “values” (the culture espoused by society’s apparent “centres”) and many individuals’ perspectives on values and justice is as great as it is now in the war-states of USA and Britain. Such tensions between the individual and the general point of view have been important, if not always resolved, in cultural studies, as Carolyn Steedman (1986) among others has shown. ¹ That is a good enough reason to pay close attention to Pierre Bourdieu’s attempt in his late work to connect the “space of [individual] points of view” to his wider sociology; for, even if Bourdieu’s own view of cultural studies seemed unhelpfully dismissive (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999), there are significant parallels between his work and cultural studies’ concern with the individual voice, parallels based in the emphasis that Bourdieu, unlike other major sociologists of the late 20th century, gave to the symbolic dimensions of power and inequality.