Child – Father to the Man?

Laurent Fleury’s Sociology of Culture and Cultural Practices is “underpinned” by a conviction that runs counter to the consensus of sociology, especially among those influenced by Pierre Bourdieu. Fleury’s conviction is that “there are no simple, univocal links between attitudes developed in childhood and choices, preferences, and practices deployed in adulthood” (xv).

Rather than a process that ends with adolescence or adulthood, “cultural socialization is a continuous, lifelong activity.” He affirms the reality of cultural habitus and admits that socialization during childhood has some impact.” But he insist on the obvious fact that “Adults undergo strong emotional experiences, from religious and ideological conversions to divorce and grief from the death of loved ones. . . . adults change aesthetic outlooks, and try new cultural experiences – from going to a theater to visiting an art exhibit.” Obviously, “these are not determined by their childhood upbringing,” and “once they have felt the shock or surprise of a new cultural experience, they may look for more in new places.” He puts a number to it: “approximately 80 percent of the variance in cultural participation (going to films, theater, bookstores, art galleries, museums, and more) is not explained by race, class, gender, or national/ethnic background” (xviii).

These cultural transformations in adulthood often involve “doubtless temporary spaces of disaffiliation or ‘desocialization’”: “Since emotion suggest dispossession, the fundamental experience of aesthetic emotion can be defined in terms of a paradoxically ‘de-socializing’ process of socialization, or of a ‘socializing’ form of desocialization. Understanding emotion as a mode of knowledge and as a heuristic key to assessing what affects us and what we affect reveals the social connotations of the words the word’s etymological roots: a ‘putting into motion,’ a transformation of identity, a process of re-socialization, the establishment of a new relationship with the self, the world, and one’s own life” (xviii-xix).

The comparative lack of attention to adult “socialization” in sociological literature is linked, Fleury argues, with a lack of attention to the institutional dimensions of culture: “sociologists of culture seem to have forgotten about cultural institutions” (xxi). He points out that “France has a long history of political intervention in the field of culture. Since the Ancien Regime, a centralized state has either aided the cultural cause by setting up the Academies and following a policy of royal sponsorship, or constrained cultural practices by political means, the imposition of censorship, the deployment of a stifling morality, outlawing voluntary associations, and more” (xix). More generally, he writes, “Rather than thinking of cultural policy solely from the viewpoint of the production fo discourses and bodies of doctrine of a central administration, we should attempt to understand the influence of links forged between the cultural institution and the individual making up its public . . . rather than considering cultural practices exclusively from the point of view of the relationship between a given individual and a cultural offer, an attempt should be made to analyze the possible influence of policy decisions and institutions on these practices” (xxxi).

(Photo by Alex Proimos.)