Bourdieu, Language and Media Studies

As noted in the introduction to this book, there have been few book-length studies of how Bourdieu’s ideas might be applied to the media, and none which looks specifically at language and the media. In fact, it is only relatively recently that Bourdieu’s ideas have been elaborated in studies dedicated to the media, many of these taking for granted that the brief statement of his position on journalism (Bourdieu 1998) is the natural starting point to apply his ideas. The following pages argue that the nature of symbolic power in language hardly gets a mention in these studies of the media. Essentially, these studies displace questions of language and the symbolic with Bourdieu’s idea of the media as a ‘field’, as a space of positions which has to be mapped as a pattern of internal relations. So Bourdieu’s understanding of the particularly symbolic nature of symbolic power becomes lost as the distinctive textual nature of media practices becomes subordinated to a focus on institutional aspects of the media, the loci of high or low positions (‘repositories’) of symbolic power at various points of the field. By following the idea of the field alone these studies lapse into a type of sociological formalism, more descriptive than analytical, of the nature of social relations within the boundaries of the media field. Without accounting for language or the symbolic, genre and more generally discursive factors, we cannot give a full account of the media field.