Bourdieu and the sociology of aesthetics. (Pierre Bourdieu)

relations in contemporary France" (47). This description of the book, while certainly not inaccurate, focuses on the social functioning of cultural capital rather than on Bourdieu's attempt to redescribe what aesthetics and taste are, and how that indicates the primary interest of the book for the literary theoretical discussion that will follow.

11 Cheleen Mahar, Richard Harker, Chris Wilkes, "The Basic Theoretical Position," in Harker et al. (note 9), 5.

12 Anthony Giddens, "The Politics of Taste," Partisan Review 53 (1986): 304. Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical project begins--not precisely chronologically, but with an intrinsic logic--as the attempt to formulate a method of sociological and anthropological analysis that mediates between simply reproducing the perceptions of the culture studied and a scientific codification of those perceptions that gives them objective shape, but not a shape that corresponds to anything in the workings of that culture.(1) Driven by the exigencies of that project, Bourdieu has ended up defining a series of concepts and concerns that has recently revivified among literary critics and theorists an interest in the sociology of literature. In particular, most centrally in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, he has offered a powerful explication of "taste," in all its meanings from choices in art through choices in dress, furniture, and the like, to taste in food, both as a unified subject matter and as a method for producing and reproducing power differences among social classes.(2) In Language and Symbolic Power, he has focused the same analysis on the subject of language, claiming that meaning, both linguistic and literary, depends on the same activities of power and social differentiation.(3) And a series of articles on Flaubert in particular and aesthetics in general--which he promises as a next book--has again discussed aesthetics and aestheticism in nineteenth-century France in terms of the same sociological analysis.

All of these works explicitly contest formal theories of culture, of language, of aesthetics, of literature, with an analysis that argues the main force of these discourses as creating and maintaining hierarchies of power and domination. Bourdieu, himself, talks of this analysis as fundamentally transgressive, remarking in the English language preface to Distinction that, "although the book transgresses one of the fundamental taboos of the intellectual world, in relating intellectual products and producers to their social conditions of existence--and also, no doubt, because it does so--it cannot entirely ignore or defy the laws of academic or intellectual propriety which condemn as barbarous any attempt to treat culture, that present incarnation of the sacred, as an object of science" (D. xiii). This claim to transgress is fairly absurd. Bourdieu's project is surely now a central one in literary studies. But the claim of his analyses upon our attention is not the novelty of thinking that literature, canon formation, culture and language have some connection to the manifestation of social power, rather the methods he has given for articulating that connection more clearly. Bourdieu, in other words, has said with theoretical detail and precision, something that literary critics have been looking for a way of saying for some time.

In working out the connections among the various aspects of Bourdieu's theories in this essay, I do not really want to dispute this central sociological claim in the service of some reformulated formalism. Rather, I want to look at its dependence upon another aspect of my title, not the sociological analysis of aesthetics, but the kind of sociological analysis that aesthetics produces. Without trying to trump Bourdieu by showing that he reproduces the aesthetics he ostensibly contests, I will argue that at crucial moments, at the moments in which he most pointedly moves from the anthropological to the literary and in which he most clearly leads to the uses literary critics have made of him, he deploys the aesthetics he simultaneously analyzes. This dependence shows not some formalist problem of infinite reflection, but rather that the politics critics want from Bourdieu's analysis of culture can only be fully outlined through an analysis of the sociology that determines the turn to such discourse, an analysis that like Bourdieu's is simultaneously aesthetic and sociological.

Both Bourdieu's argument about how culture works and the mode of analysis he applies to culture and aesthetics to make that argument have their roots in the theory of practice that he opposes to anthropological structuralism. To understand the basis of Bourdieu's cultural concerns, then, we must first understand the goal of that theory. He begins by proposing three modes of knowledge of the social world, which exist in a dialectical relationship with each other. The first form, which he variously calls primary or phenomenological, "sets out to make explicit the truth of primary experience of the social world, i.e. all that is inscribed in the relationship of familiarity with the familiar environment, the unquestioning apprehension of the social world which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of its own possibility" (O, 3). This mode of knowing is the experience that participants of a particular social world have of it. It is neither available to an observer, since he does not know as a participant, nor describable by a participant without his ceasing to experience it as a participant: "One cannot really live the belief associated with profoundly different conditions of existence, that is, with other games and other stakes, still less give others the means of reliving it by the sheer power of discourse" (L, 68). Effectively, this primary knowledge creates the subject for research and discourse, but it has no other relationship to theoretical or anthropological knowledge, either as goal or as method.

The structuralism that Bourdieu spends most of his theory criticizing, he nevertheless sees as providing a necessary beginning to anthropological knowledge: it is "a necessary moment in all research" because of "the break with primary experience and the construction of objective relations which it accomplishes" (O, 72). Structuralism, which Bourdieu also calls objectivism, accomplishes this break by abandoning the impossible task of reproducing primary experience for a description of the connections and relations among the practices it observes without experiencing: "The philosophical glosses which, for a time, surrounded structuralism have neglected and concealed what really constituted its essential novelty--the introduction into the social sciences of the structural method or, more simply, of the relational mode of thought which, by breaking with the substantialist mode of thought, leads one to characterize each element by the relationships which unite it with all others in a system" (L, 4). And Bourdieu never abandons the task of describing relations. His dissatisfaction with structuralism pertains to the status of the relations and structures it posits.