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Social practice, then, rather than being reduced to the status of a code
to be deciphered, as structuralism would have it, was to be understood
by analogy to a work of art, a work of art, moreover, described
in the most apparently classically Kantian of terms. The capacity to
‘please (or displease) without concepts’, like the quality of ineffability
attributed to practice here, recalled nothing so much as the classic
Kantian definition of the aesthetic object. The absolute centrality to
Bourdieu’s sociology of this notion of practice as aesthetic, as an ‘art’,
‘something ineffable’, is highlighted by the fact that the above passage
is reproduced verbatim not only in Bourdieu’s final work of Kabyle
anthropology, The Logic of Practice, but also in Distinction (D, 80;
LP, 34). The importance of this analogy between ‘practice’ and ‘art’
therefore appears indisputable. Indeed, Jonathan Loesberg has argued
Pierre Bourdieu’s Forgotten Aesthetic 85
that Bourdieu’s concepts of both habitus and practice are structured
analogously to the Kantian aesthetic object.6
As Loesberg points out, in the Preface to The Logic of Practice,
Bourdieu describes Kabyle practices in unmistakably aesthetic terms.
Such practices manifest the ‘coherence without apparent intention
and the unity without an immediately visible unifying principle of all
the cultural realities that are informed by a quasi-natural logic’. As
such, Bourdieu suggests, they possess ‘the ‘‘eternal charm of Greek
art’’ that Marx refers to’ (LP, 13). Moreover, in the main body of
the text, Bourdieu’s descriptions of Kabyle practice are replete with
allusions to aesthetic forms, most notably to poetry and music. His
analysis of the ‘mythopoetry’ of the Kabyle house, of the social and
symbolic connotations of hearth and threshold, stable and sleeping
quarters, is greatly indebted to Gaston Bachelard’s earlier study of
the poetics of domestic space, The Poetics of Space.7 The final chapter
of The Logic of Practice extends the insights of the analysis of the
Kabyle house to an account of the mythico-ritual structure of Kabyle
society as a whole. It takes its title, ‘Le Démon de l’analogie’ (the
demon of analogy) in the original French, from a prose poem of the
same name by Stéphane Mallarmé. Where Mallarmé’s poem explores
the relationship between masculine and feminine principles, whilst
suggesting analogies between the ineffability of the poetic and musical
languages, Bourdieu’s analysis describes a social and affective space
overdetermined by gendered hierarchies which themselves have an
ineffable quality, being incorporated into Kabyle agents below the
level of representation, ‘on the hither side of words and discourse’.
The metaphors Bourdieu uses here are not merely poetic but also
musical, his analysis replete with allusions to ‘orchestra conductors’,
‘improvisation’, ‘virtuosity’, and ‘non-written musical scores’.8
Given that Kabylia is defined by Bourdieu as a pre-capitalist society,
it might be tempting to assume that the ‘eternal charm’ he finds in
Kabyle practices rests on a form of nostalgia. For Marx, of course,
the ‘eternal charm’ of Greek art reflects its ability to offer a glimpse
of a society and of a mode of material and artistic production now
lost; Greek art’s eternal charm is thus ‘inseparably linked with the
fact that the immature social conditions which gave rise, and which
alone could give rise, to this art cannot recur’.9 The nostalgia implicit
in Marx’s formulation might suggest that Bourdieu too is drawing a
straightforward distinction between the aesthetic or poetic richness of
‘traditional’ Kabyle society and the degraded rationality of advanced
Western capitalism. However, any such straightforward opposition
86 Paragraph
would appear to be belied by Bourdieu’s study of the contemporary
French housing market, Les Structures sociales de l’économie. For here
Bourdieu returns to his analysis of the Kabyle house, arguing that
advertisements for new houses mobilize ‘poetic effects’ which func-
tion analogously to the mythopoetry of the Kabyle social universe.10
Further, in Pascalian Meditations, he maintains that the play of ‘conno-
tations and harmonics’ characteristic of the ‘practical logic’ at the
core of the Kabyle mythico-ritual system is reproduced in analo-
gous form in the discourse of neo-liberalism, ‘when, for example,
we put into play vague sets of imprecise metaphors and approxi-
mate concepts — liberalism, liberation, liberalization, flexibility, free
enterprise, deregulation etc.’.11 The efficacy of neo-liberal discourse,
therefore, is not reducible to its purely rational force of persuasion.
Rather, the play of assonance and alliteration between terms such as
‘liberalism’ and ‘liberation’ combine with the connotation of ‘liberty’
contained in both terms to lend neo-liberal discourse an efficacy that
relates as much to the domain of emotion and poetic imagination as to
that of rational argument. In an earlier essay in Language and Symbolic
Power, Bourdieu had located an analogous play of assonance, alliter-
ation, and connotation at work in Heidegger’s philosophy and politics,
in the relations the latter sought to establish between such apparently
linked notions as ‘Sorge’ (care), ‘Sorgfalt’ (carefulness), ‘Fürsorge’ (solic-
itude) and ‘Sozialfürsorge’ (social welfare). The associations Heidegger
posited between such terms were located ‘in the sensory form [la forme
sensible] of the language’ itself, Bourdieu argued; hence that language
staged an appeal at the aesthetic or poetic, rather than strictly rational,
level.12 Ideological discourses, whether neo-liberalism or Heideg-
gerian philosophy, thus mobilize the material, aesthetic nature of
language to make their tenets not simply believed or assented to, at the
level of rational consciousness, but also, and more importantly, felt. As
Bourdieu puts it, the ‘association by alliteration or by assonance, which
establishes quasi-material relations of resemblance of form and of
sound, can also produce formally necessary associations likely to bring
to light a hidden relation between the signifieds or, more probably, to
bring it into existence solely by virtue of the play on forms’ (LSP, 141).
Bourdieu’s recourse to poetic and aesthetic categories in his theory
of practice represents his attempt to capture the essence of what he
terms ‘symbolic’ forms of domination and violence, that is to say forms
of domination resting on the imposition of arbitrary social hierarchies
and conventions, an imposition achieved neither through outright
coercion nor freely given consent. If such conventions are adhered to,
Pierre Bourdieu’s Forgotten Aesthetic 87
he argues, it is because they operate at the level of ‘practice’, engaging
a series of embodied, affective, and somatic investments and it is, of
course, precisely this somatic level of experience to which the term
‘aesthetics’, in its etymological sense, refers. In The Logic of Practice,
Bourdieu identifies traditional Kabyle society, a society lacking any of
the juridical or coercive apparatuses of the modern State, as ‘the site
par excellence of symbolic violence’. Yet, as the examples of both Les
Structures sociales de l’économie and Pascalian Meditations demonstrate, he
believes symbolic violence or domination to be playing an equally
important role in advanced capitalist societies. Bourdieu’s reliance on
a certain notion of the aesthetic to elucidate the logic of practice
and the workings of symbolic domination might be read as simply
contradictory, as striking evidence of his need to rely on a concept of
the aesthetic he elsewhere dismisses as so much bourgeois bad faith.
However, without ruling out any such conclusion, it might be argued
that a more fruitful line of enquiry would be to examine what both
the theoretical bases and possible political implications of such an
aestheticized reading of social practice might be. This is particularly
the case given the frequency with which Bourdieu claims his own
theory of practice and symbolic domination to be both distinct from
and superior to existing Marxist or marxisant theories of ideology.
A first indication as to the theoretical basis for the analogies Bour-
dieu draws between the aesthetic and social practice is provided by his
reference to Husserl’s notion of the ‘impartial spectator’ in the opening
paragraph of Outline of a Theory of Practice. For this reference reveals
the extent to which Bourdieu’s critique of structural anthropology,
as of ‘objectivism’ more generally, and his consequent emphasis on
the ‘practical’, the ‘immediate’, embodied, or ‘doxic’ roots of social
action are indebted to the phenomenological tradition. As Bourdieu
acknowledges in Pascalian Meditations, his attempt ‘to break with the
scholastic vision’ involves, as one ‘indispensable’ step, an element of
‘phenomenological description’, although the insights of phenome-
nology must then be historicized, re-read in sociological terms (PM,
146–7). Terry Eagleton has pointed out that if aesthetics is understood
in its etymological sense to refer to the realm of the somatic and the
perceptual, Husserlian phenomenology involves an inherently aesthetic
project, since it seeks ‘to rescue the life-world from its troubling opacity
to reason, thereby renewing an Occidental rationality which has cut
alarmingly adrift from its somatic, perceptual roots’.13 It is clear that in
his critique of ‘the scholastic vision’, as in his elaboration of a theory of
practice, Bourdieu is pursuing a similar aesthetic project.
88 Paragraph
However, Husserl’s phenomenology is not merely aesthetic in the
sense of staging a return to the somatic roots of human experience;
it also shows close similarities to Kant’s more specialized definition of
the aesthetic in his Critique of Judgement. As Merleau-Ponty points out
in Phenomenology of Perception, if phenomenology rejects the transcen-
dental idealism of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for its ‘intellectualism’,
the phenomenological account of ‘intentionality’ does nonetheless have
much in common with the Critique of Judgement. For in Kant’s Third
Critique Merleau-Ponty finds a model of perception and practice that
relies neither on the disembodied categories of the understanding nor
on a deliberative model of rational judgement or cognition:
Here the subject is no longer the universal thinker of a system of objects
rigorously interrelated, the positing power who subjects the manifold to the
law of the understanding, in so far as he is able to put together a world — he
discovers and enjoys his own nature as spontaneously in harmony with the law
of the understanding. But if the subject has a nature, then the hidden art of the
imagination must condition the categorial activity. It is no longer merely the
aesthetic judgement, but knowledge too which rests upon this art, an art which
forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and consciousnesses. Husserl takes up
again the Critique of Judgement when he talks about a teleology of consciousness. It
is not a matter of doubling human consciousness with some absolute consciousness
which would assign to the former its aims, from the outside. It is a question
of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world
which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually
directed — and the world as this pre-objective individual whose imperious unity
decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal. This is why Husserl distinguishes
between intentionality of act, which is that of our judgements and of those
occasions on which we voluntarily take up a position — the only intentionality
discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason — and operative intentionality (fungierende
Intentionalität), or that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of
the world and of our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations, and in
the landscape we see, more clearly than in objective knowledge. . . 14
JEREMY F. LANE
University of Nottingham
NOTES
1 Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, second edition (Basingstoke,
Macmillan, 1993), 38.
2 Jacques Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris, Fayard, 1983), 269.
3 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and
Their Public, translated by C. Beattie and N. Merriman (Cambridge, Polity
98 Paragraph
Press, 1991); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste, translated by R. Nice (London, Routledge, 1984: hereafter D).
4 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by R. Nice (Cambridge,
Polity Press, 1990; hereafter LP), 31.
5 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by R. Nice
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977; hereafter Out), 1.
6 Jonathan Loesberg, ‘Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics’, English
Literary History, 60: 4 (1993), 1033–56; hereafter ‘Bourdieu’.
7 This debt is acknowledged in an earlier study: Pierre Bourdieu and Abdel-
malek Sayad, Le Déracinement: la crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie
(Paris, Minuit, 1964), 152, note 1.
8 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Le Démon de l’analogie’ in Le Sens pratique (Paris, Minuit,
1980), 333–439. Lévi-Strauss’s allusions to the poems of Rimbaud, the
novels of Proust, and Western classical music in his anthropological studies are
clearly important precedents for Bourdieu’s evocations of poetry and music.
In insisting on the ‘improvised’, ‘non-written musical scores’ orchestrating
Kabyle practice, however, Bourdieu is attempting to distance himself from
what he sees as the formal closure of Lévi-Strauss’s accounts of agency.
9 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by S.
W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1970), 217.
10 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Structures sociales de l’économie (Paris, Seuil, 2000), 38.
11 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, translated by R. Nice (Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2000; hereafter PM), 57, translation modified.
12 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, translated by G. Raymond
and M. Adamson (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; hereafter LSP), 140,
translation modified.
13 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990), 17;
hereafter ‘The Ideology’.
14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by C. Smith
(London, Routledge, 1962), xix–xx, translation modified.
15 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of
Logic, translated by J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1973), 80–6.
16 See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors:
French Students and their Relation to Culture, translated by R. Nice (Chicago,
Chicago University Press, 1979).
17 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Questions de politique’, Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales, no. 16 (1977), 55–89 (74); hereafter ‘QdP’.
18 Bourdieu’s turn to the work of Pascal, notably in Pascalian Meditations, should
be understood as part of this attempt to find a model for submission to the
status quo based on habit, custom and affect rather than rational choice or
action. There is insufficient space here to examine the implications of this turn
to Pascal or how it might differ from Louis Althusser’s invocation of Pascal
Pierre Bourdieu’s Forgotten Aesthetic 99
in his essay on ideology (see Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’, in Essays on Ideology, translated
by Grahame Lock and Ben Brewster (London, Verso, 1984), 1–60). For an
analysis of Pascal, inflected by a reading of Bourdieu, see Michael Moriarty,
‘Pascal’s Critique of Experience’, in Early Modern French Thought: the Age of
Suspicion (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 100–50.
19 Pierre Bourdieu, Si le monde social m’est supportable, c’est parce que je peux
m’indigner, entretien avec Antoine Spire (La Tour d’Aigues, Editions de
l’aube, 2002; hereafter SLMS), 53.
20 Significantly, Bourdieu compares the research interviews transcribed in The
Weight of the World to a series of Socratic dialogues; see The Weight of the
World, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by P. Fergusson (Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2000), 627.
21 Bourdieu argues that such delegation, if regrettable, is inevitable in the essay
‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’ (see LSP, 203–19).
22 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Université: les rois sont nus’, Le Nouvel Observateur
(2–8 November 1984), 86–90, reprinted in Pierre Bourdieu, Interventions
1961–2001: science sociale et action politique, textes choisis et présentés par F.
Poupeau et T. Discepolo (Marseille, Agone, 2002), 189–98 (197).