SOCIOLOGIES OF ARTISTIC EMANCIPATION
Institutional configurations of critique in Bourdieu and Boltanski
MASTER’S THESIS Hannah Lindo 6081509
Cover image : Thomas Hirschhorn, Flamme Eternelle (Palais de Tokyo, 2014)
Table of Contents
1. The historicity of the aesthetic disposition in Bourdieu; a few key concepts ... 5
Introduction ... 5
The roots of Bourdieu’s framework ... 5
Habitus and Field ... 7
Cultural capital, symbolic capital, dominant and dominated poles ... 8
Conclusion ... 9
2. The origins of art for art’s sake ... 11
Introduction ... 11
The analysis of the work of art ... 11
The birth of the literary field as a realm of practice asserting its own logic in 19th century France 12 “Morphological changes” and arts of living ... 14
Conclusion ... 19
3. BOLTANSKI’S CONCEPTION OF CRITIQUE: A RETURN TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONS ... 21
Introduction ... 21 On Critique ... 23 Critical sociology versus pragmatic sociology ... 23 The institution ... 26 The fragility of institutions and the occurrence of critique ... 28 Tests ... 31 Conclusion ... 32
4. THE ROLE OF CRITIQUE IN THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM AND THE APPROPRIATION OF ARTISTIC ATTITUDES ... 34 INTRODUCTION ... 34 The multiple faces of capitalism ... 35 The incompatibility of the artistic and social critique ... 37 Conclusion ... 39 5. GENERAL CONCLUSION ... 40 BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 44
General introduction
The crisis and crises of art, criticism and even art criticism have been discussed in artistic, academic, and public circles so extensively that they have become a near cliché. It is often argued that artistic criticism has run out of ways to meaningfully alter either itself or reality, whether this is due to the protuberances of neoliberalism, the digital revolution, the fading away of mental and social categories, or a combination of any of the above.
This is not a thesis about art; it merely seeks to explore art as a possible breeding ground for critique and change. To be more precise, I will attempt to draw a comparison between Bourdieu’s theory of the art field and Boltanski’s conception critique and institutions, in relation to his diagnosis of the role of artistic critique in the evolution of capitalism over the last decades. Not only have these authors worked very closely together – Boltanski eventually devoted a large portion of his career to developing an alternative to elements of Bourdieu’s methods and theories that he grew to reject. Most importantly, both of their texts are regarded amongst the most important works of the relationship of artistic practice to economy. My aim is to arrive at an understanding of which author offers the most useful account of the rudimentary conditions of possibility of radical artistic practice, understood as critique.
This piece is divided in two rough parts; while the first two chapters focus on Bourdieu, specifically The Rules of Art, the latter two chapters, mostly concern Boltanski. Through the second two chapters, however, I will also include points of comparison between the two authors. To make for a solid starting position, the first chapter will be dedicated to Bourdieu’s most important theoretical concepts, namely habitus, field, and capital. I will then proceed to an explanation of the significance of actualized and potential positions within fields. Subsequently, in chapter two, I will follow Bourdieu in an application of the terms mentioned above to the emergence of the artistic field in 19th century France by discussing Flaubert and
Rimbaud as revolutionaries. Thereafter, in the third chapter, Boltanski will enter the picture with a concept of a new institutional configuration that takes into account more contemporary developments; I will first discuss his criticism of the paradigm of critical sociology, of which Bourdieu was a major figure. From there, I will assess the conception of critique that Boltanski offers as a counterbid. Finally, Boltanski’s take on the current relation of critique to capitalism and of art to economy will be discussed.
1. The historicity of the aesthetic disposition in Bourdieu; a few key
concepts
Introduction
“What the ahistorical analysis of the work of art and of aesthetic experience really describes is an institution
which, as such, enjoys a kind of twofold existence, in things and in minds. In things, it exists in the form of an artistic field, a relatively autonomous social universe which is the result of a slow process of emergence. In minds, it exists in the form of dispositions which invent themselves through the very movement of self-invention of the field to which they are adjusted. When things and dispositions are directly in accord with each other, meaning when the eye is the product of the field to which it relates, then everything appears to be immediately endowed with meaning and value1.”
What do we talk about when we talk about aesthetics? In discourse about the value and function of art, one is generally inclined to assume Kant’s proposition, derived from the first Moment of the first book of his Critique of Judgment, that art is necessarily the object of disinterested appreciation. This approach to the work of art as being devoid of interest against which Bourdieu agitated, he thus writes in the presented quote’, ignores the conditions of possibility of art perception that are far from timeless and disinterested. The reason I choose to discuss Bourdieu’s approach to art, rather than other forms of knowledge or social practice, is that said approach uncovers the origin of said “disinterestedness” as a once radical way of life that was the product of very specific social conditions.
Implied as the organic counterpart of the artistic field in the quote above is the habitus. The first section of this chapter will be dedicated to the socio-historical specificity of aesthetic appreciation in relation to Bourdieu’s theoretical frame of reference. Subsequently, I will explain the concepts of habitus and field, as well as their mutual relationship. Finally, I will devote a section to the basic structures of Bourdieu’s art field. The possibility of a reciprocal relation between artistic and social innovation will be discussed more elaborately in chapter 2.
The roots of Bourdieu’s framework
While the works of Pierre Bourdieu have become a staple, and are often considered to be among the most important books in sociology and cultural philosophy, his oeuvre remains quite difficult to pin down. Although Marx, Weber and the structuralist strand in anthropology have influenced him to a great degree, he departs from these sources in quite significant ways. To thoroughly
explain what sets him apart from these inspirators would be the material for an entire book, but suffice it to say for now that Bourdieu’s main criticism of these dominant social theories is their lack of recognition for the reciprocal relation of action and social reality2;the social realm is
neither a set of rigid structures in the creation of which individuals have no part, neither is it the sum of individual experiences, thoughts and actions. This opposition, which Bourdieu reckons to be “the most fundamental (…) of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science..3”, comes down to
the divide between subjectivist and objectivist approaches. Where the former unfairly places the centre of gravity on the side of individual experience, the latter fails to recognize the relational character of the social world by ignoring the reciprocity of said objective structures and the way actors experience them, by which these structures are also shaped.
This reciprocal mechanism of objective structures and situated experiences and actions is, of course, also applicable to the world of art and cultural goods. Bourdieu deems the analysis of the cultural field so important because “few areas more clearly demonstrate the heuristic efficacy of relational
thinking than that of art and literature4”. His first systematic publication on the structures of culture
production and consumption, from which I extract this quote, is Outline of a sociological theory of art
perception, originally published in French in Revue internationale des sciences sociales in 19685. This essay,
like the entirety of Distinction, is an attack on the social prestige afforded by cultural knowledge and taste in 1960’s France, poignantly summarized in the following quote:
“Thus, the sacralisation of culture and art fulfils a vital function by contributing to the consecration of the social
order: (…) to conceal the social conditions which render possible not only culture as a second nature in which society recognizes human excellence (…) but also the the legitimized dominance of a particular difference of culture.6”
This fragment is exemplary of the culturally pessimistic outlook that Bourdieu is often associated with; art, and all other cultural objects that the middle to higher classes hold so dear, are merely vehicles of justification for the materially privileged position that lovers of culture commonly find themselves in. Social inequality, after all, is difficult to reconcile with the so-called democratic values of the modern West. The privileged classes, the early Bourdieu proffers, thus need a way of making their social distance from the working classes seem legitimate that is not material. This is where middle-class to higher culture and taste comes in; by making art proficiency seem like a matter of excellence, hard work or natural inclination, the accompanying privileged social
2 Bourdieu (1990), 25 3 Ibid.
4 Bourdieu (1993,) 29 6 Bourdieu (1993), 236
position gains the appearance of being earned.
It is thus clear that Bourdieu, at least initially, imputes the world of art with a function of domination. Far from culture simply being an ideology that is deliberately imposed upon the unknowing masses from above, though, the creation of artistic values and the disposition – ordinarily appearing as the result of taste, education or love - that is required for its effective deciphering, mutually dependent and are born and modified in a dialogical manner. This brings us to the two cornerstones of Bourdieu’s sociology: Habitus and field.
Habitus and Field
As discussed, Bourdieu sought to overcome the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity, without overlooking either the objective nature of social relations or the direct role practice has in forming these relations. The relationship between habitus and field is Bourdieu’s key in this endeavour. Far from being two separate entities, habitus and field are intertwined at the base. They are two aspects of the same reciprocal dynamic that is at the heart of Bourdieu’s social theory. Regarding the first of these concepts, Bourdieu posits that it “(...) is acquired and it is also a
possession which may, in certain cases, function as a form of capital7”. Habitus, originally from Latin, has a
twofold meaning; as a noun, it denotes ‘habit’; as a perfect participle, it ought to be translated as something that, in the past tense, was “had”, or “possessed”. In its application, it indeed denotes those behaviours, tastes and opinions that we experience as habitual.
Particularly, though, its verb-like connotation is a sign of the generative accumulation it entails; these dispositions are, for a large part, acquired through participation in as well as exposure to social games and value-systems8. Furthermore, Bourdieu proffers that habitus is the expression of
“that desire to escape from the philosophy of consciousness without annulling the agent in its true role of practical
operator of constructions of the real9”, and that it underpins the renunciation of the “canonical opposition
between theory and practice10”. Individuals thus constitute reality through practice. Practice, moreover,
should not be conceived of as theory’s counterpart or opposite.
Tersely put, as a set of mental structures habitus is the subjective counterpart to the objective reality of social relations in social space. The objective correlate of social life takes the shape of one or more fields in which agents, all endowed with their respective habits, interact with one another in accordance to a set of field-specific rules that police a struggle over universality. The interplay between habitūs and fields – in field-specific games – ultimately constitute the index of
7 Bourdieu (1996), 179 8 Ibid., 214
9 Ibid., 180 10 Ibid, 179
all meaning and value. Such games are reducible to neither pure mental subjectivity nor objectified structures.
The field under investigation in this thesis is the literary field, though the results of the analysis of the position of this field within the field of power, Bourdieu argues, are applicable to the realm of cultural production in general11. The field of power, which encompasses the relations between
individuals and institutions that are the holders of positions in proportion to their possession of the appropriate capital, contains the entire field of cultural production as a semi-autonomous citadel. The interactions within the field of power – be it between individual agents, between individual agents and institutions, or between institutions by way of individual agents – are defined by the exchange of different forms of capital that are weapons in the struggle to gain dominant positions within social space. This exchange discerns between economic and symbolic capital, the latter of which cultural capital pertains to.
Whereas the exchange of economic capital and its social conditions of accumulation is apparent, cultural capital – because it functions symbolically - takes the guise of distinction, literacy, or competence. Although the field of cultural production, as a whole, depends on the field of power and the exchange of economic capital governing the latter, it functions like the economic order upside-down; “those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness12”. The extent to which this
statement holds true at any moment in history is the expression of the field of cultural production’s degree of autonomy13.
Cultural capital, symbolic capital, dominant and dominated poles
In the figure below we can see how the field of cultural production, here in a more or less mature and advanced form, is embedded in the field of power and, as such, in the field of class relations which is social space. Within the spatial distribution of this entire realm of social relations, we can see two different centres of gravity, namely that of high concentrations of economic capital (CE) and high concentrations of cultural capital (CC). The first of these forms of capital is concentrated more heavily on the right side of the diagram, whereas the latter is aggregated on the left. Within the field of cultural production, then, we see two subfields: the subfield of small-scale production and the field of large-scale production. In the first of these subfields the production of cultural goods serves the accumulation of symbolic capital only. In
11 Ibid., 214: “Readers may, throughout this chapter, replace writer with painter, philosopher, scholar, etc...” 12 Ibid., 216
the latter production is tuned to the eventual conversion of symbolic or cultural capital to economic capital. In other words, whereas the subfield of small-scale production is dedicated to the law of art for art’s sake, the subfield of large-scale production submits to economic demands to a great degree. While small-scale production that favours production over distribution has a high degree of autonomy that is payed for in a lack of economic assets, exactly the opposite is true for the field of large-scale production, which
considers distribution of cultural goods as its basic principle14. Every agent or institution of cultural
production is thus positioned somewhere between these two extremes, though neither of the two poles are ever completely met. On both sides one needs to answer to symbolic as well as economic value to some degree. Consequently, the field of cultural production is spread out between a pole that is symbolically dominant but economically dominated, and a pole that is symbolically dominated though economically dominant. The first of
these is sanctioned by a commitment to an economic logic that is anti-economistic; it favours production over distribution, and it does so while submitting to a demand that it has created itself15.
Conclusion
We have now seen how the “Charismatic ideology” of art and culture works in terms of Bourdieu’s two fundamental theoretical concepts, habitus and field. Art fulfils a justificatory role that somewhat defies the laws of economy, power and society. This means that it can indeed – and still does – function as a vehicle of legitimation for those who find themselves in a position of power, because it has the guise of being completely independent, and thus impartial, value system. What it also means, however, is that this seemingly opposite logic of the cultural field can be turned to one’s advantage in constituting a realm of relatively autonomous practice. To arrive at an understanding of the origins of this mechanism, and how the field of cultural production as shown above came into being, we will now return to an investigation into the origins of art for art’s sake in 19th century France. After having thus applied Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to
one of his concrete case studies, we will follow the same order with Boltanski in chapters three
14 Ibid., 142 15 Ibid.
2. The origins of art for art’s sake
IntroductionThe previous chapter was dedicated to explaining the bare theoretical framework that is relevant for our discussion. Where I have already hinted a bit at the possibilities of using the art field’s inverted economic logic for revolutionary or innovative hands, this chapter will be devoted to offering an example of how such a mechanism concretely works. The example at hand is an account of the role that a handful of writers had in the emergence of the literary field in 19th century France. Our aim will be to distil from Bourdieu’s historical analysis of the literary field the conditions of possibility for autonomous art, or intellectual practice.
Key figures – ‘players’, if you will – in this account are Baudelaire and Flaubert. Their work has had, for Bourdieu, great aesthetic as well as social consequences16. The aim of this section will be
to explain the anti-economistic origin and potential of art practice and arts of living. The analysis of the work of art
The statement that “art has as its function not to have a function17” is, like we have discussed, a
disposition that ought to be historicized rather than universalized. Moreover, the normative claim that art ought to be disinterested, and favour form over function is merely a proposition about the status of art perception. Art perception, however, cannot be discussed in isolation from art production; the two ontologically ground each other18. The “science of the production of the work of art19” consequently coincides with the theory of art perception, that is, the historical analysis of
the pure aesthetic. Bourdieu aims to debunk the myth of the creator and the pure gaze by defining artistic acts as necessary position-takings or lacunae to be fulfilled, and at once to show how such an endeavour is not relativistic.
Hence, the notion of the work of art as essentially and transhistorically disinterested is, in fact, the specific product of very specific socio-historical developments and struggles. This “phylogenesis” (production) of the aesthetic disposition and its subsequent ontogenesis (reproduction), are two necessary aspects of the effective analysis of the nature of any mode of
16 He argues in a similar vein in Manet: A Symbolic revolution - the way of representation that Manet, with the other impressionists, introduced still influences our categories of cultural perception today. This work, however, will not be further discussed
17 Bourdieu (1996), 285 18 Ibid., 288
aesthetic experience; only by taking into account these conditions of production and reproduction can the “illusion of universality20” that underlies any “analyses of essence21” be evaded.
Moreover, the analysis of the work of art should not be attempted as a twofold endeavor; the opposition of production and reception is a false one. The state of art production as well as reception have the same history of social relations and mutually ground each other; the birth of art for art’s sake was, at the same time, the birth of the pure gaze of the ‘art lover’22. When
considered in terms of phylogenesis, then, “the pure gaze capable of apprehending the work of art as it
demands to be apprehended (in itself and for itself, as form and not as function) is inseparable from the appearance of producers motivated by a pure artistic intention23”.
The birth of the literary field as a realm of practice asserting its own logic in 19th century France
The modern aesthetic disposition and aura of the artist are, like I said, the product of specific developments and struggles. So specific, in fact, that Bourdieu chooses to explain these developments in relation to merely a handful of key figures. Of these key characters, Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire are the most important, of whom Flaubert is most elaborately discussed. Let us consider the following quote:
“To reconstruct Flaubert’s point of view, that is, the point in the social space from which his vision of the world
was formulated, and that social space itself, is to have a real chance of placing ourselves at the origins of a world whose functioning has become so familiar to us that the regularities and the rules it obeys escape our grasp24”.
Why is this important? What is at stake in being able to grasps these rules and regularities? And why is Flaubert such an exceptional figure in that his work is one of the few examples of works that are truly insightful in this respect? To get a clear picture of those ‘regularities and rules’ of the world in which Flaubert lived, a brief examination on some socio-economic developments in 19th century France is in order. Along with the steep industrialization driven on by the regime of
Napoleon III, a generation of super-wealthy “self-made men” was born that had little ties to the higher classes of yore. As a result, many of these businessmen came from a background that one would have called “uncultered”, proudly rejecting all things intellectual. Instead, they committed themselves to a lifestyle of luxury; money became the sole token of social prestige, in an 20 Bourdieu (1996), 286 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 288 23 Ibid,, 288 24 Ibid., 48
unbridled manner. In addition, a lot of these wealthy businessmen now utilized the novel chance to occupy political positions. It goes without saying that political power once again seemed to become an extension of economic wealth. This all coincided with the granting of material benefits for members of the press, artists and publishers to produce expressions that were accommodating or praiseful towards the status quo. The new disdain for intellectual and artistic depth amongst the powerful meant a sudden devaluation of cultural capital; the world of power and the world of money now exercised very direct control over artistic practice, due to a market that has direct influence courtesy of “the absence of true specific apparatuses of consecration25.” This
meant that men of wealth and those in political power – two categories gaining ever greater affinity – directly steered the nature of the artistic climate through their choices and tastes. One can guess that these tastes did not lean in the favour of poetry, still associated with the sentiment, bohemia, and intellectualism that the industrialists disdained. Poetry thus became severely disadvantaged, while the simple novel – called “feuilleton” – became the most encouraged form of literary expression. Experimentation in literature thus had little terrain. The only body actually mediating between the field of power and the field of literature, was the salon. The salon, on the one hand, granted continuity between the different axes of the field of power by offering networking opportunities amongst artists and between artists and the powerful. On the other hand, it functioned as a stock market for different forms of capital. For those in power, it was an arena to exercise influence over artists and writers to thereby gain cultural prestige and “the power of legitimation26”; artists, in their turn, used the gatherings of the
salons to gain the benevolence of the powerful to get a piece of the financial pie, or to indirectly influence the distribution key of funds rewarded by the government.
The Salon, in other words, was a site of mutual interest; both the powerful and the cultured needed its symbolic or material benefits. It is where the interflow of the field of power and the art field became the most visible. At this intersection of political and cultural capital, there were a few that were caught in the moral or strategic dilemma of falling in between the two poles; they were not quite powerful enough to dabble with politicians, but nevertheless respected by the culturally dominant.
One peculiar feature of the art field in the second half of the nineteenth century, like I have said, is “the absence of true specific apparatuses of consecration27”. As a consequence, political bodies and
25 Ibid., 49 26 Ibid., 51
figures of nobility had a great deal of direct influence in the field.
The generative structures of the early literary field answer to great fundamental oppositions; there’s three ‘camps’, if you will. On the one hand there’s the salons, where writers and other agents assemble that are deemed to be fashionable. Secondly, there are the groups of “great elitist
writers28” like the one surrounding Princess Mathilde and the Magny’s, at some point also
including Flaubert. 29Lastly, there’s the group of agents characterized by bohemia. The structural
domination that took place within this set of opposed sites was, for a large part, an effect of the exclusory power of the salons.
Moreover, the press of the Second Empire was subject to censorship and the imposition of a self-important tone. What were once serious journals became depoliticized, light serials that were “read by everybody, from the common people to the bourgeoisie, from ministerial offices to the court30”. The directors of these papers and serials were regulars at the literary salons31, a
circumstance that leaves no doubt about the way in which literature was colonized by industrial interests through the press32. Writer- journalists increasingly write according to public taste. Since
they also served the role of literary critic, the value systems these journalists adhered became the straitjacket that any literary initiative seeking institutional recognition had to fit into33.
“Morphological changes” and arts of living
The increasing overlap between the industrial realm and the literary field through the development of the press, Bourdieu argues, is one of the factors that gave rise to an
“unprecedented expansion of the market of cultural goods.” This expansion was both cause and effect of a substantial influx of a certain demographic into the margins of the field; a rapidly increasing number of young people with literary aspirations, though without economic capital, were drawn to Paris from the provinces to test their chances at artistic careers. Literary
professions attracted young people because of the prestige surrounding these kind of careers and the fact that there simply were not enough dominant posts in industry or politics to
accommodate the growing number of young people endowed with secondary education. An island within society thus took shape; a significant number of young people could not be
accommodated by the existing economic structures. Among these young people were many who
28 Ibid., 53
29See also Brooks (2017) 30 Ibid.
32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 54
aimed to make a living as an artist, writer or otherwise34.
These “morphological changes35” at the root of the emergence of a relatively autonomous artistic
field went hand in hand with the invention of a new lifestyle, an “art of living36”, that had the
chance to arise because its bearers did not unproblematically fit into any established levels of social stratification. These characters often fit into the category discussed above; not quite powerful enough to be one of the powerful, yet eccentric and culturally dominant enough to gain regard among other artists.
This nascent art of living, meaning the artistic lifestyle of bohemia, is what separated its champions from ordinary workers, though the two groups were akin in terms of lack of material wealth. At the same time, this bohemian art of living was fiercely opposed to the ethos of the bourgeoisie that controlled literary production and reception37. These young artists could thus be
said to bear the mark of a split habitus, which gave their possible social trajectory a measure of indeterminacy, alienated both from the commercially preoccupied bourgeois and the people, constrained by daily labour38. Their existence is influenced by the laws and expectations of
coexisting but contradictory social universes, which loosens the grip of social determination on some of their life choices. The artistic lifestyle, marked by a keenness on transgression in both literary work and daily habits, signalled the apparition of the inverted world that we discussed in chapter I. As mentioned above, bourgeois values permeated the realms of cultural production to an exceptional degree. The institution of the art world as “an empire within an empire39” was fuelled
by an aversion to this omnipresence of bourgeois – and therefore material – interests to a great degree. Apart from being a space to create a new art of living, the newfound realm of social relations that was the birth of the art field comprised of the assertion of a market that resisted, to some degree, the economic force field.
The positing of the opposition of art to money meant the end of the reproduction of the until then prevailing mechanisms of the market of cultural goods. This rupture took place through the repulsion of bourgeois clientele. Opposed to the idealist literature preferred by bourgeois audiences was socialist realism, “just as moral and moralizing40”.
34 Ibid., 55 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 50 38 Ibid., 58 39 Ibid., 59 40 Bourdieu (1996), 72
Flaubert managed, in Sentimental Education, to produce a work that, as a novel, had a truth to it in two ways; first it produced, by way of its structure, an objective effect in the field of literature through its reception; second, it permitted itself in a sociological manner, without literally stating that which a sociological analysis of the text would produce. Consequently, it embodies a structural, scientific wisdom about the context in which it was produced, but through its structural effects rather than literally stating it41; “ If Sentimental Education – necessarily a story of a group whose elements, united by an almost systematic set of combinations, are subjected to an ensemble of forces of attraction or repulsion exercised over them by the field of power – may be read as a history, it is because the structure which organizes the fiction, and which grounds the illusion of reality it produces, is hidden, as in reality, beneath the interactions of people, which are structured by it”. The similarity between the structure of the
social interactions in Sentimental Education, in other words, does not lie in substantial properties of characters, objects, or places, but in the fact that the structures of these literary social relations mimic the structures of a certain social space as an analogy. Additionally, like a true literary work, it “speaks of the most serious things without insisting, unlike science according to Searle, on being taken completely
seriously.”. Likewise, Bourdieu writes in Science of science and reflexivity, that artists do not “tacitly accept the arbitration of the real42”. In other words, Flaubert – and in Sentimental Education, Frédéric – did
not find himself willing or capable to participate in the games that constituted the political, artistic and economic field of the time, and thus resorted to invoking his own Illusio.
The Illusio, or value system, of the field of literary production before authors like Flaubert and Baudelaire transformed it, took shape as the struggle between two dominant poles; that of bourgeois literature propagating a bourgeois morality, and that of realist, supposedly socially aware literature.
Bourgeois idealism and social realism were but two positions within the same logical axis, namely that art ought to step into a direct relation with ethics. Whereas the former, in a more or less romanticist style, embodied literary propaganda for the morals and lifestyle of the bourgeois class, the latter prescribed that art should be a faithful representation of the life of the masses, often decorating the latter with moral superiority. The crux of this realist tendency of social art is that its adherents do not discriminate between the artistic field and the political field43, thereby
making their literary praxis an extension of prevailing praxes in the political field. It is, in other words, arbitrated by the same notion of reality that shapes the field of power. The same can be said about bourgeois art. This representation of the status quo, both literal and structural, is
41 Ibid., 32
42 Bourdieu (2004), 69 43 Bourdieu (1996), 91
precisely that authors like Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to subvert.
The resistance of Flaubert and Baudelaire bore the mark of an indignation to moralistic pretences. The rupture within the bourgeois order – that is, the dominant sphere of the field of power – was thus effected by a rejection of this order as well as its direct opposite. Flaubert and Baudelaire did not simply oppose one social disposition by assimilating to another; they lay bare the common structure of the value systems of both bourgeois and social literature, which was the imperative to “Moralize, Moralize!44”. In producing this double negation, they instituted a
position in the literary field that had no direct precedent in the field of power; they did not situate themselves on the axis of either existing position, but rejected both extremes equally. They acknowledged that bourgeois idealism as well as social realism were merely two different positions in the same hierarchy of values that they rejected altogether. The new nomos of art for art’s sake was, in short, not an already available or logically necessary position waiting to be occupied, but was invented by the unclassifiable social being of agents like the aforementioned writers. Their transgression did not spring from adherence to a concrete ideological cause, but resulted from a longing for transgression itself. They demanded unconditional ethical freedom and instead committed themselves to unconditional dutifulness with regards to their self-legislated laws, the refusal to surrender their art to material or symbolic seduction being the cornerstone. They boldly chose to follow only the rule of their own art in the face of financial and social repercussions to instigate an aesthetic revolution, “with no explicitly planned scheme or
expressly designated leader45” – and not only through literary experimentation, but also through
symbolic gestures. An example of this is Baudelaire’s application to the Académie Française, the supreme bulwark of the classic literature that he so utterly and openly despised. This move shocked his fellow bohémiens just as much as the bigwigs at the Académie, testifying to a symbolic fearlessness on Baudelaire’s part. His application was an anticipation of the outlook that he would not be admitted due to his public animosity towards the Académie and his reputation, and by the same stroke a provocation; Baudelaire, after all, was already quite revered in Avant-Garde circles, whereby the Académie’s imminent rejection would expose their standards of consecration and appreciation as innate, partial and uncritical as they were. Far from being a purely performative gesture, Baudelaire was known to have a preoccupation with his social position; while he looked down upon the Bourgeois tastes that the Académie represented, his application was also an appeal to his presumed right to be taken up into the order of consecration. This ambiguous position, in between the establishment and bohemia, makes
44 Ibid., 65 45 Ibid., 62
Baudelaire the example par excellence of the double-binded character of Salon culture that Bourdieu discusses.46
Positions, dispositions and position-takings
Throughout the book Bourdieu uses three similar-sounding terms that nonetheless have distinct, specific definitions: position(s), disposition(s) and position-taking(s). We will have a look at their respective meaning and their mutual relationships. We have seen that the field is an assemblage of power relations. The positions in a field are the nodes of these relations. These positions are specific, and are “objectively defined by [their] objective relationship with other positions47”. One should
think of categories and genres, or of institutions of reception. They are points of orientation for agents that either enter the field or are already participating in the field. Position-takings, on the other hand, correspond to acts, works, and discourses. They are manifestations or contestations of existing positions. Position-takings are attempts of agents to acquire or displace the capital that is concentrated in objective positions. In a stable field, these position-takings tacitly reproduce the positions that govern them. The struggles of a field are to be defined on the basis of two structures, the first being the relation between positions, the second being the relation between position-takings. The space of possibles, “which acts as a discloser of dispositions”, is wedged between these two structures. So-called aesthetic revolutions are an overturning of the relations within the space of position-takings48. Such transformations happen when acts are committed –
that is, when positions are taken – that already exist negatively in the space of possibles as “structural lacunae49”.
The position that Flaubert thus took up in the emerging literary field was one that he himself created out of a refusal of all pre-existing social roles. This commitment to indifference engendered a double refusal, of which Bourdieu constructed the following formula: “I detest X
(...), but I detest just as much the opposite of X50”. By placing his work at the intersection of realist and
idealist or romanticist literature – by, in other words, embodying through his writing the confrontation of the two most prevalent existing positions in the field - he exacerbates the struggle over values and forms within the field. He grasps the contrast between the two positions, and, by making them collide, asserts this new point of view of his as above and beyond the fields
46 The Rules of Art, 51 47 Ibid., 231
48 Ibid., 234 49 Ibid., 234 50 Ibid., 239
restrictions and limitations. By refusing the patronage of the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and realism’s convergence of the political and artistic field on the other, he postulates art for art’s sake; the given that art is irreducible to any interest, and thus free from the forces of both poles of the field of power. Flaubert thus didn’t take up an already existing position, but made the position of art for art’s sake that was hitherto “a position to be made, devoid of any equivalent in the field
of power and which might not or wasn’t necessarily supposed to exist.51” Such a position-taking is the
resistance of the dominant as well as the dominated pole of the field of power which govern the main modes of thought, thereby asserting at the intersection of both poles an independent point of view that is the beginning of a new, autonomous field. The intrinsic disinterestedness, then, that is often ascribed to art, is a side effect of morphological changes in the structure of society in post-feudal France.
Conclusion
We have seen how radical transformation of artistic praxes, that is, a structural change in the struggle over forms, is rooted in the realization of already potentially existing positions. In the established literary field, all realized positions are located somewhere between to extremes. These two extremes are, on the one hand, small-scale production, and on the other large-scale production. In the field of small-scale production, which is symbolically dominant – I.e. with a high concentration of positions endowed with symbolic capital – but temporally dominated – i.e. corresponding to a dominated position in the field of power – production takes place in accordance with internal demand; that is to say, artists produce for each other.
Though aesthetics as it is commonly understood is but a historically produced, contingent point of view, Bourdieu’s text shows how aesthetics can be the product of subversive, truly innovative practice. That artistic practice can be truly subversive is shown, for example, that Poulet-Malassis, the small publisher Baudelaire sought out in preference to the financially thriving, larger publishing houses of the time, was sentenced to go into exile for publishing Les Fleurs du Mal. It is not exaggerated, then, to think of the literary avant-garde of the time and the tribulations of the smaller publishers that associated with this avant-garde as a “ligne de combat52”.
This account of the quest for artistic autonomy in the 19th century offers, I hope, a case for the
fact that the historical analysis of the art work is far from relativistic but that it can, instead, lay bare the revolutionary roots of certain artistic dispositions and practices. Furthermore, the
51 Ibid., 79
sociological analysis of fields of practice, and the art field in particular, can offer leads “to draw up
a realistic programme for the collective action of intellectuals53”, and offers a case file of how the birth of
new realms of action can mean to “institute [an] anomie54”; in the case of Flaubert and Baudelaire,
the refusal of two opposites on the same axis meant the subversion of a whole system of reality, because when accepted thought is distributed by two virtual opposites, these two opposites tend to contain the structures of the accepted social and cognitive world between them.
53 Ibid., 339 54 Ibid., 51
3. BOLTANSKI’S CONCEPTION OF CRITIQUE: A RETURN TO
THE SOCIOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONS
Introduction
After having explained the application of Bourdieu’s core theoretical concepts to the emergence of the artistic field, we will evaluate Boltanski’s theoretical divergence from Bourdieu. This chapter will focus on the abstract framework linking everyday social practice, critique and domination. Our primary source will be Boltanski’s On Critique. In chapter four we will recount the diagnosis of the state of critique, as well as the role that critique has played in strengthening capitalism, as proffered by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism.
To get a clear picture of the structural differences between these authors, we will discuss Boltanski’s reasons to propose a new sociological paradigm – that is, the “pragmatic sociology of
critique55”- as well as his definition of the institution.
Although Bourdieu was Boltanski’s theoretical predecessor and teacher, he was also his most frequently cited opponent; a significant portion of his work has been devoted to, at least partially, cast off the sociology of domination that flourished at the time of his early academic years. Still at work today at EHESS, Paris, one of his lifelong projects has been to form a theory of critique and justification56 that takes into account the immense economic, social and ideological changes
that characterize the onset of what one usually calls neoliberalism57 - a word that he never uses
himself, but rather denotes as a change in the justification regime of capitalism, which we will discuss in further detail in chapter four. Suffice it to say for now that these remarks serve to clarify Boltanski’s role in the present debate. Bourdieu’s most well-known findings are based, after all, on empirical sociological research that dates from a time and place before the structural changes mentioned above. Does Boltanski’s approach to critique offer a better fit to a society in which class and capital aren’t as clearly distributed as in Bourdieu’s times?
The previous chapter was dedicated to Bourdieu’s account of the emergence of the art field as a relatively autonomous category of meaning as a result of the invention of new arts of living.
55 Boltanski (2011), 33
56 Biographical information on Boltanski is obtained from Simon Susen’s entry on the author in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Susen, Luc Boltanski, 2015)
The Rules of Art, after all, even being one of Bourdieu’s later works, was published in the early nineties; the playing field on which artistic and economic means compete for terrain, to use a Bourdieusian expression, has structurally changed since then. I will approach this change not by immediately diving into contemporary analyses of the current state of the art world, but first by using Boltanski’s view of the place of critique in society to, later on, arrive at an explanation for the difficulty of artistic critique in today’s socio-economic situation. To get a clear picture of the structural differences between these authors, we will discuss Boltanski’s reasons to propose a new sociological paradigm – that is, the “pragmatic sociology of critique58”- as well as his definition of the
institution.
Bourdieu, Boltanski argues, underestimates the ability or potential to develop truly critical practice, which therefore seems limited to a lucky few. This stance seems more compatible with a class society in the original sense; Bourdieu’s more or less straightforwardly Marxist approach to culture, after all, is based on a society that’s stratified in a clear, structural, and “vertical” manner. Similarly, Hardt and Negri developed the notion of the shift from national class inequality into a virtually nondescript “multitude”, dominated by the decentralized set of globalized networks called “Empire”. Because Boltanski employs a more flexible account of social reality and critique, while still stressing the weight of institutions, his pragmatic sociology of critique might be more fit to offer an analysis of the place of art in a world of work and value that might try to have a semblance of being more free, flexible and stimulating, but in fact complicates and neutralizes actual difference and critique. The ideals of flexibility and independence, it is argued59, have since
evolved into an ideological discourse that propagate the idea of life and work as an entrepreneurial project. The conditions of labour and organization – or lack therof – accompanying this jargon, though, are those of precarity. Moreover, the diffusion of the art field calls for a new approach to the philosophy of institutions, the urgency of which has been underscored by, amongst others, Andrea Fraser: “Today, the argument goes, there no longer is an outside (…) But assessments of the institutionalization of institutional critique and charges of its obsolescence in an era of mega -museums and global markets founder on a basic misconception of what institutional critique is, at least in light of the practices that have come to define it.60”
58 Boltanski (2011), 23
59 Apart from Boltanski and Chiapello, see Lazzarato - The Misfortunes of the “Artistic
Critique” and of Cultural Employment
Boltanski’s partial rejection of his former teacher’s heritage comes forward in his distinction between critical sociology and the pragmatic sociology of critique. This will, therefore, be the starting point of this chapter. Subsequently, as Boltanski deems neither of the sociological programmes cited above satisfactory, we will give an account of his alternative, in which critique and the institution are two mutually founding social phenomena. Furthermore, this construction will be explained as the mechanism that allows us to navigate the so-called contradiction between reality, world, and specific points of view. The notions of contradiction and points of view will re-enter the picture several times in this chapter. Thereafter, we will focus on Boltanski’s distinction of different kinds of tests as means of either confirmation or contestation.
On Critique
On Critique is the publication, in six chapters, of the three Adorno Lectures that Boltanski delivered at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt in 2008. The book, Boltanski suggests, still shows the thematic division in three parts. The first part, consisting of the first two chapters, considers different approaches to the relation between sociological theory and critique; it contrasts Bourdieu’s approach, denoted by Boltanski as Critical Sociology, with the programme of the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique. The third and fourth chapter, which make up the second thematic section of the book, are an attempt on Boltanski’s part to formulate a more or less structural theory of how critique emanates from everyday situations. Within this context, he offers a definition of the institution as well as a case for the indispensability of institutions for the navigation of reality. Finally, chapter five and six contain some suggestions on a contemporary critical programme for sociologists vis-à-vis current modes of domination and emancipation. The middle section of the book, consisting of chapters three and four (The power of institutions and The
necessity of critique) will be our point of focus. The contents of the first two chapters will also be of
interest for Boltanski’s own grievances with Bourdieu’s critical sociology, although these matters are also the point of departure in chapter three. I will thus begin this consideration of Boltanski’s conception of critique with a discussion of the opposition between Critical sociology and Pragmatic sociology as summarized in the beginning of The Power of Institutions, with some diversions to chapters one and two.
Critical sociology versus pragmatic sociology
In On Critique, Boltanski thus denotes the schism of modern sociology as the division in two approaches to the phenomenon of critique. The first, critical sociology, takes on an exterior approach to domination and the actors subjected to it, and seeks to arm these actors, from without, by academically mined resources to understand and partially subvert their own
domination. Boltanski files the works of Bourdieu under this programme61.
Boltanski has abandoned Critical sociology for three reasons. First, its definition of domination is “at once too powerful and too vague in character62”: by understanding social reality in terms of hierarchies
and power relations, Boltanski seems to say, is to subject the definition of true domination to inflation. By making situations that Bourdieu deems instances of symbolic violence the extension of physical violence, one ignores the experience of the actors in question, who, Boltanski argues, do not see themselves as oppressed or victimized in the former case. In other words, critical sociology of dominations projects a too all-encompassing definition of domination on the majority of social relations, thereby shifting focus away from forms of violence, physical or social, that are actually experienced by the actors involved as such63. Second, the critical capacities of
ordinary actors are supposedly met with too little faith; actors are allegedly believed by the critical sociologists to be nitwits that blindly believe any ideology that is fed to them. Structures and dispositions are thereby endowed with too much importance, while specific situations and the actors that shape them are ignored. Finally, through this gap between ordinary actors and sociologists, the scientific power of sociology becomes overestimated; they are fully trusted by affiliates of the critical programme to effectively and truthfully analyse the very social structures from which they were born. This leads to “the intensification of the difference between sociological science
and ordinary knowledge64”. The Critical Sociology of Bourdieu, Boltanski seems to argue, assumes
that societal mechanisms and ideological configurations are external phenomena that can only be comprehended by a lucky few, as if they were god-like, monolithic beings that were here before we were. It is this asymmetry65 - between the intellectual and the actor – and supposedly reified
notion of social relations that Boltanski sought to do away with.
The sociological programme that was developed in response is that of pragmatism. It signalled, Boltanski said, a move towards descriptive rather than normative aspirations66 by focussing on
the interpretations of everyday situations by actors themselves. Rather than endowing the researcher with the privilege of an exterior standpoint from which ordinary actors are to be enlightened about their own social situation, the ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ assumes that
61Boltanski (2011), 18 62Ibid., 20 63 Ibid. 64Ibid., 21 65 Duvoux (2012) 66 Boltanski (20011), 23
actors already have their own critical capacities, and starts out from there by making these capacities explicit67.
The project of critique, therefore, was not to be abandoned by the pragmatic programme; the goal was simply to reverse the hierarchy of the argument, by giving a new, perhaps more democratic impulse to critique by “returning to things themselves” of social reality. The structuralist premise was put aside in favour of an attitude akin to phenomenology. In a study of the phenomenon of critique, this meant to choose as object of analysis the form of critique in its most elementary, everyday appearance; in disputes between ordinary actors. These ordinary critical capacities, Boltanski admits, should not be overestimated. This is not due to some lack of awareness or know-how of the actors, or to the fact that they are immersed in a situation that outside experts could allegedly more adequately analyse. The issue with fervently pragmatic approaches68 to disputes and critique is that too much of the question of the resolution of
disputes is left to the black box of “common sense”. Where pragmatists, Boltanski argues, rightfully underscore the uncertainty rather than the determination of social reality, they fail to draw the apt conclusions from this “radical uncertainty”, and are instead satisfied with the cure-all of the common sense of actors69, paired with the presumed omnipresent desire to cooperate; the
latter notion is present in sociological texts as early as those of Goffman70 and Mauss71 This
emphasis on the absolving powers of the common sense have been, in Boltanski’s words, “an
obstacle to the sociology of critical operations72”, because it stops where the investigation should carry on
and works as a neutralizer of critical impulses.
So, Boltanski argues, although pragmatism is right to emphasize the critical capacities of actors in everyday situations, instead of suggesting that situations tend to resolve themselves naturally, we should give due attention to “the significance of the disagreement, dispute and, with it, uncertainty which
constantly threaten the course of social life73”. In other words, the “primitive phenomenon” to be
studied in sociological approaches to the emergence of critique shouldn’t be agreement, but uncertainty.
67Ibid., 50
68 Boltanski here has in mind the notion of cooperation in works as early as Erving Goffman and Marcel Mauss 69 Ibid., 54
70 e.g. The Presentation of Self in Everyday life 71 e.g. The Gift, 1925
72 Boltanski (2011), 55 73 Boltanski (2011), 56
We have seen that critical sociology deems domination a too all-encompassing phenomenon, leading to a lack of concise definition. However, some pragmatic sociologists, while right in underlining the uncertainty and fragility of social reality, mistakenly count on the alleged ability and willingness of people to abridge this uncertainty for the sake of social bonds. Consequently, Boltanski deems neither of the sociological programmes apt in their approach of social reality and actors’ relation to it; while the first – critical sociology – features domination too prominently and renders ordinary individuals too helpless, the second – pragmatic sociology – is too nonchalant in this aspect by deeming individuals and small communities capable of overcoming the residue of uncertainty that haunts reality.
Boltanski, above all, emphasizes the threat that this “possibility of a radical uncertainty” poses to the structures of social life. He considers the metacritical approach that he champions to be an improvement of the Bourdieusian critical sociology for underlining the specificity and fragility of empirical and social positions, instead of their embeddedness. Whereas Bourdieu allegedly regards social reality, fixed by an interplay of habitūs and fields, as a rigid sediment, Boltanski argues for a more ephemeral conception of the social in which the notion of uncertainty should be the starting point of any investigation into critique and emancipation. Radical uncertainty is a necessary problem of all communication, deliberation and action because every human being, in the end, can only really convey an account of the specific point of view that they are confined to. Because agreement and collective action, two elements without which society could not exist, need an overarching set of common principles, individuals need external semantic bodies to refer to that are not confined to specific points of view like human beings. These bodies, in other words, need to be bodiless; these bodiless beings are what we call, Boltanski argues, institutions. This is obviously not a novel premise; the institution serves as one of the most fundamental concepts of sociological concepts, although it is rarely adequately defined. I will first recount Boltanski’s definition of the institution. Subsequently, I will go over the different registers of action that Boltanski distinguishes, in each of which the relationship between order and critique attains different degrees of stability or fragility.
The institution
We have seen that Boltanski is satisfied with neither of the sociological programmes cited in On Critique. This is because neither of the cited sociological programmes offer a satisfactory framework to conduct the required ‘sociology of institutions”. According to Boltanski, the critical programme recognizes the pervasiveness of institutions in social life, while mainly attributing to
them the function of domination; “The conjunction between, on the one hand, recognizing the ubiquity of
institutions and the central role they play in the unfolding of social life in the spirit of Durkheim and, on the other – contrary to Durkheim – regarding them predominantly as instruments of domination, contributes to an indefinite extension of the diagnosis of domination.74” In other words, Boltanski argues, to equate the instituted
with the social, while only properly taking the trouble to describe it with regards to its effects of domination, gives the institution a too infinite and all-encompassing power since “it is because there
are institutions everywhere that there is domination everywhere75”.
Boltanski has, in his turn, attracted criticism from some of his peers; his emphasis on the critical capacities of all actors seems a bit voluntaristic, at least in principle76. Though this is something I
wholeheartedly concur with; while I follow his analysis of uncertainty as an elementary phenomenon from a descriptive point of view, as a starting point this view seems to be lacking programmatic political potential. In On Critique, however, Boltanski develops a theory of the institution that is essential to critical operations because, while not relying on outdated objectivist or structuralist views, provides a convincing explanation for collaboration, order and critique other than ‘common sense’ or the “horror of a social vacuum77”.
While the original pragmatic programme barely gives the institution any attention at all, Boltanski argues, it provides us with useful tools because it emphasizes the uncertainty and fragility of social reality rather than its impermeability and structural rigidity. Since the pragmatic programme largely ignores institutions, however, the task of overcoming and managing this uncertainty is put upon individuals. This is where the pragmatic programme fails in Boltanski’s eyes; it fails to see the power of uncertainty, and the impossibility to overcome it by purely individual efforts. In other words, while critical sociology deems ordinary individuals too helpless, pragmatic sociology underestimates the constraints of the institution. In this sense, where critical sociology is too fatalistic with regards to critical potential of individuals, pragmatic sociology endows actors with the tools to overcome uncertainty too easily. This is largely due to the fact that pragmatic sociology does not dwell on the definition of the institution. To truly grasp the power of institutions, then, Boltanski attempts to formulate his own definition.
74 Boltanski (2011) 52 75 Ibid.
76 E.g. Wuggenig (2008) and Honneth (2010) 77 Boltanski (2011), 54
Boltanski’s theory of the institution is, in part, motivated by the lack of emphasis that the notion of uncertainty is granted by either critical sociology or pragmatic sociology. To wit, the institution is what he considers to be society’s coping mechanism regarding this uncertainty. The institution is what enables the semantic background of social arrangements and utterances to be coherent; it mediates order. As a consequence, the institution is also a key phenomenon to investigate while studying order’s opposite, critique78: “To pose the question of the very possibility of critique”, he writes,
“assumes recognizing that social activity is not and doubtless cannot be constantly critical79”. In other words,
to research the conditions of X contains the implication that X can be isolated from an environment that it emerges from, and that X is not always the case. To understand the environment in which critique appears, Boltanski argues, “we must return to the sociology of institutions80”, because the institution seems to be the entity that enables this environment, or
“background81”, to seem as solid as it does.
The fragility of institutions and the occurrence of critique
To arrive at a more convincing explanation for the suppression of radical uncertainty than “common sense82”, then, we should investigate the things that have the authority to surmount
the strictly specific points of view that individual humans are confined to. Agreements between individuals are made possible, Boltanski argues, by transferring the authority of establishing the “whatness of what is” – that is, universal definitions that make deliberation and the convergence of different points of view possible – to beings that are not confined to a corporeal existence83.
These bodiless beings are Boltanski’s understanding of the institution84. The institution,
understood in this way, bears the power of conferring value and meaning upon “non-existent85”
or abstract beings with no material presence, but also of giving material objects a universally respected abstract meaning or value86.
To account for the significance of this power, we will take a step back to explain Boltanski’s distinction between reality and world. As I said in the introduction to this chapter, in Boltanski’s account (social) reality is a lot more fragile than in that of his predecessor. This is not to say that he trivializes reality – as in, “socially constructed” – in the way that his more formally pragmatic 78 Boltanski (2011), 57 79 Ibid., 51 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 54 83 Ibid., 74 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 75 86 Ibid., 79
