SOURCE: Dunn, Allen. “Who Needs a Sociology of the Aesthetic? Freedom and Value in Pierre Bourdieu's Rules of Art.” Boundary 2 25, no. 1 (spring 1998): 87-110.

[In the following essay, Dunn investigates a contradiction in Bourdieu's theory about the role of art in society.]

Sociology and art do not make good bedfellows. That's the fault of art and artists, who are allergic to everything that offends the idea they have of themselves: the universe of art is a universe of belief, belief in gifts, in the uniqueness of the uncreated creator, and the intrusion of the sociologist, who seeks to understand, explain, account for what he finds, is a source of scandal.

—Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question

Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of art is a rough affair. Through the conceptual violence of what he terms a “double rupture” (RA [The Rules of Art], 77), he has attempted to show that both the producers and the consumers of art are driven by an unremitting struggle for social distinction, a struggle he finds all the more scandalous because it is masked by doctrines of aesthetic disinterest. The intensity of Bourdieu's attack on aesthetic theory and the enormous body of work that this attack has generated over his long and distinguished career have led some critics to suppose that Bourdieu intends nothing less than the destruction of the aesthetic itself, for it is difficult to imagine just what might be left of art when the work of sociological demystification is done. Yet, Bourdieu has denied that he rejects the aesthetic. In his most recent book, The Rules of Art, he claims that his science of the aesthetic will actually provide a substitute for the more conventional aesthetic pleasures that it destroys. He argues that “scientific analysis of the social conditions of the production and reception of a work of art, far from reducing it or destroying it, in fact intensifies the literary experience” (RA, xix). Rather than admiring the work of art as a manifestation of freedom and creativity, the consumer who is informed by this science of sociology will learn to take pleasure in discovering the “generative principle” that “makes the work of art necessary” (RA, xix). Bourdieu's science entails a twofold revision of conventional aesthetics. First, it challenges conventional notions of aesthetic agency on the grounds that such notions mystify artistic production by crediting artists with the powers of creativity or genius. Bourdieu insists that artists themselves are created by the social conditions in which they live and that the ideology of creativity serves only to mask the forces of social determination. Second, Bourdieu attacks the assumption that aesthetic values identify any real or substantial qualities in works of art themselves. He claims that such values are the purely arbitrary means by which hierarchies are established within the aesthetic field. Like changes in the lengths of women's skirts or in the width of lapels on men's jackets, differences in aesthetic value serve only to confer social distinctions; they have no positive content in and of themselves. Thus, Bourdieu's revisionary program calls for the systematic inversion of the Kantian aesthetic that he so adamantly opposes. It will teach us to take pleasure in art that is radically self-interested rather than disinterested, that reveals the forces of social determination rather than freedom, and that, above all, is mistaken in its value claims and unaware of the conditions of its own production.

The contrast between the positions of Kant and Bourdieu could hardly be more stark, just as the choice between them could hardly be less inviting. We would have to suspect Bourdieu of either cynicism or sadism if he were simply insisting that art offers us the choice of either remaining deluded ourselves or learning to take pleasure in exposing the delusions of others. Certainly, one cannot blame sociology for revealing the unpleasant truth, but one should question the claim that such truth is a proper source of aesthetic enjoyment. Bourdieu's project escapes cynicism precisely to the extent that it assumes that sociology has a more noble purpose than allowing certain informed individuals to enjoy their knowledge of the various ways in which others are trapped by forces beyond their control and understanding. This more noble purpose, as Bourdieu himself often avers, is to increase, however modestly, human freedom.

If increasing the realm of human freedom is one of the goals of Bourdieu's sociology, freedom itself also provides the norm by which he judges the justice of social practice. Thus, he sees the necessity imposed by various forms of social determination as a manifest evil. In an interview, he admits: “I personally suffer when I see somebody trapped by necessity, whether it be the necessity of the poor or that of the rich” (IRS [An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology], 200). Yet, if the spectacle of determinism is so painful in everyday social interactions, why should it be less painful in the field of art, and why is art unable to represent in its products or to implement in its practice the freedom that sociology cultivates? In response to the latter question, Bourdieu insists that because art depends on the unconscious mystification of both agency and value, the producers and consumers of art will always be constrained by a social necessity that is beyond their understanding and control. However, I will argue that the very possibility of the freedom that is affirmed in the normative framework of Bourdieu's sociology calls into question his pessimistic assessment of aesthetic agency and value. At the very least, such freedom raises the possibility that an aesthetics of the future, whether scientific or not, might be more than a meditation on a world of constraints and illusions.

In challenging Bourdieu's assumption that art is necessarily barred from exemplifying the freedom to which it aspires, I will also be arguing against his more fundamental assumption that freedom and culture are necessarily antithetical and that freedom usually entails resisting cultural practices rather than participating in them or transforming them. On the one hand, Bourdieu insists that all forms of culture are shaped by social practices that few individuals understand and that none control. He assumes that overriding self-interest will motivate the participants in these various social practices to compete for various types of goods as these are defined by the practices themselves. The model clearly limits, if not eliminates, human freedom and makes further restrictions on the types of values that it is reasonable to take seriously. In most of his analyses of human behavior, for instance, Bourdieu seems systematically to rule out the possibility of altruism as a credible description of human motives. On the other hand, however, Bourdieu reserves the right to be outraged by this self-interested behavior. In his impatience with the vanity of art producers and art consumers, for example, he implies that if these individuals would just reflect more objectively on their baser motives, they could conduct their lives with more decency. This halfhearted Hobbesianism has the double disadvantage of making it seem like an unbearable moral compromise to accept the highly determined and self-interested nature of human conduct but, conversely, of also making it seem like a ridiculously utopian delusion to imagine that human behavior is or could be significantly different.

If Bourdieu's sociology of the aesthetic is scandalous, it is not because it reveals that the producers and consumers of art are self-interested and, beyond that, class interested, nor is it because sociology proves that they are constrained and even shaped by social and historical forces beyond their control. All of these assumptions are acknowledged to varying degrees by most contemporary theories of the aesthetic. Rather, if there is a scandal to be found in Bourdieu's sociology of art, it is in the implication that we can attain freedom only by assuming the position of spectators who witness the spectacle of human misery without being able to intervene, without being able to translate sociological knowledge into social practice. This would certainly disable aesthetic theory, but it would also diminish sociology itself.

THE DILEMMA: BETWEEN DETERMINISM AND REFLEXIVE FREEDOM

The sources of the gap that Bourdieu discovers between the reflective freedom of the sociologist and the iron cage of culture are evident in his account of human agency. This account is contained in his theory of the dialectical relationship between habitus and field. According to Bourdieu, each agent is a habitus, a set of inclinations or dispositions that are acquired when the individual internalizes the logic of the various sets of social practices or fields into which he or she is socialized:

The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.

(LOP [The Logic of Practice] 53)

Because the habitus is created by the internalization of external social structures, it tends to reproduce those objective structures in its actions; by participating in the fields in which it was socialized, it gives objective form to the mental structures that were originally internalized as features of the objective world. As the internalization of the external world, the habitus contains “a system of cognitive and motivating structures” (LOP, 53) that both creates the desire to attain certain goals or goods and provides the cognitive means for doing so.

The forms of motivation and cognition that the habitus internalizes are largely unconscious, however, and this is due to the distinctive logic of the fields themselves. Fields are, above all, sites of struggle: “The structure of the field is a state of the power relations among the agents or institutions engaged in the struggle, or, to put it another way, a state of the distribution of the specific capital which has been accumulated in the course of previous struggles and which orients subsequent strategies” (SIQ [Sociology in Question], 73). Bourdieu claims that fields are universal, that “there are general laws of fields,” and that “we know that in every field we shall find a struggle” (SIQ, 72). In some fields, such as the capitalist economy, this struggle for goods is overt and obvious to all participants, but in cultural fields such as aesthetics, where social prestige or cultural capital is at stake, the struggle is likely to be invisible. To participate in such invisible struggles, the habitus must internalize unconscious motives and strategies. Furthermore, these unconscious motives and strategies must often be at odds with conscious goals. The artist, for instance, may unconsciously struggle to improve his or her position in the aesthetic field but may consciously believe that he or she is motivated by aesthetic goals internal to his or her work, that is, by the desire to excel according to aesthetic standards.

Thus, to participate in the game that structures a particular cultural field, the habitus must believe in the values (what Bourdieu calls the illusio) endorsed in that field. The habitus must accept these values as natural, as a reflection of the way things are, although, Bourdieu assures us, in reality, most such values will be no more than social artifacts that serve to generate cultural distinctions. The desire that motivates the habitus is, for Bourdieu, as artificial as the goals for which it strives; it is a learned response. Insofar as every particular goal that a habitus embraces is a reflection of a more general struggle to improve its place in a field, however, one could say that a generalized desire (whether conscious or unconscious) for a better position is the habitus's most durable disposition.¹

In light of Bourdieu's insistence that the structure of both motivation and cognition is the product of social conditioning, it is not surprising that he must frequently defend himself against the charge that he is a determinist. As he himself observes, because he believes that “dispositions themselves are socially determined,” he might be classified as a “hyperdeterminist” (IRS, 136). Yet, he continues to insist that within the constraints that fields impose, an agent may enjoy a limited and somewhat paradoxical freedom. He describes this “conditional freedom” as “rather like that of the magnetic needle which Leibniz imagined actually enjoyed turning northwards” (OTP [Outline of a Theory of Practice], 76-77). The habitus is like the compass needle because although it may move freely, the goods that it seeks are determined by the field in which it is situated. As Bourdieu phrases it, “the dispositions durably inculcated by objective conditions … engender aspirations” as well as strategies (OTP, 77). Thus, the habitus will take its goals and general orientation from the field in which it finds itself, but despite the “relative closure of the system of dispositions that constitute habitus,” its behavior will not be completely predictable and the field itself is “never completely predetermined” (IRS, 133, 199).

The freedom that the habitus enjoys in following its predetermined inclinations, the freedom of the compass needle, is not identical with the freedom that Bourdieu attributes to the sociologist, however. As I have said, Bourdieu usually characterizes the freedom that sociological analysis makes possible in negative terms: “The true freedom that sociology offers is to give us a small chance of knowing what game we play and of minimizing the ways in which we are manipulated by the forces of the field in which we evolve” (IRS, 198). In an even more succinct summary of this negative freedom, he notes that “in every relationship of the type ‘if X, then Y,’” sociology provides “the freedom that consists in choosing to accept or refuse the ‘if’” (SIQ, 25). Bourdieu assumes that sociology will not facilitate the satisfaction of the desires that are invoked by a particular field but, rather, will encourage resistance to the kinds of manipulation that desire makes possible, and this is precisely the kind of resistance that he recommends in the face of aesthetic temptation. Such resistance is possible only when an agent confronts, and to some extent rejects, the effects of the unconscious conditioning that shape the habitus. He observes that “determinisms operate to their full only by the help of unconsciousness” and that “failing an analysis of such subtle determinations that work themselves out through dispositions, one becomes accessory to the unconsciousness of the action of dispositions, which is itself the accomplice of determinism” (IRS, 136-37).

The difference, then, between the freedom that is deployed by the sociologist and the freedom that is available to the unreflective participant in a particular cultural field is the difference between an ethical freedom, on the one hand, and a purely instrumental freedom, on the other. The sociologist's freedom is sui generis, a freedom that is not linked to the ability to accomplish any particular goal; it is, rather, the freedom to preserve autonomy by resisting manipulation. Instrumental freedom, on the other hand, is realized in an agent's ability to follow the compass needle of desire. If instrumental freedom involves giving in to social conditioning, then ethical freedom is attained through a process of reflection.

Yet, it is not clear how and to what degree Bourdieu's theory allows him to differentiate the sociologist's ethical freedom from the instrumental freedom of the unwitting participant in a particular cultural field. If all human motives are produced by struggles within fields, then it is not apparent which field produced this desire for autonomy, this desire not to be manipulated by fields. Why, in other words, does the sociologist want to avoid manipulation rather than to manipulate others and thus to dominate the field? Is reflection on the true nature of the struggle within the field enough to bring about a spontaneous disavowal of self-interested motives? If it is not, then the sociologist will be more likely to use his or her knowledge to attempt to win than to avoid manipulation.

In light of these questions, it seems that Bourdieu may be making unrealistic assumptions about the ethical consequences of sociological demystification. In fields where the dynamic of domination is fairly well exposed, people are not necessarily less likely to resist manipulation. This is true in the field of fashion, for instance, where people who know perfectly well how the fashion system works continue to attempt to distinguish themselves according to its rules. This means that the choice of whether to attempt to dominate a field or merely to resist manipulation is not simply determined by how well one understands the subconscious logic of the game in question. The freedom an agent wins by acquiring such understanding has value only as a means to possible goods; even the strategy of resisting manipulation has value only insofar as it facilitates other possible projects. If the sociologist's freedom has any content at all, it will entail choices about how to live in the world, and it seems inevitable that such choices will involve cultural commitment as well as resistance.

Of course, if the needs and desires of the habitus are really no more than the products of social conditioning, then it will be difficult to generalize about why freedom is important at all or about why, in some instances, it may be better to resist the power that is at stake in a field rather than to appropriate it. Needs that reflect only the historical contingencies of the fields from which they derive do not provide much of a moral mandate. Yet, Bourdieu does imply the existence of a self with needs that somehow exceed the social conditioning that creates the habitus. This is the self that feels the constraints that the field imposes even when it is dominating the field; this is, for instance, the rich person mentioned by Bourdieu, who, his or her wealth notwithstanding, is trapped by necessity. This plenipotentiary self evaluates fields from a position that does not seem to be located in any particular field. Such a self is invoked in the following passage, where Bourdieu speaks as if some sort of existential need were the prerequisite and not the product of social engagement:

Could rites of institution, whichever they may be, exercise their power … if they were not capable of giving at least the appearance of a meaning, a purpose, to those beings without a purpose who constitute humanity, of giving them the feeling of having a role or, quite simply, some importance, and thus tearing them from the clutches of insignificance? The veritable miracle produced by acts of institution lies undoubtedly in the fact that they manage to make consecrated individuals believe that their existence is justified, that their existence serves some purpose.

(LASP [Language and Symbolic Power] 126)

Bourdieu goes on to argue that it is this existential need for meaning that lures agents into social struggles where, because of the “differential and distinctive nature of symbolic power,” a “distinguished class” of individuals is granted the privilege of “Being” while the rest are condemned to “Nothingness” (LASP, 126). This Sartrean parable encapsulates Bourdieu's predicament of culture: Individuals need social recognition to have any kind of identity at all, yet they can purchase such recognition only by surrendering to the structures of symbolic power that will imprison them. If Bourdieu were to offer any way out of this double bind, it seems it would be to counsel his readers to embrace the Nothingness of reflection over the Being of social recognition. As I will argue, this is the thrust of his warning against aesthetic narcissism.

ACTING OUT: FETISHISM AND AESTHETIC AGENCY

Bourdieu describes aesthetic value as a form of fetishism. As fetishes, he claims, artistic acts and objects are endowed with mysterious powers by the producers and consumers who participate in aesthetic games of collective misrecognition. This illusion is supported by a form of narcissism, by a reciprocal vanity that links producers and consumers in an economy of admiration. By fetishizing the artist's product as a form of creative mastery, the consumer can share in its value, both by identifying with the artist and by making distinguished choices in selecting the objects that he or she, the consumer, consumes. Bourdieu claims that it is the narcissism of producer and consumer that accounts for the resistance that his theory of the aesthetic provokes: “Why, in short, such resistance to analysis,” he asks, “if not because it inflicts upon ‘creators,’ and upon those who seek to identify with them by a ‘creative’ reading, the last and perhaps the worst of those wounds inflicted, according to Freud, upon narcissism, after those going under the names of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself?” (RA, xvii). Similarly, the hermeneutic scholar who “affirms his intelligence and grandeur by his empathic insight into great authors” is, according to Bourdieu, motivated by nothing more than “hermeneutic narcissism” (RA, 303).

This account of the habitus of cultural producers and consumers is not surprising, given Bourdieu's account of the general nature of habitus and field. The vehemence of Bourdieu's diagnosis is somewhat surprising, however, precisely because the aesthetic habitus fits so well with Bourdieu's general account of agency. There is no field that is not organized by the struggle of various habitus for cultural or economic capital, so the self-interest of the aesthetic habitus is certainly not unusual. Characterizing the aesthetic habitus as narcissistic seems, thus, at best redundant and at worst misleading—misleading, that is, to the extent that it implies that the “narcissism” of the habitus is a kind of pathology to be corrected. If sociology inflicts the last and worst of a series of wounds on the structure of the habitus, then we might be encouraged to hope for its eventual extinction.

Bourdieu indicates that such hopes might be premature, however, by the way in which he describes the structure of the sociologist's own habitus. According to Bourdieu, sociological science, like art, sublimates self-interest into more socially acceptable forms, and this allows science to advance by channeling the selfish motives of scientists. In a properly constituted scientific field, he theorizes, it will be impossible for the scientist to sate his or her hunger for distinction without producing good science. “We must work,” Bourdieu claims, “to constitute a Scientific City in which the most unavowable intentions have to sublimate themselves into scientific expression” (IRS, 178). This means that “the most mediocre participant is compelled to behave in accordance with the norms of scientificity” and the “libido dominandi” of personal vanity is “forcibly transmuted into libido sciendi” (IRS, 178).

Bourdieu's willingness to endorse a scientific meritocracy that uses each individual's need for personal distinction to motivate objective science indicates that he feels that vanity itself and the distinction that it produces may be productive if harnessed for the right ends. One can do good science while motivated only by selfish motives, although it is not clear whether the good social scientist who is motivated by the desire to dominate his or her field will be outraged by the struggle for dominance that he or she finds in other fields. Given the fact that he sees a potential social utility in self-interest, it seems that Bourdieu's attack on the narcissism of the aesthetic is not so much an attack on narcissistic self-interest per se as it is an attack on self-interest deployed for the wrong ends. He may be arguing that if social distinctions are to be granted, they should be the real distinctions that science has to offer and not the illusory distinctions of art.

Given this ambiguity, there are at least three possible ways in which one might understand Bourdieu's position on the habitus's quest for distinction. First, one might read his work as a call for a selfless society, a society in which all struggles for distinction are suppressed and the freedom of a reflexive Nothingness is affirmed over the more illusive satisfactions of social recognition. In support of this utopian reading of Bourdieu, one might note that Bourdieu assumes that sociological self-consciousness will generally dampen the habitus's desire to dominate fields. Sociology, thus, might provide a model for the habitus's project of self-overcoming. In a society of sociologically sensitive individuals, individuals might simply get over their need to be recognized. Although, as I have just argued, Bourdieu's own rhetoric sometimes raises this utopian hope, he is explicit in rejecting such a utopian scenario and the so-called radical sociology it implies. He insists that fields are a universal feature of human society and that the freedom they allow is necessarily limited, much more limited than he had once hoped and assumed (see, for example, IRS, 196-200). As a result of these necessary limitations, he tends to speak more of the freedom that sociological reflection can grant individuals than of its liberating effects on social groups. It seems, however, that several American critics who have been influenced by Bourdieu's work are much more optimistic than he is about the possibility of eliminating subjectivity's distorting effects.²

A second way of understanding Bourdieu's perspective on the agency of the habitus is to assume that he views the struggle for distinction as an inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, evil, but as an evil that can sometimes be turned into a partial good as is, in fact, the case in the production of good science. According to this view, the struggle for distinction is harmful because it produces the symbolic violence that is found in social hierarchies; everyone would be better off if it were possible for agents to stop struggling for distinction, but since this is not possible, or possible only to a very limited extent, we can occasionally put the mechanism of struggle to good use. In putting the struggle to good use, we establish limited meritocracies in cases where the good to be derived from the struggle for distinction outweighs the harm done by the inequalities that struggle produces. This, I think, is the best way of making sense of Bourdieu's call for a Scientific City.

Yet a third way of interpreting Bourdieu's attitude toward agency is suggested by his existential account of the way in which agents are lured into social fields with the promise of identity. According to this account, the need for identity and recognition is a “natural” and perhaps even innocent human disposition. Being recognized is, thus, in and of itself a kind of good, but the hierarchy that the struggle for recognition produces is harmful since it perpetuates a symbolic violence. This means that although the struggle for distinction produces oppressive hierarchies, it also produces two types of goods: It can generate objective goods, such as scientific research, and it can help satisfy the habitus's potentially legitimate need for recognition.

According to the second and third interpretations of Bourdieu's position on agency, we can evaluate the habitus's struggle for recognition only by weighing possible good against possible harm, and this implies local rather than categorical judgments; it implies the kind of choice between competing goods with which Bourdieu is uncomfortable. The fact that struggles for distinctions tend to perpetuate class hierarchies is a reason to discourage struggles within fields but not always the only criteria for judging if they are worthwhile. From what I can tell, the second interpretation comes closest to Bourdieu's attitude toward agency, although I think that the third position is most defensible. Categorically dismissing the need for recognition as an evil that at best can be made provisionally useful seems unrealistic given Bourdieu's own assumptions about the habitus and, to that extent, unnecessarily harsh. (Of course, were it not for Bourdieu's skepticism about such things, we might imagine a form of recognition that employed strategies of cooperation to offset the effects of competition.)

To embrace position three, however, would be to accept the possibility that there might be legitimate reasons to value human performance above and beyond its objective utility. From this perspective, it would not matter if aesthetic performance is evaluated by arbitrary rules, since arbitrary rules can measure various objectifiable potentials and talents in human performance. Bourdieu's own persistent use of the game metaphor to describe fields of struggle implies that a revelation of the arbitrary nature of rules that govern aesthetic performance will not necessarily destroy the value that people find in aesthetic virtuosity. The rules of most sporting contests are widely recognized as arbitrary, for example, but that does not impair the spectator's enjoyment or make the qualities revealed in athletic performance seem less objective. The value of an athletic contest cannot be reduced to the intrinsic value of the activity involved. I may be impressed with the courage and determination of a track star without necessarily assuming that running is intrinsically good. Similarly, I may admire the virtuosity of a singer while recognizing the arbitrary nature of the twelve-tone system in which he or she performs. Furthermore, an audience's awareness of all of the social forces that have shaped, constrained, and made possible this kind of virtuosity does not dispel the impression of mastery. Despite our awareness that the virtuoso is a creator who has been created, the performance in some way exceeds the sum of all those social determinations.

This kind of admiration of artistic mastery is precisely what Bourdieu finds most problematic in the aesthetic, however, since it leads the consumer of art to impute a kind of ineffable good to the producer of art in order to share narcissistically in the artist's power. As I have already mentioned, Bourdieu believes that “what is called ‘creation’ is the encounter between a socially constituted habitus and a particular position that is already instituted or possible in the division of the labour of cultural production” (SIQ, 141). “The principle of the effectiveness of acts of consecration [of art] resides in the field,” and hence, Bourdieu claims, “nothing would be more futile than to search for the origin of ‘creative’ power … anywhere else than in this space of play” (RA, 169). To break the spell that the illusion of artistic mastery casts over the aesthetic field, the sociologist must “substitute the often rather melancholic joys of the necessitating vision for the perverse pleasures (always ambivalent and often alternating) of celebration and denigration” (RA, 272-73). Rather than admiring or disapproving of a particular cultural performance, the sociologist is content to contemplate the social forces that made it necessary.

If the consumer of art still needs some criterion of value, Bourdieu concedes that it might be found in the notion of work itself. In The Rules of Art, he observes of Gustave Flaubert:

Maybe there is here, for those who want it, a rather indisputable criterion of value for all artistic production and, more generally, for intellectual production: to wit, the investment in a work which is measurable by the cost in effort, in sacrifices of all kinds and, definitively, in time, and which goes hand in hand with the consequent independence from the forces and constraints exercised outside the field, or, worse, within it, such as the seductions of fashion or the pressures of ethical or logical conformism.

(RA, 85)

Work, unlike creativity or artistic mastery, implies a purely objective measure of value, a measurable quantum of effort, time, and sacrifice. It implies the fulfillment of a pregiven task rather than the creation of something from nothing, and this makes it a much more democratic measure of human effort than creativity: Anyone can work, but only artists can create. If this standard still distinguishes those who do not work from those who do, this is likely to be a less invidious distinction than those imposed by criteria of creativity and originality.

Yet, buried in Bourdieu's praise of Flaubert's work is the claim that the true value of work will be measured in its ability to resist social pressures both within and without the field of endeavor. This independence from social constraints is certainly not guaranteed by the mere expenditure of effort itself. In fact, it would seem to necessitate some kind of originality. One does not spontaneously resist the pressures of ethical or logical conformism. In his discussion of Flaubert, Bourdieu leaves no doubt that he finds the work of Flaubert superior to the work of many other novelists, not because of the quantity of work it represents but because of the superior quality of the work itself as measured by its provisional autonomy within the aesthetic field. Bourdieu would probably claim that he makes this distinction on other than aesthetic criteria, but whether or not this is true, he certainly violates his own strictures against praising or blaming the artist.

Of course, the scientific meritocracy that Bourdieu advocates is predicated on an economy of praise and blame, as are the ethical and political norms of his own sociology. His proscription of the “perversity” of praising and blaming artists is itself a kind of performative contradiction, since it sets up an invidious comparison between those stoic consumers of art who resist evaluation and those narcissists who yield to the temptation to like and dislike works. Indeed, Bourdieu might admit all of this but claim that praising and blaming in science and in morality are based on legitimate distinctions while in aesthetics they are not. This, then, raises the question that is central to Bourdieu's argument: What prevents aesthetic distinctions from being reformed to reflect the legitimate distinctions found in other fields? What prevents art from demystifying and knowing itself?

BECAUSE HE NOTHING AFFIRMS: VALUE AND NEGATION

To turn from Bourdieu's theoretical treatments of the sociology of the aesthetic to his application of his theory in his analysis of Flaubert's life and work is to face a dizzying array of apparent contradictions. Despite his announced break with the illusio of art and the values that this illusio entails, Bourdieu's analysis leaves the literary canon in place and even seems to endorse its rigorous distinctions between major and minor writers. It does this not just by acknowledging the historical fact that some authors have exercised a much greater influence on the literary field than others but also by its apparent endorsement of the justice of the judgments that have created this differential of artistic influence. Despite his attack on the ideology of creation, for instance, Bourdieu does not hesitate to rhapsodize about the heroic inventiveness that propelled Flaubert into literary prominence, and because of this reverence for the author, there is little in Bourdieu's reading of Flaubert that is likely to scandalize the conventional literary historian. Furthermore, despite his attack on the way in which literary critics attempt to validate their work with claims of originality, he insists that he is revealing a structure that “has eluded the most attentive interpreters” (RA, 3). Whether these apparent contradictions are apparent rather than real depends on whether Bourdieu's sociology allows him to revalue the familiar distinctions that he finds in conventional aesthetics.

Bourdieu's approach here is a conspicuous departure from the tone—if not from the central ideas—found in Distinction, where he calls for a vulgar criticism, a barbarian assault on the fetishism of art: “It is barbarism to ask what culture is for; to allow the hypothesis that culture might be devoid of intrinsic interest, and that interest in culture is not a natural property—but a simple social artifact, a particular form of fetishism; to raise the question of the interest of activities which are called disinterested because they offer no intrinsic interest” (D [Distinction], 250). The assumptions behind this attack are fairly straightforward: Aesthetic values lack any objective reality since they are “devoid of intrinsic interest,” but they function as markers of social distinction that allow members of a dominant class to consolidate their power and sense of superiority. Therefore, we should disregard the content of arguments for various schemes of aesthetic value and focus on the effects these arguments have in perpetuating systems of domination. It is important to note that this argument assumes rather than demonstrates the emptiness of aesthetic judgments. As Anthony Giddens points out, it is possible that aesthetic principles could be both objective and even universal and the basis for a system of social domination.³ For instance, aesthetic goods might resemble certain material goods by virtue of the fact that they acquire their power to confer distinction from their power to confer other benefits as well. In any event, it is not clear what standard Bourdieu would have us use to test the substance of aesthetic value claims. His apparent suggestion that if aesthetic qualities do exist, they will be immediately perceptible as “intrinsic” properties of an object seems disingenuous. There are numerous ways in which aesthetic judgments might depend on social conventions without losing their claim to objectivity, as I have argued. In an article critical of Bourdieu, Peter Bürger notes that the trust that makes possible collective participation in modern banking systems creates currency with real but not intrinsic value.⁴ Bürger also notes that Bourdieu's arguments in Distinction overlook the ways in which specific aesthetic values evolve in response to a specific history and to other aesthetic values. According to Bürger, such a pattern of evolution explains the way in which aesthetic judgments can change without necessarily being arbitrary.

Bourdieu's work since Distinction has implemented at least some of Bürger's suggestions, since it has increasingly focused on the sociohistorical forces that Bourdieu thinks shape aesthetic values both from within and without the aesthetic field, and he has placed special emphasis on the way in which exchanges between artists in that field create an internal economy of recognition that grants the field a relative autonomy. Yet, Bourdieu's increasing stress on the autonomy of the aesthetic field has not led him to take the content of aesthetic claims any more seriously. Typically, he describes the relationship between different notions of aesthetic value as the relationship between forces within a force field, so that arguments for cubism, for instance, might be seen as a force vector deployed against the force of impressionism. While at first this might seem like a handy metaphor for describing the rise and fall of various aesthetic programs, it soon becomes clear that it is simultaneously a way of insisting that aesthetic arguments operate primarily at a noncognitive level.

In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu maps the force field of Flaubert's world using the three-part formula that he has developed for all forms of cultural analysis: “First, one must analyse the position of the literary (etc.) field within the field of power. … Second, one must analyse the internal structure of the literary (etc.) field. … And finally, the analysis involves the genesis of the habitus of [its] occupants” (RA, 214). Bourdieu begins, then, with an analysis of Flaubert's habitus as he finds that habitus objectified in The Sentimental Education. The source of Flaubert's greatness, Bourdieu argues, is his ability to reflect critically on the social conditions that have shaped him. At the heart of Flaubert's habitus, Bourdieu discovers the same radical ambivalence that characterizes Frederic, the protagonist of The Sentimental Education. According to Bourdieu, Frederic is “determined to indetermination” (RA, 4). He is “a potential bourgeois and a provisional intellectual” who is “at the centre of a field of forces owing its structure to the opposition between the pole of economic or political power and the pole of intellectual or artistic prestige,” and because these competing forces cancel one another out, he is left in a “zone of social weightlessness” wherein he is unable to commit himself to a particular course of action (RA, 12). By refusing commitment and clinging to a kind of adolescent freedom, Frederic fails to realize any of his possibilities, achieving neither artistic greatness nor middle-class stability.

This is the same pattern that Bourdieu finds in Flaubert's life and in his artistic practice. Flaubert, he argues, tries “to keep himself in that indeterminate position, that neutral place where one can soar above groups and their conflicts” (RA, 26). Yet, by objectifying the failure of Frederic's passive indeterminacy, Flaubert manages to identify himself with “the active indeterminacy of the ‘creator’ he is labouring to create” (RA, 26). This active indeterminacy allows Flaubert to realize in fiction the freedom that Frederic has sought in reality. “There, at least,” Bourdieu quotes Flaubert as remarking, “everything is freedom, in this world of fictions” (RA, 26). In this way, the dispositions Flaubert shares with Frederic are “simultaneously surpassed and conserved” (RA, 27). Bourdieu seems uncertain, however, about what ethical status he should assign to the artist's quest for autonomy. He suggests that the freedom the writer wins by embracing either the active or the passive form of disinterested spectatorship may be nothing more than the artist's protection against his or her own perceived failure; that is, it may be the artist's rejection of a bourgeois world that has already rejected him or her. Yet, if Bourdieu were to extend this logic, he would have to argue that there is ethical significance only in the struggles of those who desire freedom for pure motives, and this is certainly incompatible with his notions of the habitus.

The double negation that allows Flaubert to attain a provisional autonomy by situating himself in a neutral zone between competing social forces is also the means by which he achieves artistic success. In his study of Frederic, Bourdieu claims, Flaubert “delivers the generative formula which is the basis of his own novelistic creation: the double refusal of opposed positions in different social spaces and of the corresponding taking of positions which is at the foundation of an objectifying distance with respect to the social world” (RA, 28-29). As it is applied to the literary world of his time, Bourdieu argues, Flaubert's double refusal consists in a rejection of both realism, with its call for social reform, and romanticism, with its bourgeois escapism. In support of this claim, Bourdieu quotes Flaubert's indignant rejection of the notion that he is either a realist or a romantic: “Everyone thinks I am in love with reality whereas actually I detest it. … But I equally despise the false brand of idealism which is such a hollow mockery in the present age” (RA, 92). This double refusal of opposed positions within the literary field provides the foundation for what Bourdieu calls a “pure aesthetic” (RA, 105); by writing well about vulgar or mediocre subjects, Flaubert combines the style of romantic prose with the subject matter of realism and thereby asserts that it is the artist's gaze (or the artist's stylistic attention) that confers value on whatever subject matter the artist might select as the material for his or her work.

For Bourdieu, however, Flaubert's gaze generates more than aesthetic value. He credits Flaubert with a successful form of “objectification of the self” and of “socioanalysis,” and attributes Flaubert's literary success to his ability to master the techniques of the sociologist (RA, 25). Because Flaubert has been “extraordinarily successful” in the “objectification of [his] social experiences and the determinations weighing on them, including those attaching to the writer's contradictory position in the field of power,” the ruptures that he is able to produce in that field are “totally analogous with those accomplished by science” (RA, 103). It is Flaubert's special insight, Bourdieu observes, to link literary illusion to the “pathology of the primordial belief in the reality of social games” (RA, 334). Flaubert's sociological insights are, Bourdieu claims, the source of his literary value, since these insights allow him to objectify and to negate all of his competitors in the literary field: “What makes for the radical originality of Flaubert, and what confers on his work its incomparable value, is that it makes contact, at least negatively, with the totality of the literary universe in which it is inscribed” (RA, 98). In making this negative contact, Bourdieu contends, Flaubert “smashes a whole series of obligatory associations,” such as “the ones that tie the so-called ‘realist’ novel to the ‘literary rabble’ or to ‘democracy’ … or the ‘realism’ of the subject to humanist morality” (RA, 102).

Bourdieu makes no secret of the fact that he can appreciate Flaubert's work because he thinks it provides such a dramatic application of the principles of his own reflexive sociology. Despite promising his readers that he would teach them to take pleasure in tracing the social necessity that shapes both the life of the artist and the aesthetic field in which the artist works, Bourdieu's account of Flaubert celebrates not necessity but the limited autonomy that Flaubert is able to achieve by objectifying himself and his social situation. In the end, that is, it is the freedom that Flaubert achieves that Bourdieu finds most remarkable, and Bourdieu's elaborate analysis of the forces that determine Flaubert's life is dedicated to explaining how this triumph was possible. Bourdieu delights in the way in which Flaubert maps the relationships between his characters with sociological exactitude, and he clearly approves of the way in which Flaubert discovers a tough-minded self-interest behind the noble sentiments that his friends and his characters profess. Most of all, however, Bourdieu admires the way in which Flaubert can turn these tools of analysis on himself and use them as a discipline to resist the vanities of the social world. It is this discipline that allows Flaubert to find solace in an intellectual work ethic, an ethic that shields him from the “seductions of fashion” and gives him independence from the “pressures of ethical or logical conformism” without completely mystifying his own agency (RA, 85).

His warnings about the narcissism of interpretation notwithstanding, Bourdieu's interpretation of Flaubert seems to be animated by his conviction that in Flaubert he has found a kindred spirit, and this undoubtedly contributes to its insightfulness. Yet, this sociological reading is misleading insofar as it implies that literature (or any author) succeeds only to the extent that it mimics sociology's objectification of the social world and, more importantly, that the objectification of that world necessarily implies the negation and refutation of its values. In describing Flaubert's triumph over the literary field of his time, Bourdieu consistently confuses the process of objectification with the process of refutation, and this confusion, I think, constitutes one of the chief weaknesses of Bourdieu's method. Objectification of the struggles in which various ideas are deployed and of the social forces shaping those struggles does not constitute a refutation of the ideas themselves. A realist novel's denunciation of social inequality, for example, is no more invalidated by the fact that it is being used as a strategy for advancement within the aesthetic field than Bourdieu's condemnation of symbolic violence is invalidated by the fact that it is part of his strategy for advancement. Thus, by objectifying the aesthetic field, Flaubert and Bourdieu may show us the way in which various notions of what constitutes aesthetic value have been deployed in various internal political struggles, but this objectification of social circumstances can only arouse our suspicions about the validity of these notions; it cannot demonstrate that they are empty.

Bourdieu presents Flaubert's objectification of the social world as both a categorical rejection of the “pathology of the primordial belief in the reality of social games” and as refutation of specific positions within the social matrix of his time. That is, on the one hand, he credits Flaubert with seeing and implicitly criticizing the weaknesses of specific types of value claims, observing that Flaubert's work exposes both the “false Pharisaic humanism of the vendors of illusions” (RA, 112) and the complacency and complicity of realism that, if it “questions the existence of an objective hierarchy of subjects, it is only to invert it, out of a concern to rehabilitate or to take revenge … not to abolish it” (RA, 105). On the other hand, Bourdieu admits that Flaubert does not simply reject specific moral and political positions he happens to find flawed; he rejects moral and political values in their totality. Flaubert seems to be contemptuous of all those who take moral and political stands, implying that all such stands will be equally empty and hypocritical, and therefore inappropriate as guides for art. Bourdieu acknowledges, in fact, that Flaubert's aestheticism implies a kind of moral neutralism that “taken to its limits … is not far from an ethical nihilism” (RA, 110).

Such neutralism and hence nihilism are inevitable, however, for anyone who refuses to situate himself or herself in a framework of values. Thus, the project of objectifying and negating the “pathology” of all social belief is not only not synonymous with the project of criticizing specific forms of belief but is in many ways incompatible with it. To criticize false or hypocritically held values, one must take at least some other values seriously, and this is what the sociologist's categorical suspension of belief in the interests of social analysis makes it impossible to do. The sociologist's epoché or suspension of questions of belief may be justified as a strategic measure that allows us to focus on the role beliefs play in particular types of social struggle, but this means that epoché must be rigorously distinguished from social critique. Critique is distinguished from criticism precisely by the fact that those who engage in critique acknowledge their positions within a social matrix. Of course, Flaubert's negation of the social world is not as complete as Bourdieu would like, and part of the power of his work derives from his ability to combine a skeptical distance with more intimate and sympathetic views of humanity. For example, Bourdieu praises Flaubert's use of free indirect discourse as a technique for distancing and objectifying his characters, and this is part of its power. Flaubert also uses this technique to achieve a closer proximity to his characters, however, and it is the combination of distance and proximity that makes the technique so dramatically effective.

Because art contains this indelible sympathy for social illusions, Bourdieu argues that it will always be in need of a sociological supplement. He insists that no art form, Flaubert's included, can completely break the spell of the cultural illusio. “The charm of the literary work,” he observes, “lies largely in the way it speaks of the most serious things without insisting, unlike science according to Searle, on being taken completely seriously” (RA, 33). Because it does not insist on being taken seriously, Bourdieu insists, literature requires the help of sociology: Only “a sociological reading breaks the spell” (RA, 32) of the aesthetic. Sociology does this “by interrupting the complicity that unites author and reader in the same relation of denegation of the reality expressed by the text” (RA, 32). This denegation of reality is nothing other than the cultural illusio itself, which, try as it might, the literary text can never completely destroy. Although Flaubert's novelistic form creates ruptures within the social life world that are “totally analogous with those accomplished by science,” Bourdieu insists that because they are “not willed as such,” these ruptures are limited by the very “social unconscious” that they reveal (RA, 103), that is, because the fictional structures that “ground the belief in the ordinary experience of the world” are present in literature but “not marked out as such, as in scientific analysis: they inhabit a story, where they are realized and dissimulated at the same time” (RA, 335). Literature is condemned to invoke the illusion of belief even as it exposes the fictionality of that illusion.

Interestingly enough, Bourdieu insists that even art that openly proclaims its own fictionality and exposes the game from which it derives is still complicit in the process of aesthetic mystification. In the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, Bourdieu finds the admission that art is only a game based on a collective insistence on imputing value to an aesthetic essence that does not exist. Although he admits that Mallarmé's “reflexive critique … wrecks the poetic sacral and the self-mystifying myth,” Bourdieu finds it inadequate because Mallarmé insists on taking pleasure in literary illusion, even after acknowledging that it is illusory (RA, 275). Mallarmé insists on revering the collective illusion that produces, the “authorless trickery which puts the fragile fetish outside the grasp of critical lucidity” (RA, 276). Mallarmé's strategy is deplorable, Bourdieu argues, because it reserves the truth for a few initiates and perpetuates “the values to which the great humanist trickeries render at least the homage of their hypocrisy” (RA, 277). As Jonathan Loesberg points out, Bourdieu makes a similar argument, in Distinction, against Jacques Derrida, whom he credits with realizing that the aesthetic field is based on a system of empty but proliferating differences but whom he faults for taking a certain pleasure in this proliferation of differences and for lacking a proper seriousness about the phenomena he describes.⁵

These criticisms of Mallarmé and Derrida make it clear that Bourdieu assumes that the ultimate difference between aesthetics and sociology is not the knowledge to which they have access but the differing attitudes they take toward that knowledge. The sociologist can maintain the proper distance on the social world only by cultivating the seriousness that comes with moral disapproval. In his analysis of Mallarmé, Bourdieu argues that properly acknowledging “the mechanisms constitutive of those social games which are the most surrounded with prestige and mystery … comes down to denouncing them” (RA, 277). Anything less than a denunciation keeps open the possibility that the observer might be tempted to affirm the structures of culture and thus lose the moral seriousness that is synonymous with their complete rejection.

At this point, it becomes obvious that the epoché that has ostensibly served Bourdieu as a tool for sociological investigation has hardened into a moral absolute. As a moral axiom, the epoché measures value solely in terms of the abstract autonomy made possible by the resistance to belief, and it enforces a programmatic insensitivity to all other value claims. The norms of freedom and equality that are constantly invoked in Bourdieu's work are, as I have argued, reduced to insubstantial abstractions by the programmatic refusal of any form of social illusio. In similar fashion, the axiomatic application of the sociological epoché reduces the aesthetic to a drama of failed objectification and the attendant loss of moral seriousness. Within Bourdieu's sociological system, a more robust form of either ethical or aesthetic value would be possible only if the system itself allowed us to take other kinds of goods and more complex kinds of human agency seriously.

Ironically, in insisting that the observer of culture can lay claim to ethical and political seriousness only if he or she renounces the structures of culture in their entirety, Bourdieu resembles Theodor Adorno, despite their different assessments of the efficacy of art as an instrument of social resistance. That is, Bourdieu's analysis of aesthetics supports Adorno's assumption that any attempt to find pleasure or affirmation within the structure of modern culture can only prolong the existence of the cultural structures that must be completely destroyed if any genuine human happiness is to be possible. With Adorno, however, the necessity of a rigorous negativity is still connected to a possible happiness, to the possibility that the structure of society could be changed enough to make possible the kinds of pleasures that are now unavailable.

The resemblance between Bourdieu and Adorno is ironic because Bourdieu explicitly rejects the kind of utopianism that he feels Adorno's radical sociology represents. In place of Adorno's absolute and therefore idealistic opposition to culture, Bourdieu advocates a “reasoned utopianism, … a rational and politically conscious use of the limits of freedom afforded by a true knowledge of social laws,” a political program that is content to work within the limitations of culture as it presently exists (IRS, 197). It seems improbable, however, that anyone could implement such a reasoned utopianism from the distance dictated by the sociological epoché. Any kind of practical political program is likely to depend on a more robust notion of value than Bourdieu's aesthetic theory would allow, and such a livelier notion of human goods would implicitly extend the limited scope that he allows works of art. By contrast, the more the stoic and melancholy spectatorship of Bourdieu's sociology is embraced merely as an end in itself, divorced from any possible pleasure or satisfaction save the security of its distance from the illusions of the social world, the less authority it has to claim a political or moral mandate for its labors.

Not surprisingly, most American literary critics who profess allegiance to Bourdieu's work supplement his sociology with their own normative framework. Most often, they derive this framework from Marxism or one of the other traditions of radical sociology that Bourdieu rejects. These critics tend to share Adorno's pessimism about the kinds of satisfactions that contemporary culture makes available, but they affirm both the possibility and the necessity of radical social transformation, and this affirmation provides the concrete details of the political program that Bourdieu seems to lack. John Guillory concludes Cultural Capital, for instance, with a Marxist “thought experiment,” in which he imagines a world wherein aesthetic judgment remains a meaningful part of human existence but is somehow rendered powerless to confer social distinction.⁶ This is appealing, although it is difficult to suppress the suspicion that value judgments without consequences would not be value judgments at all. In lieu of such a utopian solution, however, we are, if we are lucky, left with the responsibility of estimating partial goods and weighing potential harms. Bourdieu's objectification of various arenas of social struggle may help us better understand which goods are at stake, but it does little to facilitate our choices, however limited those choices may be.

Notes

1. Several of Bourdieu's critics have described his theories as a form of economism. Bourdieu has vigorously denied this claim on several occasions, but it is not always clear what Bourdieu and his critics think is at stake in this label. Bourdieu typically attempts to refute the claim that his theory implies an economistic framework by pointing out that (1) the motives that he attributes to agents are only partially conscious motives and therefore cannot generate purely rational strategies, and (2) that the goods for which his agents struggle are imaginary goods with values that cannot be rationally computed and assigned economic value. It is true that this makes it inappropriate to describe the habitus as a rational strategist who maximizes goods according to a single standard of value. Insofar as the habitus will necessarily strive to maximize its economic and cultural capital in whatever field it finds itself engaged, and insofar as this is part of the habitus's overall strategy to maintain or improve its overall social standing, however, the habitus is a kind of maximizer or, perhaps more accurately, a kind of satisficer. Bourdieu thus may be justified in claiming that his theory is not compatible with some of the narrower rational choice models of motivation, but this fact does not address what I take to be an important aspect of his critics' arguments: Insofar as the habitus is a kind of satisficer (albeit an unconscious one) involved in a zero-sum game, there is no possibility that it will engage in genuinely cooperative behavior. Thus, Bourdieu's theory seems to be as pessimistic about the possibility of altruism as are the most rigid forms of economism. For an example of the charge of economism, see Axel Honneth, “The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture,” in The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Charles W. Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 184-201.

2. See, for instance, David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Simpson argues that the contemporary social sciences have been disabled by their dependence on literary models of subjectivity. He sees the process of objectifying and overcoming such subjectivity as the first step toward reclaiming valid social knowledge. It is not clear just how far he thinks we can or should go in subduing subjectivity.

3. Anthony Giddens, “The Politics of Taste,” Partisan Review 53, no. 2 (1986): 300-305. Giddens reviews Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

4. Peter Bürger, “The Problem of Aesthetic Value,” in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 23-34.

5. See Jonathan Loesberg, “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics,” ELH 60, no. 4 (winter 1993): 1033-56. Loesberg makes this observation about Bourdieu's treatment of Derrida in the course of a larger argument, in which he claims that to the extent that cultural capital remains antithetical to economic privilege, Bourdieu is compelled to reinstate a form of intrinsic aesthetic value. That is, he argues that if Bourdieu “allows even the act of distinction that aesthetics enables to become a value that cannot be cashed in, he seems to have simply produced a new version of an intrinsic aesthetics” (1045).

6. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

In this essay, I discuss the following works by Bourdieu: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984) (hereafter cited as D); Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1991) (hereafter cited as LASP); The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990) (hereafter cited as LOP); Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) (hereafter cited as OTP); The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995) (hereafter cited as RA); Sociology in Question, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993) (hereafter cited as SIQ); (with Loïc J. D. Wacquant) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) (hereafter cited as IRS).

I would like to thank Mary Papke for her invaluable help in revising and editing this essay. Thanks also to the Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Tennessee for providing intellectual companionship during this project; our weekly discussions have provided a forum in which I could test my ideas against their always thoughtful criticism.