SOURCE: Paulson, William. “The Market of Printed Goods: On Bourdieu's Rules.” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 1997): 399-415.

[In the following essay, Paulson proposes that although Bourdieu has remained constant in his opposition to social, cultural, and economic oppression, he presents a modified version of this argument in The Rules of Art.]

In December 1995, during the second month of the largest wave of strikes and social protest France had seen since May 1968, Pierre Bourdieu was one of the leading intellectual figures to lend his support to the movement. Le Monde described his remarks as the high point of a string of speeches by the organizers of a published “Intellectuals' Appeal in Support of the Strikers.”¹ According to Bourdieu and his fellow intellectuals, the strikes were a “movement that has nothing of a defense of private interests, still less of privileges, but is, in fact, a defense of the most universal gains of the Republic”—the elements of social equality guaranteed by the state and the public sector against the encroachments of a European, indeed a worldwide, market economy.² For Bourdieu, the conflict between the strikers and the government was one of principle versus expediency, in which the intellectuals' duty was to defend a universal value, social equality, against the managerial calculations of the Juppé government.

It was no surprise to find Bourdieu at the head of the intellectuals' intervention, for during his entire career he has been preoccupied with the social and cultural bases of exclusion from the power and status conferred by economic and symbolic capital, and his recent book The Rules of Art concludes with an uncompromising plea to intellectuals, “one of the last critical countervailing powers capable of opposing the forces of economic and political order,” to mobilize in defense of their own autonomy, increasingly threatened by the strengthening forces of the market.³ Bourdieu can speak and write as an authoritative defender of intellectual autonomy because his long-standing and extensive work in the sociology of culture has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of how the autonomy and internal dynamics of certain fields of cultural production, and indeed the distinctively aesthetic disposition itself, are not ontologically given (as some philosophical approaches to aesthetics would have it) but socially and historically produced. The explanatory power of his approach lies in its systematic character: he not only describes how social and economic dynamics give rise to and structure the cultural practices that define the artistic and intellectual elite but also situates this elite and its practices in relation to the economically dominant class, to middle-brow and popular taste, and to the institutions through which culture is recognized, preserved, and inculcated, from literary prizes to museums to schools.

According to Bourdieu, the artistic, literary, or intellectual field has won for itself a high degree of autonomy in the making of judgments, the conferring of legitimacy, and the recognition of symbolic capital. The most serious artists have since seen fellow artists as their only true public, so that artistic legitimacy, in the modern world, can be granted only by other artists, or by comparable creators such as poets or composers, or at most by critics who have the symbolic status of artists and intellectuals. This characterization has remained more or less constant over a quarter century of Bourdieu's publications, but his account of its genesis has changed considerably. A long article from 1971, “Le Marché aux biens symboliques,” and The Rules of Art, first published in France in 1992, represent two types of sociohistorical explanation, one oriented toward broad and relatively long-term shifts in the economics, technology, and social organization of production, the other attuned to the specific social and ideological conflicts of a single place, Paris, during the mid-nineteenth century, in particular to the exemplary stances and utterances of a small group of that moment's major figures.

The second account is in many respects a refinement of the first, a thoroughly analyzed case study of how the underlying determinants of change are played out and mediated through specific cultural practices. However, the two kinds of sociohistorical account belong to very different stories about the origins and destinies of artistic autonomy. These narratives diverge in their continuation and possible endings and therefore in their implications for our own era, in which the material conditions of aesthetic and intellectual production, especially in the literary field, are changing rapidly and raising questions about the viability of long-standing institutions and the practices of mature print culture. In this context Bourdieu's earlier, more structural account of aesthetic autonomy turns out to be more historically specific and pertinent than his later, seemingly much more historicized version. The shift of emphasis in Bourdieu's explanations of autonomy's emergence and flourishing, while it undergirds his recent defense of the autonomous intellectual, can also be read as a turn away from a historical and theoretical perspective of greater explanatory power.

Grounded in the transition to a market economy of symbolic production, a shift more obvious and probably more thoroughgoing in print than in other media, Bourdieu's 1971 account describes the autonomous sphere of cultural production as an outgrowth of large-scale technological, economic, and social transformations. He thus offers his reader a basis for understanding why the autonomy of cultural production may not survive in anything like the same form following the different but comparably important transformations under way in the late twentieth century. In contrast, The Rules of Art emphasizes acts of ideological opposition to a particularly crass and obnoxious bourgeois order, that of mid-nineteenth-century France, and thereby suggests that the autonomy then wrested from hostile conditions will retain its pertinence and moral force as long as crass and obnoxious bourgeois ordering of the world is around—which is likely to be a long time, as Flaubert implied when he wrote that Voltaire's infâme, far from having been crushed, kept growing bigger and fatter. As a result, Bourdieu's normative and polemical postscript to The Rules of Art, in which he defends autonomy as a prerequisite to the authority and position of intellectuals, fits far better into a narrative based on his second version of autonomy's genesis than into one based on the first. The postscript presupposes that autonomy is a heroic, quasi-irreversible conquest, whose existence defines a “before and after” in history and which constitutes a modern legacy to be treasured and defended. However, the comparative explanatory weakness of that second version raises questions about the robustness of the rules of art and intellectual life that Bourdieu would derive from it. If technological and economic transformations can structure and restructure cultural fields to the extent suggested by “Le Marché aux biens symboliques” (and by the inner logic of much of Bourdieu's work), then the Bourdieu of The Rules of Art—and of December 1995—may have pinned his hopes and his calls to action on a noble anachronism: the state of the intellectual field during the era of print culture.

The contrast between the main title of The Rules of Art and its subtitle, Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, along with the book's emphasis on Flaubert, points to an important character of Bourdieu's work: its claim to describe the rules “of art” is largely, though not exclusively, based on an investigation of the literary field. Bourdieu explores and elaborates his theses most seriously, especially in their historical origins, with respect to the literary, although The Rules of Art also includes considerable analysis of the twentieth-century art market.

In fact, “Le Marché aux biens symboliques” relies even more on the specificity of letters than The Rules of Art, whose subtitle is justified more by the importance of Baudelaire and Flaubert in comparison with Courbet and Manet than by the analysis of the specificity of literary practice in the era of mature print culture. In “Le Marché” [“Le Marché aux biens symboliques”] Bourdieu argues that both artistic autonomy and the “field of restricted production” where it exercises its dominion depend on a sharp division between producers and consumers of symbolic goods or, more precisely, between a small group of technically specialized and self-aware producers and a larger group of consumers who, viewed from the first group, are an anonymous collective governed by alien market forces. In the economy of printed texts, for example, the reproduced work of each producer must be marketed to a large number of consumers, most of whom will not respond to it directly as a patron or court audience would have done and whose facelessness and numerical mass make them quite different from the purchasers of paintings, even in a commercialized art market. A largely anonymous market frees symbolic producers from the direct control of sponsoring institutions or individuals, but it subjects them to the impersonal, foreign pull of the market itself. A field of production structured by the requirement of its own autonomy arises in reaction both to the kind of freedom accorded by the market and to the kind of constraint it simultaneously imposes.

Bourdieu does not restrict his arguments to any one artistic or cultural field, but the literary furnishes, implicitly or explicitly, his most compelling illustrations. Freeing intellectual and artistic life from the control of court and church, he writes, “is correlated with the constant growth of a public of potential consumers, of increasing social diversity” (Rules [The Rules of Art], 112); such growth is more characteristic of the emergence of mature print culture than of changes in the market for the plastic arts, though of course it, too, is far from static. Bourdieu's account of the genesis of autonomy makes plain the decisive position of print: “Th[e] movement towards artistic autonomy accelerated abruptly with the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic reaction. The development of a veritable cultural industry and, in particular, the relationship between the daily press and literature, encouraging the mass production of works produced by quasi-industrial methods—such as the serialized story (or, in other fields, melodrama and vaudeville)—coincides with the extension of the public, resulting from the expansion of primary education, which turned new classes (including women) into consumers of culture.”⁴ The conjunction of mass literacy and fully reproducible text made print the most advanced medium of marketed and marketable culture and thus made literature a leading early instance of an autonomous aesthetic field whose construction was both opposed to and facilitated by that impersonal and heteronomous cultural market.

In emphasizing the social role of the print culture industries and in locating it in the industrial revolution and in the emergence of romanticism, Bourdieu offers an account compatible with other historical analyses of how the market in printed goods became the dominant force structuring the literary field. As Walter J. Ong and Alvin Kernan note, the “literary” in the romantic and postromantic sense is itself highly dependent on a particular technology and its social organization. “Literature” is a formation of “high print culture,” so that Bourdieu's field analysis is applicable to the modes of exchange regulating symbolic goods under the fully developed literary institutions of print culture.

The dynamics of print as a medium and as a commodity put a premium on innovation and originality quite unknown in what Ong calls “rhetorical culture,” an older form of literary culture that, while largely realized in writing and even print, was still grounded in oratory, oral narration, conversation, and face-to-face exchange. In a culture with vast storehouses of printed knowledge, there is no need for the formulaic repetition of narrative and oratory as an aid to memory or an ordering strategy, and there is little justification for printing a new book that repeats a previous one. Ong contends that the very accumulation of knowledge through print enabled imaginative literature to venture outside the formulaic regularities of neoclassicism and begin exploring the formerly dangerous pleasures of experimentation, difficulty, and difference, pleasures that would come to be hallmarks of self-consciously literary writing in the distinctively literary sphere.⁵ In a slightly different but parallel argument, Kernan reads Samuel Johnson's career as exemplifying the emergence of the modern print author, who as a professional producer of copy and as an individual capable of achieving originality through self-expression stood in sharp contrast to the socially shared conventions of the oral and rhetorical cultures that preceded the mature age of print: “There were no writers like Johnson before him, and none like him even afterward, but in the romantic system of literature that gradually developed after him, the authorial personality had to be, and continued in fact to be, like Johnson, in the respect of being strange and interesting enough to impart to writers and writing a psychological dignity and meaning they could no longer derive from a place and function in the social world of palace, great house, and cathedral.”⁶ In describing the rise of the professional author and the exploratory potentialities of print, Kernan and Ong offer similar accounts of the large-scale shift in cultural inscription and institutions that accompanied a developed market in printed goods.

The social and aesthetic dynamics of the same shift are described in Bourdieu's analysis of the widening division between the autonomy of cultural producers and the heteronomy of nonproducing consumers. The institutions of print culture have seemed well-nigh universal in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as if they were a definitive advance over production in the salon culture, patronage culture, or rhetorical culture of the ancien régime. The rapid emergence of new media in the late twentieth century, however, makes many such institutions seem mortal, if not moribund. Retrospectively, they appear to have depended on a particular set of technologies and on the path-dependent history of economic, social, and cultural enactions of technological possibilities.

The material and economic conditions of symbolic production in many spheres, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web, are simply becoming less and less compatible with those under which the literary author produces for the market of printed books. Attempts to achieve aesthetic legitimacy by hewing to a print-based model, as the mid-twentieth-century cinema has admittedly done with success in promoting the auteur concept, look increasingly strained or at least seem to blunt some of the most radical and exciting initiatives of the new media in which they are applied. (The adaptation of “copyright” law to media that make both copying and alteration fast, cheap, and decentered occasions much tension between sociolegal institutions, based on print, and those in the vanguard of digital communications.) However, to label the social institutions of symbolic production under print culture Bad and their replacements under electronic culture Good, as their proponents tend to do, misses the point. Too much thinking on these issues is either unremittingly progressivist or declinist, the two modes being foolish mirror images of each other. What matters is that a greater-than-usual rate of technological change puts into play conditions of symbolic production that admit social and conceptual innovation but inevitably extinguish familiar and worthwhile practices.

The technological and social closure of the age of high print culture today brings with it a sense of the limits of Bourdieu's analyses and, more important, his “rules.” It is by no means certain that the new communications environment and conditions of intellectual production will give rise to formations as impressive as those of print culture, but it hardly seems possible anymore to base a theory and defense of intellectual autonomy on the institutions and practices of print, at least not without recognizing that such a theory and defense are a calculated exercise in the strategic maintenance of residual formations. In “Le Marché” Bourdieu himself advances the idea that technological and economic mutations have considerably changed the social organization of symbolic production and even that such change is welcome as a real-world corollary of the sociologist's demystification of idealisms characteristic of the earlier, more individualized, print-based formation (Field [The Field of Cultural Production] 130-1). The narrative of “Le Marché,” in other words, is one of unending historical change.

The Rules of Art, on the other hand, offers a detailed, historically and even individually specific account of the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic production in mid-nineteenth-century French, especially in the words and deeds of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Presumably Bourdieu wanted to complement and refine the highly schematic, “theoretical” analyses of “Le Marché” by demonstrating through a case study that his general analysis would stand up to fine-grained observation in a particular place and time. He had been publishing insightful essays on L'Education sentimentale and on Flaubert's aesthetic and social position since 1975, and in The Rules of Art his magisterial analyses of Flaubert are finally situated explicitly in the context of his sociology of cultural production. In locating the “moment of autonomy” around 1850 rather than extending it more broadly to the industrial revolution and romanticism (or even to the quattrocento), Bourdieu does not simply revise himself or admit that he was wrong earlier; rather, he concentrates on a specific, advanced phase of autonomization when the claims of distinctiveness for the artistic field became more radical and manifestly oppositional.

However, the more precise placement of the temporal locus of his argument has consequences for the narrative Bourdieu offers in The Rules of Art. In “The Conquest of Autonomy: The Critical Phase in the Emergence of the Field,” the book's key chapter, “conquest” implies a more voluntarist, individually activist story than the structural dynamics emphasized in “Le Marché.” Bourdieu presents aesthetic and intellectual autonomy less as a general consequence of the fundamental economic and technological changes fostered by the French and industrial revolutions and more as a specifically modern conquest achieved by individuals whose views, choices, and actions, although possible only in the context of a complex and overdetermined social field, are nonetheless distinctive, even “heroic” (113). In mid-nineteenth-century France “the principles of autonomy … still reside[d] to a large extent in agents' dispositions and actions” (113); indeed, a section of Bourdieu's first chapter is devoted to “Baudelaire the founder” (60-8).

Bourdieu's description of the “structural subordination” (48) of cultural producers treats both the market in symbolic goods and artists' and writers' social relations with members of the economically and politically dominant class. He emphasizes the presumably sordid complicity of economic and state power under the Second Empire and the lack of cultivation among the midcentury financiers and industrialists whom artists and writers encountered in salons and other bourgeois and/or state-sponsored venues: “To understand the experience that writers and artists may have had of the new forms of domination they found themselves subjected to in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the horror the figure of the ‘bourgeois’ sometimes inspired in them, we need to have some idea of the impact of the emergence of businessmen and industrialists of colossal fortunes. … they were self-made men, uncultured parvenus ready to make both the power of money and a vision of the world profoundly hostile to intellectual things triumph within the whole society” (48). Bourdieu makes no absolute claims for the uniqueness or newness of the confrontation, evident in differing forms and degrees during the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries; instead, he argues that the objectionable features of bourgeois society became more intense, more overt, and less avoidable around 1850.

Acknowledging that the impecunious, relatively independent, and proletaroid scribbler appeared in the previous century and in other settings, Bourdieu evokes the rising population of literary and artistic bohemia at midcentury and implicitly situates the narrative almost exclusively within his national culture. Recognizing that the actions and pronouncements of Flaubert and his contemporaries can be read as part of a longue durée transformation, Bourdieu nevertheless stresses willed acts of opposition to state and market control over the cultural sphere during this “critical phase” (47).

Moreover, by emphasizing the signal contributions of Baudelaire and Flaubert, contextualized and socially constrained as they are, Bourdieu defends himself against the charge of reductionism. “Far from annihilating the creator by the reconstruction of social determinations that exert pressure on him,” sociological analysis “allows us to describe and to understand the specific labor that the writer had to accomplish, both against these determinations and thanks to them, in order to produce himself as creator” (104). This is a powerful insight into the social conditions of literary originality, and surely one of the many merits of The Rules of Art is to cast the achievements of the most distinctive midcentury writers in a new light. It is less clear, however, that it constitutes an argument for the historical uniqueness of their contributions or the irreversibility of the transformation they helped accomplish.

In historicizing autonomy so as to emphasize the opposition of great writers to a grubby elite of money and a compromised milieu of letters, then, Bourdieu idealizes its conquest and elevates it to a characteristically modern event, splitting the history of the social status of art into pre- and post-1850 periods. Now autonomy can be treated, with some help from the implicit assumption of historical progress, as an acquisition won by the great oppositional figures of the nineteenth century and inherited by the artists, writers, and intellectuals of today. Bourdieu explicitly links the beginning of his account of autonomy's “conquest” to the call to arms with which he will conclude the book: “Returning to the ‘heroic times’ of the struggle for independence, when the virtues of revolt and resistance had to assert themselves clearly in the face of a repression exercised in all its brutality (especially during the trials), also means rediscovering the forgotten—or repudiated—principles of intellectual freedom” (48). The existence of an autonomous field of cultural production, in which producers create for and recognize the judgments of fellow producers only, is equated with the more general value of intellectual freedom.

It is therefore entirely logical that Bourdieu's account of a distinctive intellectual and artistic field, with its chronological, geographic, and even individual specificity, should be accompanied in The Rules of Art by strong claims for the general, indeed the universal, value of artistic, literary, and scholarly autonomy. If this autonomy is the heroic acquisition of Baudelaire and Flaubert, then it is a step forward in a genealogy of progress and a patrimony that their heirs—present-day artists, writers, and other intellectuals—must preserve. In the book's postscript Bourdieu describes the position of the intellectual in terms that suggest propriety and obligation: “Cultural producers will not regain the place that is theirs in the social world unless … they agree to work collectively for their own interests” (348; translation modified). Bourdieu forthrightly states his belief in the universality and undiminished pertinence of intellectual autonomy; if it is in danger, it is from backsliders or simply from the pressure of hegemonic capitalism, against which the authority of intellectual autonomy is constructed and must always combat.

If, by contrast, autonomy were described not as the prize of heroic conquest but as the product of a nineteenth-century conjunction of economic and technological forces now drifting apart in the late twentieth century—the intensification of economic processes having eroded the margins available to the aesthetic countereconomy, while very different technological configurations offer novel possibilities but close off some long-familiar ones—then it would belong to another story altogether. If autonomy in the field of cultural production depends on particular historical, economic, and technological configurations, then it may not be universal at all; its history may begin with its emergence but end, just as logically, with its dissolution or disaggregation. We should not be surprised at living through the beginning of the end of it, nor should we expect it to remain as convincing or attractive a model as it once was. We should not expect, however, the imminent or probable end of the autonomous artistic and intellectual fields characteristic of high print culture to mean the end of intellectual freedom, which would presumably continue to exist and struggle in new forms and guises.

In The Rules of Art, especially in its concluding call to the defense of intellectual autonomy, Bourdieu seems to adopt a static view of positions in the intellectual field, reifying the arrangements of print culture and all but denying the possibility of further change. Only if technological and economic change were not (or were no longer) seen as a crucial factor (as it is described in “Le Marché” as having been) could Bourdieu write that “history carries an important lesson: we are in a game in which all the moves made today, wherever, have already been made” (342). In his references to communications media there is no strong sense of their specificity, and in his relatively rare cross-cultural asides he addresses roughly comparable technoeconomic societies (such as France and Germany), thus concentrating on the wealthiest stratum of nations and all but removing technology and economics as determinative factors. He also makes assumptions about the economic risk of symbolic production that are much more characteristic of literature than of, for example, film (142-3), with emergent electronic forms such as computer hypermedia likely to fall somewhere in between the two in practical terms.

Given the language of purity and disinheritance that Bourdieu uses in defense of intellectual autonomy (344, 348), it is worth noting that in “Le Marché” he acknowledges that the opposition he erects between the restricted and large-scale modes of production is an idealized projection: “One should beware of seeing anything more than a limiting parameter construction [le produit d'une construction par passage à la limite] in the opposition between the two modes of production of symbolic goods, which can only be defined in terms of their relations with each other. Within a single universe one always finds the entire range of intermediaries between works produced with reference to the restricted market on the one hand, and works determined by an intuitive [or scientifically informed] representation of the expectations of the widest possible public on the other” (Field, 127). But if the poles of the opposition are projected limits, extrapolated from a continuum of positions, none of which is purely of one kind or the other, then it may be useful to shift the emphasis from the endpoints to the middle. In other words, one might do for the autonomy-heteronomy polarity what Bruno Latour does for the nature-culture polarity when he argues that nature and culture as pure entities are projections made from an actual continuum of natures-cultures by those who believe themselves modern because they can distinguish nature from culture.⁷ The notions of purely autonomous or even heteronomous production would thus be seen as characteristic fictions of modernity, and the question of the intellectual's exemplary integrity or menaced subjection would be replaced by a more multiple and nuanced look at the concrete play of constraint and maneuver in the spaces where artistic and intellectual work is carried out.

In fact, much of Bourdieu's empirical work on the sociology of aesthetics explores and maps this middle. He charts actual aesthetic preferences and art gallery practices, for example, between the idealized poles of the highbrow and the popular, and describes the positioning of writers and painters according to the extent to which their actions and pronouncements indicate that they produce for their peers or for the nonartistic public. But in The Rules of Art, particularly in its postscript, he claims to base rules for the hygiene of intellectual life on the opposition derived by pushing countervailing tendencies in the artistic and intellectual practices of the print culture era to their limits.

It is, of course, common to derive normative statements in this way, and Bourdieu's projections have in their favor the considerable evidence that actors in the field have believed in them—for example, poets whose work is purchased and read by nonpoets have not hesitated to say that they write only for fellow poets. Creative and scholarly autonomy, although an ideal, is by no means a figment of the sociologist's imagination; people attempt—always imperfectly, to be sure—to live up to it. In upholding autonomy as a rule for the preservation of intellectual integrity, Bourdieu rightly hopes to denounce the selling out of intellectual authority in mass-media appeals to anti-intellectualism by the likes of the “journalist philosopher [who] expressly attacked Baudelaire, … went on to make a television history of intellectuals … [and] singled out from this immense adventure only the parts he could grasp—cowardice, baseness, treachery, small-mindedness” (339).

There are, however, substantive reasons to question Bourdieu's passage from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from his historical and empirical analyses of “the rules of art” in the era of high print culture to his call to make them the rules of intellectual conduct now and for the future. In the first place, his insistence that aesthetic or scholarly autonomy is the true foundation of intellectual authority as it emerged and became canonized in the late nineteenth century appears to account for only part of that history. For Bourdieu, the defining moment of this authority is Zola's “J'accuse,” in which “the intellectual is constituted as such by intervening in the political field in the name of autonomy and of the specific values of a field of cultural production which has attained a high degree of independence with respect to various powers” (129). The intellectual arrives at “universal principles” by generalizing the “specific principles” of freedom and autonomy in a special field of cultural production; Zola's intervention in the Dreyfus affair asserts “against all reasons of state the irreducibility of the values of truth and justice” (130, 129).

Zola's great commercial success as a novelist, however, tainted him in the eyes of those most devoted to the autonomy of the literary field; as Bourdieu himself points out, he had to work at maintaining his literary respectability, first by identifying himself with the stance of the scientist in his theory of the roman expérimental and second by intervening in the world of politics as an intellectual. Bourdieu describes Zola's stand in the Dreyfus affair as a virtuous circle in which the novelist shored up his literary authority by acting as a disinterested intellectual while deriving intellectual authority from his standing as a disinterested man of letters. Aside from undermining the assertion that Zola brought to his intervention as an intellectual an entirely autonomous, literary kind of authority, Bourdieu's account leaves out factors equally important to the success of “J'accuse.” Zola made a political impact in part for the same reason that he succeeded as a novelist; namely, he had mastered the dominant medium of mass communication in his era, print. Moreover, the huge sales of his novels helped him win recognition for his intervention as an intellectual. (To test the plausibility of these “impure” factors, imagine the impact of a “J'accuse” written by Manet, Mallarmé, or Cézanne.)

If the print-era intellectual succeeded in no small measure by effectively using print as a medium of mass communication, then the corresponding model of intellectual authority may lose much of its pertinence in a world of postprint communications. The relation between economic power and the mastery of symbolic systems is vastly different today, in a largely “knowledge-based” economy where advertising and the media themselves generate enormous wealth, than in the nineteenth century, with its stolid, uncultivated captains of industry. The relation between economic and symbolic capital involves as much complicity as opposition and is harder than ever to untangle.

As a result, Bourdieu's call for an instance of intellectual authority and critique that would stand outside the circuits of economically driven communication and media seduction seems to belong to a bygone era. Many contemporary media theorists argue that the critical distance and tendency toward autonomy that characterized the intellectual operations of print culture are simply unsustainable in an environment dominated by television and electronic networks, where hierarchization and the word have given way to infinite and transitory juxtaposition and images. The eccentricity of residual institutions, such as academic literary culture, that can remain aloof from the great bazaar of sonorous and luminous symbols makes them not so much authoritative as irrelevant. As Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen write in their eye-popping antibook Imagologies: “Enlightenment no longer automatically sells. Neither does critical thought. To sell your product, you must get down to business and take advertising and marketing seriously. The discourses of scholarly achievement not only define the wrong agenda but have no promotional strategy.”⁸ Of course, Bourdieu might reply that he is trying to counter this point of view by rallying his readers to the defense of traditional intellectual legitimacy. But if the technologically and economically driven mediasphere in which most public discourse now exists has rendered critical thought unmarketable, then Taylor and Saarinen's vision is past being deplored: its obvious dangers and drawbacks must be lived with and negotiated in new ways. “The denial of cultural autonomy does not necessarily mean the impossibility of critique. In the absence of any Archimedean point from which to view and criticize society, it is necessary to develop strategies of criticism that deploy available modes of production and reproduction” (“Pedagogies,” 6). The autonomous field of cultural production, no longer a privileged fulcrum from which to apply the lever of criticism, is increasingly perceived as one “special interest” among many in a society where countless institutional spaces claim some measure of autonomy, in spite of their tight and complicated interconnectedness.

There are many vital issues, moreover, for which social critique that can be grounded on the authority of an autonomous field of cultural production may simply not be pertinent or adequate. The material, economic, and communicative complexity of the contemporary world works against its separation into a material or bourgeois plane where instrumental reason reigns supremely, if perversely, and a plane of ethical reason and universal values to which the first is held accountable. The canonical form of intervention by the legitimate scholar, artist, or intellectual presupposes the separability of these kinds of reason and the efficacy of economic and state power in their own sphere; the intellectual acts as though state power and economic power needed only to be corrected on matters of freedom, human rights, equality—in general, on criteria of adherence or nonadherence to Enlightenment principles. Yet many contemporary problems, whose neglect or inadequate solution is a major cause of injustice, exclusion, and regimentation, are traceable to the failure of instrumental approaches on their own terms, the failure of technocracy to realize even its own limited and dubious goals. To resolve or even face honestly the nature-culture problems evoked by Latour, such as the AIDS pandemic and the hole in the ozone layer, or simply such economic problems as the financing of retirement and health care in societies subjected to global market competition, demands impure but functional alliances of instrumental and ethical reason. Deplorable as some may find this prospect, it is hard to see how the intellectual authority conferred by a sphere of cultural production that holds itself aloof from the messiness of the economic world can form the basis for relevant intervention in that world.

The “Intellectuals' Appeal” of December 1995 was issued at a moment when France's season of strikes was about to end, partly because of concessions made by the Juppé government (largely in the area of railroad retirements) and partly because of the upcoming Christmas and New Year holidays, when the personal inconvenience brought by the strikes would have undermined the widespread public support they had enjoyed. It was therefore impossible to assess the effect of the declarations by Bourdieu and the others. They offered no insights, however, into how the goal of maintaining public service and social equality was to be realized within the economic constraints associated with the Maastricht treaty's conditions for European unification or, alternatively, how France was to remove itself from these constraints. The uncertain efficacy of an “Intellectuals' Appeal” in the face of conservative economic expediency seems emblematic of the grave difficulty of using the intellectual means of the past century and a half to confront the practical problems—bound up with very real injustices—of the rapidly changing societies of the present and the foreseeable future.

Notes

1. Sylvia Zappi, “Pierre Bourdieu choisit la grève contre la ‘barbarie,’” Le Monde, 14 December 1995, 1.

2. “Appel des intellectuels en soutien aux grévistes” (advertisement), Le Monde, 15 December 1995, 12.

3. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 339.

4. Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 113. This is a much-abridged translation of the original article, which appeared in L'Année sociologique 22 (1971): 49-126.

5. Ong, “Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 276-9.

6. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 21.

7. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

8. Taylor and Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994), “Ending the Academy,” 9; see also “Interstanding,” 6-7. (Imagologies is paginated only within sections.)